It's one of those astounding coincidences of history that Zohran Mamdani will be elected on the thirtieth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's as*as*ination.
I think the real reason Jews are up in arms about Mamdani is not anything he'll do, he's a f*cking mayor, but the symbolic value of what this portends for the rest of the country.
This shows that, yes, the social democrat flank of the Democratic party might be able to win elsewhere. It shows that anti-Israel sentiment is a very powerful engine of GOTV (get out the vote), and that anti-Zionism just might, in fact, have powerful appeal on the right as well as the left.
Israel started out a socialist country: not the 'liberalism with a social face' of Northern Europe, but the real thing; and then, nearly fifty years ago, Israel started winning their wars and expanding territory, and Menachem Begin definitively threw socialism out. Pro-Israel conservatives have always believed the left's animus to Israel is antisemitism: it's not, it's classism. Anti-Zionism is in the socialist DNA because previous generations of socialists viewed Israel as class traitors who abandoned the cause.
But go still farther left, and there has never been a scintilla of fine feeling for Israel, precisely because it's democratic, precisely because it has rule of law, precisely because it makes dictatorships look incompetent. These communists, these radical Islamists, these... whatever else... are very much antisemites. Socialists and alt-righters would look the other way at Jewish deaths (and already have), but these other groups want us dead.
Yitzhak Rabin was as important a figure of the late 20th century as anyone; Reagan, the Pope, Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping, Nelson Mandela.,, Mandela paid for reconciliation with thirty years of his life. Rabin paid for the possibility of reconciliation with his life itself, and still it wasn't enough.
I definitively stopped trusting the new generation of social democrats when AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) turned down an invitation to a Rabin memorial. It showed the leader of the whole thing was more concerned with ideals than results. I'm obviously not an idealist. Even the successful idealists are realists, and I'm not sure whether getting an idealist or a realist socialist running for president scares me more. The former would just be unwilling to compromise their principles to get what they want. The latter could literally sink anything in the country that works on the hope that the populace would flock to their solutions. Whom does that remind you of?
The symbolic significance of AOC's refusal was clear. Rabin was an Israeli general, in charge in the 80s of putting down the First Intifada. His instruction to the IDF? "Break their bones." He was criticized around the world for treating rebels so brutally. He was criticized in Israel for not killing the rebels. When it came time to make peace, lots of leftists hated it as well as rightists. Rightists wanted no concessions made, a permanent state from river to sea. Leftists wanted nothing less than Right of Return, and, if possible, a binational state.
Rabin persisted: through two years of daily calls for his assassination, two years of suicide bombings by terrorist organizations like Hamas, through two years of funerals where Israelis who lost loved ones would yell in his face while he simply took it, he even persisted knowing that Yassir Arafat was as likely to stick to the terms of an agreement as Hitler was to the terms of Molotov-Ribbentrop. While Yassir Arafat used his fear of assassination as a reason for not signing any pledge, Rabin kept at it doggedly when half the country wanted him d*ad, knowing that any moment may be the one to demand his ultimate sacrifice.
Why did he do it? Why did this man of war give his life for the chance of peace? Part of it was that he clearly was a statesman who saw the world in terms of justice and freedom. How do we know he was a statesman? Because he was the dullest politician in the world. Rabin's rival and partner, Shimon Peres, was a politician who loved giving extraordinary speeches and wheeling deals among cigars and expensive wine, but Rabin clearly didn't get into politics because he derived any thrill from crowds or dealmaking. Part of it was also that he was sick of watching thousands of families grieve the loss of their sons. But more than being a statesman, he was a general. Israel had just lived through Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons attack, and Rabin knew that it was, and remains, a matter of time before a fundamentalist Islamic regime got their hands on serious weapons of mass destruction. In the coming fight, Israel would need to do whatever it can to turn every non-fanatic Middle Eastern dictator into friend.
Even after what's now known as 'The Twelve Day War', that war is still coming, all the more likely now because Iran's government feels so humiliated by how easily Israel won. Iran cannot be allowed WMD's any more than the Taliban can (remember them?... Afghanistan is now listed statistically by Freedom House as the least free country on earth, significantly past even N. Korea, not that anybody cares anymore in the face of Gaza...).
Rabin also knew that the longer this war continued, the more Israel would likely become the most isolated state on earth. Jews would become the same pariahs elsewhere that they were before 1945. A less scrupulous leader would likely use that to his advantage, forcing Jews of means to relocate to Israel, perhaps not realizing that by ruining Israel's contacts abroad, Israel's abilities at home become worthless. Though he probably does...
Thirty years later, peace is still the only way. The two-state solution is still the only way. Nobody should pretend it's anything but a shitty solution. Nobody should idealize peace as an amazing state of affairs that will completely change realities of the Middle East that have existed for four thousand years and probably much longer. Even the most successful peace would last, what? Fifty years? Seventy-five? Thirty?
But there are only two ways to prevent war on a scale far larger even than Gaza: one is genoc*de. Not the bullshit accusation from the Jewish past that Jews now have to endure daily, but the real thing, what Hitler called 'annihilation' (vernichtung). What happens now is not genoc*de, but make no mistake, genoc*de is the current trajectory.
There is only one other way to prevent it. There is the only way to prevent another October 7th, another Gaza War, there is only one way to get rid of Hamas and Likud.
The war for peace continues, and make no mistake, it's a war.
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