It’s not the sort of language we’re used to hearing from ambassadors, especially not from Israeli ambassadors to the United States when speaking about American Jews. At a National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism meeting at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, Yechiel Leiter called the left-wing J Street lobby “a cancer within the Jewish community.”
That sort of blunt talk about American Jews who band together to bash or pressure the State of Israel has, up to now, generally been regarded as divisive and unproductive by the Jewish establishment here in the United States, as well as the diplomats and bureaucrats back at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem.
Undiplomatic talk
But as efforts to delegitimize Israel grow, alongside and as part of an unprecedented surge of antisemitism in the United States, diplomatic niceties and happy talk about a big tent is no longer appropriate to cope with a real crisis.
Democrats are falling increasingly under the sway of their intersectional base that regards Israel as a “white” oppressor and an “apartheid” state. Antisemitism that operates under the guise of hatred for Israel has become normative both on the political left and the far right.
All of the instincts and past practices of the organized Jewish community impel it, as well as Israeli diplomats, to tread lightly when it comes to Jews who join the ranks of anti-Zionists. However, under the current circumstances, it is vital that the hard truths like those spoken by Leiter be heard rather than the empty talk about inclusion and a big Jewish tent. Under the current circumstances, unity with J Street and openly anti-Zionist and antisemitic groups like Jewish Voice for Peace means giving those who are actively aiding and abetting others waging war on Israel and the Jewish people.
Leiter’s undiplomatic comment was not a one-line mic drop. He explained that “the worst thing about J Street is it’s duplicitous.” Referring to the group’s stand favoring the attempts of Democrats to cut off arms sales to the Jewish state, he asked, “How can you be pro-Israel and advocate for an arms embargo on a state that’s fighting a seven-front war against Iranian proxies?”
While J Street and its defenders say they are just criticizing the Israeli government, Leiter says this stand is disingenuous.
“If they said that they were pro-Palestinian, I wouldn’t have a problem meeting with them,” Leiter said. “I meet with pro-Palestinian groups.”
“But when you come and say in such a two-faced manner, ‘We’re pro-Israel, we’re pro-democracy,’ there’s a democratically elected government in Israel,” he said. “You don’t like Netanyahu, make aliyah, vote in the next election and express yourself. Don’t say you’re ‘pro-democracy,’ and decry and defy the position of the democratic government of Israel.”
Where ‘pro-Israel’ merges with anti-Zionist
J Street, which entered the political fray in Washington in 2008, was criticized harshly in the past by two of Leiter’s predecessors, Michael Oren and Ron Dermer, who also represented Israeli governments led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But they didn’t call the group a “cancer.”
Michael Herzog, who was appointed by the short-lived government led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid from 2021 to 2022, stayed away from attacks on J Street, even if he was blunt about his negative opinion about the organization’s ally in the Senate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt).
Leiter’s right about what J Street has been up to. They back the efforts of congressional Democrats to cut off arms sales to Israel in the midst of a war against Iran and its terrorist proxies, which began with the Hamas-led Palestinian terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Indeed, since its founding, J Street has made it its sole purpose to aid efforts in pressuring the Jewish state to make suicidal concessions rejected by its democratically elected governments and the voters that put them into office.
Despite their claims to be a nominally Zionist group, the difference between its stands and those of openly anti-Zionist and antisemitic groups like Jewish Voice for Peace is increasingly theoretical, rather than a matter of actual policy and actions.
That was made evident when J Street defended Zohran Mamdani, the virulently anti-Zionist and antisemitic mayor of New York City. When the Anti-Defamation League, which was slow to recognize the peril to the Jewish community from the left, began a “Mamdani Monitor” to note his actions and statements, J Street condemned it. The group claimed that it was wrong to “conflate” what they say is “criticism of Israel’s government” with antisemitism. But Mamdani has never made any effort to conceal his opposition to the existence of the Jewish state and his desire to aid those working to destroy it.
From his time as a student at Maine’s Bowdoin College, where he founded a chapter of the openly antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine, the 34-year-old mayor has been an ardent anti-Zionist, dedicated to supporting the war on the one Jewish state on the planet.
