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Zohran Mamdani’s shaky politics has come home to bite

The Israel-Palestine question appeared to be the one area where he apparently refused to soften his views. And that refusal is now colliding with the realities of governing.

NYC’s maverick mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is learning the hard way that campaigning in poetry is easy, governing in prose is difficult. He famously quoted these lines in his victory speech in November last year, but his shaky politics have now come home to roost. 

Mamdani and his Syrian wife, Rama Duwaji, have often been questioned about their support for Palestine. Mamdani has insidiously and strategically deflected questions about his wife’s personal likes and ideologies and has correctly pointed out that it has no relation to his work as the mayor or his politics. 

Until this weekend. At a press conference, Mamdani was asked about his wife’s illustration for a book of essays — Every Moment Is a Life: Gaza in the Time of Genocide — edited by Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa. The mayor, instead of defending Abulhawa, who has repeatedly spoken out against Israeli aggression in Gaza, called her rhetoric “reprehensible,” while clarifying that his wife had never interacted with the author directly and that any connection between them was through a third party. As many on social media pointed out, he defended his wife by “throwing [the Palestinian author] under the bus”.

And he did that after building his politics around the Palestinian cause, speaking like a true champion of those oppressed in Gaza and the West Bank, and describing the Israeli government as “committing a genocide” while standing next to President Donald Trump. 

And yet, when it came to a Palestinian voicing those and similar views, he couldn’t hold his ground even for a moment and labelled her tweets as “patently unacceptable” in an attempt to disassociate his wife from those tweets, quietly playing into the hands of the American right.

Well done, Mamdani, you not only handed them a stick to come back harder at you with their scrutiny — and come back they will — but also dismissed a figure like Abulhawa who speaks from her lived experience. Associate with the community, disassociate with an individual from that community.

Here’s what makes Mamdani’s seemingly routine political clarification feel like a........

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