Mayor Mamdani’s Jewish State

A myopic worldview is offered by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s declaration that “any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.” Hizzoner made that statement to ABC News’s Jon Karl on Sunday. The newsman was pushing him on where the Democratic Socialists of America stand in respect of the Jewish state. Yet unlike Saudi Arabia, Israel has no official religion.If Mayor Mamdani were to withdraw his support from any state affiliated with a creed, he’d have precious few left to choose from. There are more than 50 that are affiliated with Islam — including Saudi Arabia and, say, the Islamic Republic of Iran — and some 25 that link their body politic to Christianity. Mr. Mamdani insists that he can only support the “state of Israel as a state with equal rights.” That is a call for Israel’s dissolution. Israel’s consul general at New York, Ofir Akunis, responds in a statement that “Israel’s Declaration of Independence guaranteed full equality for all its citizens. That has been the reality since the day our state was established.” That charter vows to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” and to “guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.”The chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Mark Dubowitz, calls Mr. Mamdani “either willfully ignorant or maliciously mendacious” and laments that despite all the countries with religious affiliations “Israel is routinely portrayed as uniquely problematic because it is a Jewish state.” Mr. Mamdani hardly appears as exercised by another religiously based entity, the Islamic Resistance Movement, whose name is abbreviated as “Hamas.”For a tutorial on the nature of Israel’s social compact Mr. Mamdani could find it instructive to look toward Tel Aviv, where last week the first Hebrew city appointed an Arab Israeli, Amir Badran, as deputy mayor. Or the tragic death last week at Lebanon of a Druze soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, Major Basil Sweid. Sheikh Muwafak Tarif declared that the “heroism of the Druze fighters illustrates our shared commitment to the State of Israel.”Israelis call the relationship between Israeli Jews and Druze “brit damim,” or the “covenant of blood.” Also part of that pact is a Bedouin Israeli military contractor, Raad Abu al-Kiyan, killed at Gaza last week. These heroes — alongside their innumerable Jewish Israeli comrades in arms — grasped that Israel’s identity as a Jewish state left them a wide berth in matters of belief. Some 26 percent of all Israelis are not Jewish.Israel’s Declaration of Independence begins by declaring that the “Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.” That makes it a homeland for the Jewish people, not a theocracy. A pity that Hizzoner does not intend to visit.

Mayor Mamdani’s Jewish State

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