New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji, played host this week to another young couple, who came to Gracie Mansion to break their Ramadan fast. A picture taken of the dinner was softly lit and sweet, smiles all around.
The mayor posted the photo on social media the next day, along with a tribute to his guest, Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student and anti-Israel activist who is fighting the deportation order. “This past year has been marked by great hardship—and great courage,” Mamdani wrote, describing Khalil’s detention by ICE last March. “All this for exercising his First Amendment right to protest the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”
Mamdani’s decision to defend Khalil is certainly consistent with his past support for Palestine. It can register as an act of kindness. Khalil has had a really bad year; ICE separated him from his wife just before she gave birth, and held him for 104 days. The Trump administration accused him of leading a protest in Columbia that it saw as anti-Semitic, apparently targeting him for his speech.
But Mamdani’s announced dinner reinforces the degree to which opposition to Israel is central to his worldview—not just another item on his ideological list; it is at the very top. A few years ago, He said that the struggle for the liberation of the Palestinians is at the “core” of his politics and that it is the issue that drew him to the Democratic Socialists of America, which explains Israel as a racist, settler-colonial state with fascist ambitions. During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani he refused to recognize Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, saying that he supports its right to exist “as a country with equal rights,” which would end Israel’s role as a haven for Jews worldwide. “I’m not comfortable supporting any state that has a leadership of citizenship based on religion or anything else,” he told a Fox television affiliate. He has supported a boycott of Israel and promised to honor the international warrant to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he sets foot in New York City. Obviously, he won’t tread on any of those ideas as mayor.
In his first months in office, Mamdani has managed or compromised on several issues: He has praised the New York Police Department, he spoke with Donald Trump, and. convince DSA not endorsing a challenger to the seat of Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. But the issue of Israel and Palestine seems to be different.
New York City’s history is littered with mayors who expressed strong opinions on all kinds of global issues and rarely hesitated to voice them. John Lindsay opposed the Vietnam War; Ed Koch heaped insults on the Palestine Liberation Organization; David Dinkins spoke in support of the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa; Rudy Giuliani brought out Yasser Arafat at a concert at Lincoln Center. For decades, the mayor of New York made a visit to the so-called Three I‘s—Ireland, Italy, and Israel—in a nod to the city’s three main ethnic groups.
But the mayors were taking popular political positions. Mamdani oversees a city that has the largest Jewish and Muslim population of any American city. And even though he has won strong support from liberal and left-wing Jews, many Jewish New Yorkers, not least some prominent rabbis, remain loathe for him, especially at a time of rising anti-Semitism. His own police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, represents the three things the mayor claims he doesn’t care about: He’s a Zionist, a bigot and a billionaire. The extent to which Mamdani can balance those tensions is a very open question.
Mamdani not only defended Khalil’s right to speak; he chose to deceive the man and his cause. For the mayor of New York to use that word of course genocide explaining the Israeli invasion was important; Israel faces credible charges of war crimes, but no international court has ruled that it committed genocide. (Hamas itself broke the ceasefire when its fighters attacked Israel.) And saluting Khalil for “exercising his First Amendment right” was an unusual way to talk about an activist who served as speaker to a group of protesters, some of whom gave flyers to celebrate the Al-Aqsa Flood—the name Hamas gave to the attack on October 7, 2023, in which its militants killed 1,200 people in Israel. (Mamdani himself he has called October 7 “horrible war crime.”)
In a podcast interview and New York Times in August, Khalil played around with the right level of sympathy for Hamas. Killing civilians is never right, he said. But then: “We cannot ask the Palestinians to be perfect victims.” He called October 7 “a desperate attempt by Hamas to tell the world that the Palestinians are here.” When asked about allegations of anti-Semitism at Columbia, he replied that most of it was “manufactured excitement.” A task force in Columbia reached a very different conclusion, finding evidence that Jewish and Israeli members of the college “have been the target of racist graffiti and graffiti, obscene signs, and controversial and unpleasant questions.”
Another interesting data point emerged last week when The Inner Jew information that Duwaji, Mamdani’s wife, “liked” Instagram posts celebrating October 7. One of the posts showed a bulldozer tearing a hole in the fence between Gaza and Israel, a move that allowed Hamas fighters to attack; another showed an Israeli army jeep full of Palestinian fighters, the soldiers presumably dead or taken hostage. He also liked a post about the Oct. 8 rally in Times Square that celebrated the Hamas attack as an important resistance. The Times‘ account of these publications he stood out as painfully demure; it described them as “supporting the Palestinian cause.” (Duwaji and Mamdani were in a relationship at the time but not yet married.)
Most recently, The Washington Free Beacon information that Duwaji, an artist, had drawn illustration for an essay by author Susan Abulhawa in the newspaper Everything Is Political. Abulhawa has previously made negative comments, describing Israeli Jews as “rootless” and October 7 as “an interesting moment.” (Mamdani’s spokesman told them Free beacon that Duwaji “has never engaged with or met” Abulhawa, who is a prominent Palestinian writer and activist, “nor has he ever seen the tweets in question.”)
Add to this another incident. Earlier this month, Mamdani attended the Ramadan prayer service at the Muslim American Society Staten Island Center. The imam who welcomed him that night, Abdullah Aklis a Palestinian activist who in 2024 he led the crowd in chants of “Beat, bet Tel Aviv!” At a rally last fall, Akl led the crowd inside singing: “We will come out stronger than we did the first October 7!”
Caves are confirmed here. Mamdani has denounced blatant acts of anti-Semitism, both before and after his election, and has reached out to Jewish leaders. Duwaji, who has not publicly commented on her social media posts, is entitled to political expression, however offensive it may be, and people should not assume that her every “like” represents her husband’s opinion. In a city as chaotic as New York, mayors often find themselves side-by-side with men and women with whom they disagree on a wide range of topics. Yet because Mamdani has said that the liberation of Palestine defines him, it undermines the belief that his views are very different from his wife’s. When asked by journalists about the publications, he said that he loves Duwaji very much and that he is a private citizen, and left it at that.
That the mayor has chosen to turn Gracie House into a platform for expressing his views on Israel and Palestine is perhaps not surprising. In 2023, Mamdani he told the DSA meeting that, before joining the organization, he “struggled to find a home in New York City” where he could marry his views on Palestinian liberation with his socialist politics. His membership in DSA, and now his mayorship, has given him the means to do so.
