New York City, if the polls are right, is at another signpost in its mayoral politics history.

It was 30 years ago — on Oct. 23, 1995 — that Mayor Rudy Giuliani had Yasser Arafat, the visiting president of the Palestinian National Authority and a loathed figure in Israel, kicked out of a concert at Lincoln Center.

Spin forward to this year’s mayoral campaign, whose early voting period begins on Saturday: City voters appear on the verge of electing Zohran Mamdani, who has championed the cause of Palestinians and called for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit New York.

Nobody says they expect the arrest to actually happen, but Mamdani supporters and detractors alike contend the anticipated messaging around Middle East politics from City Hall if Mamdani is elected would mark a notable shift. If elected, Mamdani, the Democratic Party nominee, would be the city’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor.

The shift has some Palestinian New Yorkers and allies feeling less excluded from corridors of power while leaving pro-Israel constituents wondering if they’re now on the outside.

“ New York City mayors have always been pro-Israel, at least since the birth of Israel in ‘47,” said George Arzt, a longtime consultant and Jewish New Yorker who has advised a number of elected officials. In terms of city leaders departing even somewhat from this orthodoxy, he said, “ There was nothing prior to Mamdani.”

That much has been clear from the campaign stage.

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat running as an independent, said at Wednesday’s mayoral debate that Mamdani helped “stoke the flames of hatred against Jewish hatred.” Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, accused Mamdani of supporting “global jihad.” Mamdani rejected the accusations, saying, “I have never, not once, spoken in support of global jihad.” He countered that the charges were grounded in the fact that he’s Muslim.

The barbs have not diminished Mamdani’s status as front-runner.

In a Fox News poll taken last week, 38% of Jewish voters said they supported Mamdani, with 42% supporting Cuomo and 13% supporting Sliwa. Mamdani led among all likely voters, with 52% support compared to 28% for Cuomo and 14% for Sliwa.

Mamdani’s break from past mayors’ abiding loyalty to Israel has been sharp. He has consistently called Israel an “apartheid” state, and in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks against Israel, he referred to Israel’s actions in Gaza as a “genocidal war.”

He’s also called for the arrest of Netanyahu, responding to an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, which accused Netanyahu of war crimes in Gaza.

Mamdani has repeatedly met with Jewish leaders since his Democratic primary win in an effort to forge ties with the community. He has also moderated his stance on occasion, telling business leaders he would discourage people from using the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

Dora Pekec, a spokesperson for Mamdani, said in a statement, “Zohran will be a mayor for every single New Yorker, of every religion and every nationality — because all of us deserve a city that we can afford and feel safe in.”

Some pro-Palestinian supporters of Mamdani, whose rise has been met with a surge in anti-Muslim posts online, said the likelihood of his victory comes against the backdrop of a sobering reality, namely the two-year military campaign and devastation in Gaza.

The death toll in Gaza has crossed 68,000, according to Gaza’s health ministry. The Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks against Israel resulted in 1,200 deaths, according to the Israeli government.

Tarek Ismail, a Palestinian activist in Queens, said the shifting political winds represented in part by Mamdani’s ascent required “sacrifice and loss on the part of the Palestinian people.” He said it also required the efforts of numerous organizations and activists in New York who continually raised awareness about the plight of the Palestinian people.

“ I don’t know if it’s hopeful,” Ismail said, “but it suggests that there’s something different possible.”

A century-plus of ideological consistency

The likelihood of Mamdani’s electoral victory, Arzt said, suggests that a century-long political tradition of pro-Israel loyalty that began with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants in New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has run its course. For decades, he said, the mayors of New York have professed fidelity to the Israeli state.

“ No one to my knowledge challenged that,” Arzt said. “They wouldn’t be running for mayor.”

Pledges of loyalty included the period in the early 20th century, well before Israel achieved statehood in 1948. This followed large waves of migration that brought Jewish immigrants to the city, to the extent that by 1910, 25% of the city’s population was Jewish.

“ The Jewish vote was a big bloc and no one wanted to get voted out,” Arzt said.

In a 1923 proclamation, Mayor John Hylan urged New Yorkers to contribute “generously” to a fund in support of a Jewish homeland, “so that the largest sums may be raised for the rebuilding of the ancient land of the Children of Israel.”

Mayor William O’Dwyer, who was in office from 1946 to 1950, took a 34-day trip to Israel in 1951, establishing a tradition that would continue to the present day.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for a two-state solution, said O’Dwyer also joined hundreds of thousands of other New Yorkers to mark the first anniversary of the Israeli state in 1949, an event that he said would eventually become the annual Israel Day Parade.

“ So there is a very long tradition of engagement between New York City, which is the largest Jewish population in the world, and the state of Israel,” said Ben-Ami.

A showdown at Lincoln Center

Giuliani’s ejection of Arafat from Lincoln Center in 1995 took place during a New York Philharmonic performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at a United Nations anniversary concert. The mayor didn’t do the deed himself; he had his chief of staff Randy Mastro usher Arafat out of the concert.

Through a City Hall spokesperson, Mastro, who currently serves as first deputy mayor to Mayor Eric Adams, declined to comment on the incident.

The episode prompted immediate condemnation from the New York Times editorial page as well as the administration of President Bill Clinton, but Giuliani was unapologetic, according to press reports at the time.

“I am comfortable with my decision and very proud of it,” Giuliani said.