That takes various forms. It includes his longtime support for illegal BDS discrimination against Israel and Jews, which J Street claims to oppose. It also means falsely labeling Jews who support Israel as taking part in violations of international law, even when that means egging on antisemitic marches and demonstrations outside of synagogues. There is also his consistent backing for mobs who target Jews for intimidation, in addition to violence on college campuses and elsewhere, while chanting for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews wherever they live (“Globalize the intifada”).
Mamdani’s hate for Israel was front and center this week, but so was his ability to rally support from left-wing Jews.
‘Nakba Day’ fraud
The mayor has announced that he will be the first person holding his office since the founding of the Jewish state to refuse to march in the annual “Salute to Israel” parade down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Instead of making that token gesture of solidarity with the city’s Jewish residents, he commemorated “Nakba Day,” or “Disaster Day,” referring to the establishment of the modern-day State of Israel in 1948.
Mamdani did so by posting a video and a statement on social media, including a four-minute, documentary-style video created by his government-paid staff that featured an interview with a woman named Inea Bushnaq. “Inea is a New Yorker and a ‘Nakba’ survivor,” said Mamdani. In it, Bushnaq recounted her family’s departure from Jerusalem during the 1948 War of Independence, claiming that they were forced to flee because “the Zionists were coming into Jerusalem.”
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs did, in fact, flee the British Mandate for Palestine before May 1948. They did so because of the war that their leaders and the surrounding Arab nations started, most often at the behest of those who claimed they could come back after the Jews were pushed into the sea. They had rejected the U.N. partition vote in November 1947 for an Arab state alongside the new Jewish one, just as they would reject every peace offer from Israel in the decades that followed.
The failure of that effort to carry out a second Holocaust, only a few years after the first one, which resulted in the slaughter of 6 million Jews in Europe, left the Arabs disappointed. But they were still determined to continue their war on the Jewish presence in the country, a self-destructive belief that persists to this day, which has brought nothing but suffering for Palestinian Arabs.
During this same period, an even larger number of Jews were expelled or forced to flee from their homes throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds—from North Africa to the farthest stretches of the Middle East.
The plight of the Palestinian refugees was hard, but unlike the Jews, who were resettled in Israel and the West, they were deliberately kept homeless to serve as props in the ongoing war on Israel that continues 78 years later.
What was particularly egregious about Mamdani’s highlighting of one such refugee lies in the fact that—contrary to the anti-Zionist mantra about the Palestinian Arabs having been in the country from time immemorial—her family were relatively recent immigrants. Bushnaq’s relatives were Bosnian Muslims, who had arrived in what is now Israel in the 1880s, after that country was no longer controlled by the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottomans had ruled over parts of the Balkans for centuries, tyrannizing its Christian inhabitants, and some Muslims fled, fearing retribution from the new rulers. The Bushnaqs first went to Syria and then settled in Jerusalem, which was already starting to grow as a result of the initial wave of Jews returning to their ancient homeland.
Yet far from Jews being new to Jerusalem, as Bushnaq claimed, they had, of course, been there for thousands of years—long before the Muslim conquest in the seventh century C.E. While Jews had been the largest religious group in the city for many years before that, the Ottoman census in 1875 showed that they formed an absolute majority of the population.
And just to show how fake the claim that the city and country she fled was wrongly stolen from her family and other Muslims, Mamdani’s video contained one damning detail that his staff missed. The “Visit Palestine” poster on the wall behind Bushnaq was actually a work of a Zionist and Jewish artist, Franz Kraus, who saw it as part of the effort to promote the burgeoning Jewish homeland prior to 1948. Indeed, as Liel Leibovitz noted in the New York Post, if you look closely in the video, you can see that Kraus signed his work in Hebrew.
Mamdani’s Jewish collaborators
That is, as he rightly pointed out, a graphic metaphor for the fraudulent nature of the entire nakba narrative that Mamdani relentlessly promotes. Its purpose is not to help Palestinians, but to build support for the dispossession of the more than 7 million Jews of Israel. That is something that could only be accomplished by genocide—like the one the Arabs of 1948 failed to accomplish, and for which the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7 were merely a trailer for what they wished to do to every Jew.
