Reeling From Reality: From Mideast Mayhem to NYC Politics

In today’s world, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are fluid, and global events can dominate local politics.

‘I’m not happy with Israel.’ President Trump angrily criticized Israel and Iran — but mostly Israel — for violating his ceasefire.

“All I do is play both sides.” Donald Trump, June 24.

Sometimes the president actually speaks the truth. But it’s hard to tell when. And the “truth” is subject to one’s interpretation of the mind-boggling events taking place every day of late, here and in the Middle East.

Consider: One minute Trump is God’s gift to the Jewish state, courageously ordering American pilots to blast Iran’s nuclear fortress, and the next he is angrily cursing the IDF’s actions in “what well may have been the most bitter public denunciation of Israel by an American president since, well, ever,” noted Times of Israel editor David Horovitz.

In a blink, the leader of the Western world has gone from dropping 15-ton bombs on Fordow to F-bombs on the White House lawn.

Mercurial, petulant, impatient, consistently inconsistent. How do we respond when the wrong person does the right thing? Clearly, or maybe not so clearly, we must respond in kind. Praise when worthy of praise; criticism when called for.

Full-heart kudos to Trump for going after Iran militarily, in cooperation with Israel, in seeking to prevent a revolutionary Islamic regime from succeeding in its openly avowed mission to destroy the Zionist state. How ironic, though, that as David Frum wrote in The Atlantic this week, “an American president who does not believe in democracy at home has delivered an overwhelming blow in defense of a threatened democracy overseas.” Frum went on to note that Trump “did the right thing in the wrongest possible way” by avoiding Congress and all but a handful of sycophantic advisers in making his decision. True, but I’m glad he did.

A glowing Prime Minister Netanyahu deserves much credit for taking on Iran at the right time and for convincing Trump to join him. Though Israel has long prided itself on not relying on others to fight its fights, this was a unique opportunity. It was a moment when Iran was at its weakest and its proxies, most notably Hezbollah, had been sidelined, perhaps permanently, from the action. Let’s pray that’s true for Iran as well.

The Netanyahu-Trump relationship has waxed and waned over the years and may have reached its highest – and lowest– points within a couple of days this week. Trump praised Bibi on Saturday night and then scolded him Tuesday morning, demanding that the Israeli leader call back air force jets that had set out on a post-ceasefire mission over Tehran. Netanyahu obliged, a sign of the limitations of relying on a bully president.

While Mideast experts try to predict what happens next in terms of the ceasefire, a possible U.S.-Iran deal, and the Gaza quagmire, American Jews joined our brothers and sisters in a collective sigh of relief at the end — at least for now — of the war with Iran. Millions of Israelis can finally sleep in their own beds again, no longer complaining that, as the latest dark Israel humor has it, the whole society had taken on the behavior of babies: getting up three times each night screaming.

Mideast Conflict Hits Close To Home

But the feeling of relief faded quickly for many of us when proof emerged that the bitter controversy over the Mideast war has spread even to local elections in the U.S.

Mayor Mamdani? At an anti-Israel rally last year.

I admit that I had never heard of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old socialist candidate for mayor in New York’s Democratic primary and outspoken critic of Israel, until he began creeping up in the polls in a crowded race of a dozen candidates. Both The Daily News and The New York Times, which rarely agree on political issues, editorialized against Mamdani. The News described him as “anti-Semitic” because of his support of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel), and the Times wrote: “We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.”

Deserving of a spot or not, Mamdani handily trounced former governor Andrew Cuomo and the others on Tuesday, likely paving the way for him to become the first Muslim mayor of New York in November. What’s particularly disturbing to many Jews, a million of whom live in New York, is his pop idol status among Gen Z voters and his insistence on using and defending the pro-Palestinian slogan “globalize the intifada.”

Supporting an intifada in the Middle East is disturbing enough, but globalizing it certainly sounds like calling for violence against Zionists anywhere and everywhere. And while during the campaign Mamdani backed off of some radical statements he had made, like “defund the police,” he continued to defend and assert his use of “globalize the intifada,” telling The Bulwark’s Tim Miller in a podcast last week, “the role of mayor is not to police language.”

True, but the right thing to do is to call out hate language.

Mamdani’s win was not a fluke in the New York City elections, nor was his contest the only one where Israel and the Mideast was a key factor. Shahana Hanif, a Brooklyn City Council incumbent and full-voiced critic of Israel in a heavily Orthodox Jewish area, defeated Maya Kornberg on Tuesday in a race that had strong Mideast overtones.

Hanif accuses Israel of “genocide” and supported and visited the anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University last year. Two years ago, Hanif was one of a handful of City Council members who voted against a resolution to establish April 29 as an annual “End Jewish Hate Day.”

(In 2021, Hanif retweeted a post on X that said “globalize the intifada.” She later deleted it, saying she recognized “that it is a phrase that is antagonistic, discriminatory and hurtful to many Jewish people, and so I have learned, and I will continue to learn.") Will Mamdani do the same?

One thing we know, the saying that “all politics is local” no longer applies. Though city officials around the U.S. have virtually zero impact on foreign affairs, what happens in the Mideast – in effect, Israel fighting off Iran and its proxies determined to annihilate the Jewish state – since October 7, 2023, is all the world’s business. And a dangerously growing number of younger people are rooting for the bad guys.