When rhetoric, historical memory, projection, and political obsession collide
Every generation promises itself that it would recognize the warning signs before history repeats itself.
Yet history rarely announces itself with jackboots and concentration camps. It begins with something far less dramatic: words. Repetition. Obsession. The gradual normalization of viewing one people, one nation, or one movement as uniquely dangerous.
The lesson of the twentieth century is not that every controversial political figure represents the same historical dangers. Such comparisons are usually lazy, inaccurate, and insulting to the singular evil of the Holocaust. The warning worth remembering is more subtle.
Authoritarian movements do not begin with genocide. They begin by convincing ordinary people that one group is uniquely responsible for society’s problems. They cultivate moral exceptionalism. They create villains. They repeat the same accusations until they become accepted truths. Only later do rhetoric and policy merge into something far darker.
That is why words matter.
This is also why New Yorkers should pay close attention to the political career of Zohran Mamdani.
To be clear, I am not at all suggesting that Mamdani is like Adolf Hitler. Such a comparison would be historically absurd.
What concerns me is something different: the extraordinary degree to which Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, has become the defining foreign policy obsession of his political identity.
For years, Mamdani has made opposition to Israel central to his public persona.
He has publicly championed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, whose goal is to isolate Israel economically, culturally, and academically. While supporters describe BDS as a nonviolent human rights campaign, many Jews across the political spectrum see it as an effort to delegitimize Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
Mamdani has repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a charge Israel strongly rejects and many supporters of Israel view as a politically motivated attempt to delegitimize the Jewish state.
Critics of the accusation argue that the war began after the October 7 attacks and that Israel’s stated objective is the defeat of Hamas, not the destruction of the Palestinian people. They point to Gaza’s significant population growth over the past several decades and argue that civilian casualty figures must be evaluated in the context of a dense urban war against an armed group operating within civilian areas. Urban warfare expert John Spencer has argued, based on his analysis, that the civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in Gaza is approximately 1:1 to 1.5:1, which he contends is among the lowest seen in comparable high-intensity urban conflicts.
When asked during his mayoral campaign whether Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, Mamdani repeatedly declined to answer in the affirmative. Instead, he argued that every state should guarantee equal rights to all of its citizens. To many progressives, that reflected a universal principle. To many Jews, however, it raised a troubling question: why is Jewish national self-determination uniquely questioned while dozens of other nation-states organized around national identities escape similar scrutiny?
More recently, Mamdani referred to “the monsters that we are up against” before discussing AIPAC, America’s largest pro-Israel lobbying organization. Although he later insisted he was criticizing a political institution rather than Jewish people, hundreds of rabbis publicly called on him to apologize, warning that such language dehumanizes and inflames.
Even this episode raises broader questions. Qatar has spent enormous sums on lobbying, public relations, universities, and influence campaigns throughout the United States. China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and many other foreign actors aggressively seek to shape American policy. Yet critics argue that none of these issues appears to command the same sustained attention in Mamdani’s public advocacy.
None of these statements, taken individually, proves antisemitism.
Together, however, they reveal something worth examining.
The question that follows is simple: Why Israel?
Israel is a country of fewer than ten million people, smaller in population than the broader New York metropolitan area.
Why does this one nation occupy such an extraordinary amount of one politician’s political imagination?
Where are the sustained campaigns against China’s persecution of Uyghurs?
Where is the same relentless focus on Iran’s execution of dissidents and oppression of women?
Where is the comparable outrage over Sudan’s civil war, Syria’s atrocities, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
Every one of these crises deserves moral attention. Yet none appears to command Mamdani’s political energy with anything approaching the intensity reserved for Israel.
Supporters argue that Israel is different because it receives American military assistance. That deserves discussion. But the slogan that America simply “gives billions to Israel” omits an important fact. Much of that assistance is structured through defense cooperation and must be spent on American-made military equipment, supporting American jobs, research, and defense industries. Moreover, numerous countries receive substantial American military or economic assistance without becoming the defining obsession of prominent local politicians.
That explanation simply does not account for the extraordinary centrality of Israel in Mamdani’s political identity.
Nor does it explain why criticism of Israel so often employs rhetoric unlike that directed at any other democratic ally.
This matters even more because Mamdani seeks to become mayor of New York City.
New York is home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish New Yorkers have family members living in Israel. For many, Israel is not an abstract geopolitical issue. It is deeply personal.
A mayor does not have to support every decision made by the Israeli government.
A mayor should be free to criticize any foreign leader.
A mayor may oppose military aid to Israel or to any other country.
But New Yorkers are equally entitled to ask whether someone who has devoted such extraordinary political energy to condemning the Jewish state can successfully represent one of the world’s largest Jewish communities.
They are also entitled to ask a simpler question: Why has Israel become such a defining issue for a politician seeking to govern New York City?
Politicians are often shaped by personal experiences. Cuban-American lawmakers understandably focus on Cuba. Ukrainian-Americans have been vocal advocates for Ukraine. Armenian-Americans have long championed Armenia. Such connections are natural.
What is more unusual is when a politician with no publicly identified personal or familial connection to a foreign conflict makes that conflict a defining feature of his political identity. That is one reason Mamdani’s singular focus on Israel is worthy of examination.
Perhaps there is an explanation rooted in ideology rather than biography. If so, voters deserve to hear it. When one foreign nation becomes the central object of a politician’s political energy, particularly someone seeking to govern New York City rather than shape American foreign policy, citizens are entitled to ask why.
This is not a question about disagreement.
It is a question about proportionality.
History teaches us that democratic societies should pay attention whenever political rhetoric becomes consumed by a single target.
Hitler’s Germany did not begin with Auschwitz.
It began with years of speeches portraying Jews as a unique source of corruption, danger, and moral decay.
Again, this is not to equate Mamdani with Hitler. It is to remember that history’s warning signs are found at the beginning, not only at the end.
They appear when obsession replaces balance. When one nation becomes uniquely evil. When one movement becomes uniquely monstrous. When moral outrage is applied selectively rather than consistently.
Critics will undoubtedly argue that these concerns seek to silence criticism of Israel.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Israel, like every democracy, should be criticized when it deserves criticism. Israelis themselves criticize their own government with remarkable intensity.
But criticism becomes something different when it becomes fixation.
When Mamdani skipped New York City’s Israel Day Parade while attending Pakistan Day celebrations, many Jewish New Yorkers took note. One event, by itself, proves little. Patterns, however, deserve attention.
Holocaust survivors often tell young Jews that the defining tragedy of the 1930s and 1940s was not only persecution. It was the absence of a safe haven. Today, the Jewish people have one. That is why many Jews hear calls to dismantle or delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state differently than others do.
Few other countries have their legitimacy and continued existence debated with the same regularity as Israel. Whether one calls that anti-Zionism or something else, it is worth asking why the Jewish nation alone is so often treated as uniquely contingent.
When one small country dominates a politician’s worldview while atrocities elsewhere barely register, citizens are justified in asking whether they are witnessing principled human rights advocacy or something more selective.
History rarely repeats itself in identical form.
But it often rhymes.
Its earliest rhyme is not violence.
It is obsession.
The first warning signs are not found in the aftermath. They are found in the language that comes before it.