Yet Gotham’s Marxist mayor has had no trouble recruiting Jews to collaborate with his efforts to harm their own community.
One such person is Rabbi Miriam Grossman, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. That’s a group that not only shares Mamdani’s desire to destroy Israel but is responsible for spreading blood libels against it. Yet she will serve in a paid government post as the mayor’s “faith liaison” with the Jewish community.
That’s an outrage and an insult to the overwhelming majority of Jews who rightly understand that Israel and support for Jewish rights to it remain an integral part of their faith and identity as a people.
As much as a third of the city’s Jewish population might have voted for Mamdani last November for a number of reasons, including their blind loyalty to the Democratic Party and justified disgust with disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was the main alternative. Still, Mamdani’s hostility to Jewish safety is no longer a theoretical argument.
The good news, however, is that the leaders of the organized Jewish world in New York have been forced by Mamdani’s actions to show some spine. Their language wasn’t as blunt as Ambassador Leiter’s about J Street. But by boycotting Mamdani’s pre-Shavuot Jewish Heritage Day reception at his Gracie Mansion official residence, they sent a message that the city’s Jews aren’t going to go along with the pretense that the mayor is anything but an open enemy of Jewish life.
Mamdani was nevertheless able to recruit some Jews to show up for his shindig. And they deserve the opprobrium not only of the Jewish community, but of all decent people who realize we are at a tipping point when it comes to the normalization of antisemitism.
Among them was the usual contingent of ultra-Orthodox Jews from the Satmar sect, who proclaim their opposition to Zionism and Israel for theological reasons that treat Jewish powerlessness as a virtue to be embraced until the coming of the Messiah. The far smaller and often violent Neturei Karta group is another problem. Such sectors of the community are willing to do business with anyone in power, regardless of whether or not they pose a threat to Jews.
Far more prominent were the left-wing Jews like Grossman and other JVP members, who see Mamdani’s hostility to Israel and mainstream Judaism as reasons to support him.
Perhaps even more significant were the comments of the man who gave the invocation at Mamdani’s sham event—Rabbi Irwin Kula, president emeritus of CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. CLAL became an important focus of efforts to unify the Jewish community under its founder, Rabbi Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg. But under his successor, Kula, it has become not merely irrelevant but arguably counterproductive.
For Kula and others who seek to normalize Jewish antisemites, as well as those working to undermine and attack Israel, inclusion is the most important value. He mocked the absence of Jewish leaders as illustrative of the collapse of “the liberal Zionist consensus.”
He blessed Mamdani and urged him to “hold the complexity of this city, to parse and nuance, with care and precision, the meanings of Zionism, of antisemitism, and the inextricable connection of Jewish identity and Palestinian dignity.” Such a meaningless word salad speaks to his intellectual and moral bankruptcy. It also demonstrates that Jews, including those who hold the title of rabbi, who advocate for a community that won’t take a stand against open Jew-hatred and delegitimization, aren’t merely harmless idealists or starry-eyed dreamers of peace.
When they work to isolate Israel—and strip it of its only ally and the means to defend itself against genocidal regimes and their terrorist auxiliaries, and treat those who seek to destroy it as praiseworthy—they have lost more than the respect of their fellow Jews. They have instead taken on the role of foot soldiers in a globalized intifada against their own people.
The primary focus of Jewish activism must be combating those on the left and the right who are normalizing antisemitism, along with publications like The New York Times that traffic in blood libels against Israel and the Jews. Yet we cannot be silent about those Jews who aid and abet them. They are, like the Satmar Chassidim, turning into a sect outside of normative Jewish life. They have little in common with those who understand that, imperfect as it may be, Israel deserves our love and support regardless of who leads it or what measures of self-defense they choose to employ against murderous enemies.
At a time when antisemitism is surging and Jewish lives are in danger, those who stand with the Israel- and Jew-haters do so outside of the Jewish community. What’s needed when dealing with them is not diplomacy or dialogue, but harsh truths like the ones spoken by Leiter.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