Reflecting on the moment three decades later, Arzt said some of Giuliani’s Jewish allies felt it was a wise move, part of a long-standing tradition to be “ in with the three I’s”: Italy, Ireland and Israel, which all represented represented large voting blocs. Other members of the Jewish community, Arzt said, “ thought that it was a naked political move.”

Bill de Blasio, a progressive Democrat Mamdani called the best mayor of his lifetime, said that part of his job description was being “a defender of Israel.”

In particular, he opposed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement — a boycott aimed at compelling Israel to change its policies toward Palestinians.

But de Blasio said that his politics shifted in 2022, when as a congressional candidate he came out against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobbying group.

Unlike Mamdani, who has said he would not support Israel as long as it gave lesser rights to Palestinians, de Blasio said he continues to believe in a Jewish state. But like Mamdani, he now uses the word “genocide” to refer to Israel’s actions in Gaza, although he said he initially felt the term “was an overreach.”

“ I’m very, very saddened to say I believe it has devolved into a policy of genocide,” de Blasio said. “I don’t think that’s what the Israeli people believe, but I think it’s what the Israeli government is doing. I mean, to have a famine occurring on their watch and to withhold food aid, I don’t know what else you can call that.”

Palestinians on the sidelines

Some Palestinian New Yorkers and allies who have long felt excluded from the city’s halls of power said Mamdani’s political ascent brings hope.

“There’s a possibility that we’re going to be living in a city that is governed by someone that is ready to fight for our basic rights, for all of us, with no exceptions, with nobody sidelined,” said Sumaya Awad, a member of New York City Democratic Socialists of America and a Mamdani supporter. “And I think that’s what makes this so powerful.”

Awad said the long-standing public support for Israel began to shift “ in the last decade and certainly in the last five years.”

But that shift was not readily internalized by those in power, said Ismail, the Queens-based Palestinian activist who has helped build support for state legislation known as Not On Our Dime. The legislation, meant to “prohibit not-for-profit corporations from engaging in unauthorized support of Israeli settlement activity,” was sponsored by Mamdani.

Ismail said after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, when Israel began its military offensive, “Palestinians began to die in completely indiscriminate ways.”

The deaths on both sides at the time, Ismail said, did not receive equal attention or mourning from the city’s political and business establishments.

“ You would be hard pressed to find an official seat of power, be it business or government that wasn’t literally lit up with blue and white lights in solidarity with the Israeli state,” he said.

Ismail did not paint Mamdani’s political ascent or the waning of pro-Israeli support in celebratory terms. He instead called it “ deeply tragic,” because it took “decades of dispossession and occupation” in Gaza and a deadly military conflict for public opinion in New York to sufficiently change.

“The cost of getting to this point has been hundreds of thousands of lives ended, uprooted and destroyed, family trees completely cut off,” Ismail said.

Jewish fears and reassurances

The Mamdani campaign said the candidate was frequently meeting with members of the Jewish community in a bid to build relationships.

This included a visit to Williamsburg earlier this month, when Mamdani donned a velvet Hasidic yarmulke and met with Rabbi Shalom Landau and others in the Orthodox community.

“ He’s done a lot of outreach,” said Ben-Ami of J Street. “ People who are involved in J Street have met with him and have engaged in efforts to ensure that there’s a good, open and strong line of communication with him during the campaign. And if he succeeds, after.”

Still, some Jewish New Yorkers said concerns were palpable.

Yosef Rapaport, a longtime journalist, said he’s a member of a WhatsApp group called The Resistance, which he defined as a “liberal, anti-Trump” collective of around 120 Hasidic Jews, most of whom live in the five boroughs.

“They’re all scared of Mamdani,” Rapaport said.

He said the concern is only indirectly about the candidate’s stance on Israel.

“People are educated enough to know that the mayor has no say” in U.S. foreign policy, Rapaport said. He added that for some members of the community the issue nonetheless serves as a “bellwether of how he’s going to treat the Jewish community” on local issues, including “regular city matters” of education, health and public safety.

He said community members were particularly afraid of antisemitic incidents such as the recent deadly attack at a synagogue in Manchester, England. He said the Mamdani campaign’s outreach to Orthodox communities had been insufficient, despite promises to increase anti-hate crime programming by 800%.

The result, he said, was “a real fear that the the doors of power in New York City will be shut to them.”

Ben-Ami said the shift in local politics was somewhat inevitable, as perceptions of Israel changed from “an underdog state” to one run by “ right-wing governments… bent on permanent occupation and creeping annexation.”

“The whole atmosphere around these issues has shifted dramatically in these 25 years,” Ben-Ami said, “and a younger generation that Mamdani represents, particularly in the Jewish community, only knows an Israel that is a strong, forceful military superpower.”

De Blasio said the concerns voiced by Rapaport were understandable.

“ All people live in fear of being shut out,” he said, “and it’s understandable that they don’t have a relationship with him so far, and they’re worried about that.”

He said “Zohran will succeed by serving all communities well,” and predicted that New Yorkers would be “pleasantly surprised” by Mamdani’s engagement with all communities.

But he also felt Mamdani represented a potential break from earlier mayors, because he separated his foreign policy stances from his views of constituents.

In that sense, de Blasio said, Mamdani represented “a maturation of our political culture, to say, ‘Let’s leave the homelands and the foreign policies out of this because we’re living here now.  We’re all part of this community.’”

“I think this is all part of a bigger evolution,” the former mayor said. “We’re not living in the politics of the past.”