The Permitted Enemy

How Israel became New York's Moral Test

Image: Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1799. Public domain, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On November 5, 2025, New Yorkers woke to the result they had chosen: Zohran Mamdani had won. He had won on affordability — rent, transit, wages, and the cost of life in the most expensive American city. But the exit polls registered something stranger. Two-thirds of voters said the candidates’ positions on Israel had factored into their decision, and thirty-eight percent called those positions a major factor.

For a mayoral race in New York City.

The job is the MTA, the NYPD, the schools, the rent, the rats, the parking, and the snow. There is no Israel desk or foreign policy portfolio for that matter. And yet, on the issue with the least to do with the job, two of every three voters had taken a position and acted on it.

Eight months later, on June 23, 2026, three candidates aligned with Mamdani won Democratic congressional primaries in New York. Unlike the mayoral race, these elections matter for Israel. As members of Congress, the elected candidates will cast votes on aid, sanctions, and resolutions. We do not yet know whether their position on Israel decided any of the races, as they differed by district, opponent, constituency, and local terrain. What we do know is that each winning campaign treated opposing Israel as politically advantageous; each winning candidate had charged their opponent with enabling Israel’s “genocide” against Palestinians.

Israel policy is the subject of ongoing disagreement among Democrats, and more recently Republicans. The debates draw on specifics, such as how much military aid, on what conditions, with what oversight; whether to recognize a Palestinian state and when; how to position the United States toward settlement expansion. A congressional candidate running against an incumbent on Israel could have addressed any of these positions, but none of the winning candidates did. Instead, they insisted their opponents enabled “genocide.”

The question is: why?

The charge converted a matter of foreign policy into a matter of local moral standing. Political economists call this “expressive voting”: a choice whose value lies in the act and its audience rather than its result, and which, as Alan Hamlin and Colin Jennings observe, comes to dominate wherever the action itself is inconsequential and the price of taking the position is low. A vote on Israel cast in a New York primary changes little in Gaza and much in the eyes of the voter’s own coalition.

The records of the defeated tell the story better than the charge did. Adriano Espaillat, ousted in the 13th, was a five-term incumbent and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a champion of affordable housing, immigrant rights, and labor — the very issues his opponents claimed to run on. Dan Goldman backed reproductive rights, a higher minimum wage, universal childcare, and paid family leave. What separated them from the candidates who beat them was Israel. As the writer Elissa Wald put it, the incumbents’ fatal mistake was being pro-Israel, “and it would seem that nothing else mattered.”

When the Vote Becomes a Moral Signal

In a mayoral election, when voters cast ballots on questions the office cannot meaningfully address, the vote’s political function exceeds its practical effect. The voter may experience herself as responding to Gaza, and she may be responding sincerely; an expressive choice can be a heartfelt one. In New York, this response functions as a declaration of identity. It signals by telling other people — the electorate, her peers, even herself — who she is.

This is why her position must be visible through the post, the sign, the chant, and even the vote. What she wants is to be recognized, be read as one of them, and be on the right side of the line they draw. These are the forms through which the position becomes socially real. Philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call this “moral grandstanding,” the use of moral speech to raise one’s standing. They note its built-in escalation, how once someone stakes out the stronger condemnation, the rest must match it or be left looking like naysayers. In a coalition that reads silence as a position, to go unplaced is to be suspect by default.

So the display tells her neighbors where she stands before anyone can decide she stands elsewhere — with the oppressed against the powerful, with the insurgent against the establishment, with the innocent against the guilty.

The subject is Gaza, but the sorting happens in New York.

Far From the War, Close to the Jew

The ordinary work of government cannot easily be made into a drama of innocence and guilt. The MTA resists the form, as do parking, sanitation, and snow removal. Israel works because it meets three conditions: it is distant enough that the voter does not bear the consequences, familiar enough that she knows how to read it, and unresolved enough that it can be used again.

This logic operates on the American left. The conflict’s costs are paid every day by people who cannot vote in New York City, while its symbolic weight is harvested by people who can. The voter speaks of decolonization, but the Palestinians she speaks for are not really the point — they are the material she uses to show who she is. The cause is invoked, the people are not consulted, and a coalition that calls itself anti-colonial treats its own subject as something to be spoken for rather than heard from.

In 2025, the Israel position that animated 38% of New York’s voters cost most of them nothing. They had never been to Israel or Palestine, had no Israeli or Palestinian relatives, and stood at a conversational distance from anyone whose life the position would touch.

So the distance holds in one direction. The voter is far from the conflict she invokes, but the power she opposes is imagined as near. When the imagined source of that power is remote, the hostility travels to whoever stands close enough to answer for it. In New York, that proximity is assigned to the local Jew, who bears no relation to Israeli policy and is drafted into the slot of the aggressor regardless.

The mechanism is old.

