What I Saw at New York’s Anti-Israel October 7 Rallies
· The Atlantic
Yesterday was a reminder of the difficulty that the pro-Palestine left has with showing grace even for the dead. On the third anniversary of the day that Hamas gunmen and freelance killers arrived in Israel on motorcycles and paragliders and trucks, and slaughtered children and grandparents and mothers and fathers and dancing young people, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani put out a statement that was empathetic and modulated in tone … for about 50 words.
“This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers,” Mamdani began. “It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.”
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Alas, then came the next 162 words, as the young mayor indulged his anger with Israel. He apparently felt obligated to give New York City—which is home to the biggest Jewish population of any city on the globe—a history lesson that seemed to suggest that Israel brought the October 7 tragedy upon itself.
“The suffering did not begin nor end that day,” he wrote. “It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing.”
[Jonathan Chait: Progressive activists are sometimes on the wrong side of history]
On he went, referencing Israeli war crimes and apartheid and unbearable grief and American complicity in it all. By the time he concluded, he had turned grace into a cudgel. Ammiel Hirsch, a prominent New York rabbi and a longtime peace advocate, called the statement “morally perverse” and likened it to “sticking a knife into the pain of the Jewish community.”
Mamdani might have thought his statement to be provocative enough to satisfy even the most anti-Zionist, anti-Israel leftist. But portions of New York’s pro-Palestine community were insistent about observing the anniversary with a Citywide Protest Resisting Genocide since 1948. They were less intent on remembering Palestinians who have suffered grievously than they were focused on implicitly saluting Hamas’s savage attack, as their call to protest offered “glory to the martyrs, victory to the resistance.” And a fringe went further still, denouncing Mamdani for what it perceived as insufficient anti-Israel fervor.
I spent some hours yesterday tracking these protests, including classroom walkouts and marches, and in truth, the numbers were deeply underwhelming. The demonstration began with 80 or so New York University students gathering for a noontime rally in Washington Square Park. They chanted, denounced their university leaders, and listened as an NYU professor spun out various conspiracy theories suggesting that Israel was principally responsible for its own casualties. Two hours later, another 75 or 80 students gathered on Broadway, outside the Columbia University campus, and chanted, “Intifada revolution” and “Palestine from river to sea,” an idea that, as a practical matter, would entail the abolition of Israel.
A larger rally was planned at City Hall Park in the late afternoon. Protesters there numbered—and my grading could be generous—a touch more than 200. This included a breakaway group of roughly two dozen anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Satmars, a crew of black-clad anarchists who did their best to appear forbidding, and an impressively insistent Maoist Communist faction. The lackluster turnout might have owed in part to the fact that the grandees of New York’s organized left, in particular the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, were savvy enough to avoid militant protest on this solemn day. The New York City DSA went silent on social media, making no mention of October 7 or the rallies. Only the youth wing of DSA showed up.
[Rose Horowitch: Where are all the campus protests?]
There was a faint hint of anti-Mamdanism. A young protester, his face wrapped in a keffiyeh, shouted into a bullhorn and assayed a brief attack on the mayor. His voice was muffled by the cloth, so it was difficult to make out what he said, save for the fact that he repeated it rhythmically. Perhaps seven or eight protesters joined in, and a Maoist held aloft and jiggled an anti-Mamdani sign.
The atmosphere grew more hostile as day turned to night and the protest came to a desultory end. According to news reports, a rump group of perhaps 100 followers of various obscure militant-left groups and pro-Palestine groups marched north from city hall to Union Square. They were intent on disrupting a remembrance run by the anti-war group Israelis for Peace and attended by Mamdani. That vigil recognized both the Israeli dead and the many thousands of Palestinians who have died in the war in Gaza. The protesters crowded in, unleashing boos and chants, not least at Mamdani, whom they appeared to cast as Judas for standing alongside left-wing Jews and very liberal Zionists.
Peter Sterne, an editor at City & State New York, posted on X some of their nastier chants: “Traitor, traitor, come on out! You sold all your people out!” and “Zohran, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide!” Mamdani, accompanied by his police detail, left to a chorus of jeers and boos.
A revolution eating its own is a historical commonplace. For now, Mamdani has used his considerable political skills to keep the most uncompromising of his pro-Palestine-left supporters in check. But last night perhaps signaled a fraying of patience.