Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, compared himself to South African icon and former president Nelson Mandela on Thursday.
Mandela, known affectionately as “Madiba,” died in 2013 at 95. In an interview, Ted Koppel, of ABC, asked Mandela whether his solidarity with Palestinians meant he was “willing to alienate the Jewish community,” as Mamdani told it.
“It was a question so contrived that Madiba had to ask Koppel what exactly he meant,” the New York City mayor said. “It is also a question that, frankly, rings familiar—one that I have been asked in similar forms many times myself, whether opposing Israeli war crimes and violations of international law somehow makes you hateful toward a people.”
Mamdani has said that he would have the Israeli prime minister arrested in New York City, and his spokeswoman said that synagogues violate international law when they host pro-Israel events. Mainstream Jewish leaders have said that the mayor is minimizing the importance of or even fueling Jew-hatred.
In the interview with ABC, “Madiba refused the premise,” Mamdani said on Thursday in a keynote address at a Nelson Mandela Foundation leadership forum.
“Instead, he flipped it into a different kind of question—about whether a politics of universalism can exist if it is riddled with exceptions. Whether any of us are free if some of us are not,” Mamdani said.
It is “easier to make a concession, to relinquish a long-held belief, to abandon a principle than to hold firm,” the mayor said. “That was true when the world asked Madiba to compromise on apartheid. It was true when many asked him to abandon the Palestinian struggle for freedom, and it remains true today.”
Mamdani also pointed to Jewish opposition to South African apartheid, singling out Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, or JFREJ, whose members held “a Shabbat service that raised $50,000 for the anti-apartheid struggle.”
He did not name any other organizations.
Many South African Jewish leaders were at the forefront of the fight to free Mandela from prison and to end apartheid.
“Why must we wait until thousands more parents bury their children,” Mamdani said, “until thousands more lose their limbs, their homes and their futures to come together and insist upon Palestinian freedom?”