Freud described how a group can “bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness,” and the psychoanalytic literature on antisemitism, from Otto Fenichel onward, treats the Jew as the figure onto whom a displaced hostility is projected because the particulars of Jewish life “make them suitable for such a projection.”

The displacement is social before it is anything else. The voter reaches for a distant conflict at little personal cost, while the local Jew absorbs it at close range.

The Coalition Finds Its Enemy

While the conflict does identity work for the individual, it does organizing work for the coalition.

A movement recognizes itself through what it opposes, so it needs a shared enemy: someone outside its own membership that the whole coalition can stand against and, in standing against, recognize itself. A target drawn from within fractures the coalition; one drawn from outside holds it together.

The left had tried the internal version. For a while its organizing principle was a reckoning with whiteness — an examination in which members were asked to locate the oppressor in themselves, to name their own complicity, to sit with their privilege. As moral instruction it was powerful, but as a unifier it worked against itself. An object placed inside the coalition divides it, because everyone inside falls under the same scrutiny. The reckoning turned members’ attention toward one another and toward themselves, and a movement cannot easily cohere around a demand that each of its members answer for the thing it opposes.

But an external object resolves this. When the figure to be opposed stands outside the coalition — powerful, distant, and elsewhere — the scrutiny that had turned inward can be redirected outward where it unifies instead of divides.

Trump did this with the caravan in 2018. A group of Central American migrants moving north through Mexico existed, but the urgency Trump attached to them did not. The caravan became a fixed point onto which his coalition could project itself. Stand against it and you were one kind of person; stand with it and you were another. The actual migrants became secondary to the story told about them — like the Palestinians, their purpose was to carry a coalition’s sense of itself.

What Trump’s coalition opposed sat at the border and out of reach. What Mamdani’s coalition opposes has a local address: the largest Jewish population outside Israel.

For many New York Jews the conflict abroad is family, history, theology, the question of whether a relative came home from October 7. Mamdani’s victory was, among other things, the announcement that the cost of that victory would now be theirs to absorb. They will live with the mayor who declined to say that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, who vowed to arrest Netanyahu should he visit the city, singling out the Israeli prime minister from every other head of state he might have named.

The Conflict Came Pre-Labeled

Other distant conflicts, such as Tigray, Sudan, Xinjiang, and Myanmar are familiar enough to register, but that is not enough. The American left has no labels for them because its signature distinction is colonizer and colonized, and these wars do not divide that way.

Sudan is an Arab-led government against African populations, with no Western power to cast as the villain; Tigray is Ethiopian against Ethiopian; Xinjiang would mean siding against China, which reads as siding with American power, the wrong direction. Ask who the good side is in any of them and you get a pause because this requires reading up.

But Israel-Palestine comes pre-labeled: a Western-backed, white-coded state against a brown, indigenous people. The fact that more than half of Israeli Jews are Black and brown does not disturb the label, because the label was never meant to describe — only to convict.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the vilification of “the Zionist” supply a reading far older than the conflict itself.

The figure of the Jew as powerful, foreign, and dominant by hidden means runs back centuries — through the moneylender, the conspirator, and the secret hand behind events. The American left’s colonial frame runs on opposition, and without an oppressor to name, there is no side to take and no virtue in taking it. So the frame finds one. Israel did not have to audition for this role — the casting was a story about Jews before it was a story about Israel. And of course, the voter does not register this story as antisemitic; she believes she is opposing power, and opposing power is the one thing she is sure is right.

The Cost Lands in New York

A mayoral election should belong to the city, and in part the 2025 race did — Mamdani won it on affordability. But that was the governance half. He won the other half by giving the coalition a common enemy: the easiest way a movement makes itself whole, turned on the most ancient target there is.

And this week, in races where the office actually does touch Israel, the pattern surfaced again. Three candidates won by leveling the “enabling genocide” charge against their opponents; no policy position could have had the same impact. The conflict will change, but what stays is the inherited story that makes some conflicts available for moral performance and leaves others unseen.

Jewish people comprise approximately 12% of New York City’s population. This is a community that helped make the city what it is, and now finds itself sorted to the “wrong” side. For them the conflict was never a performance, and neither is the sorting — it is where they live.

And “Antizionism” is just its most current name.

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Sources

Grubbs, Joshua B., Brandon Warmke, Justin Tosi, and A. Shanti James. “Moral Grandstanding and Political Polarization: A Multi-Study Consideration.” Journal of Research in Personality 88 (2020): 104009.

Hamlin, Alan, and Colin Jennings. “Expressive Political Behaviour: Foundations, Scope and Implications.” Strathclyde Discussion Papers in Economics, no. 09-18. Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 2009.

Tosi, Justin, and Brandon Warmke. Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

White, Robert S. “An Antisemitic Transference and Countertransference.” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 19, no. 1 (2022): 1–15. The quotations from Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930) and Otto Fenichel (“Psychoanalysis of Antisemitism,” American Imago 1, 1940) are drawn from this source.

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