OPINION:
In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis by Hamas terrorists, anti-Israel encampments sprang up across many university campuses.
One of the largest was on the campus of George Washington University, just blocks from my office. I decided to see the encampment for myself.
Dressed in a jacket and tie, I was welcomed into the encampment. My attire made it appear as though I was a professor and, therefore, that I was likely sympathetic to the pro-Hamas demonstrators.
At one point, I found myself next to a woman who was loudly shouting her animus toward Israel, referring to it as a colonial state. I noted that she had an accent. When she stopped yelling to take a breath, I seized the moment to ask when she had arrived in the United States. She proudly said she had been here since 1967.
I responded by noting that Jews had been living in the land that is Israel for nearly 4,000 years. She sputtered some epithet and walked away.
I was recently reminded of this incident when I watched news of a violent demonstration in front of a New York City synagogue, the site of a seminar on Israeli real estate. I focused on the reaction of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Mr. Mamdani lauded the right to demonstrate but went on to declare his firm opposition to Jews being allowed to purchase real property in the so-called West Bank, purchases which he declared to be in violation of international law.
Of course, Mr. Mamdani is wrong as a legal matter. All persons, regardless of religion or nationality, are allowed to purchase real estate in private transactions in the West Bank. But then, Mr. Mamdani is a rapper, not an international lawyer, by profession.
He is also the direct political descendant of Peter Minuit, a Dutchman, who represented a group of investors intent on establishing a commercial beachhead on the North American continent. Neither Minuit nor his investors had any historical, theological or emotional ties to Manhattan, an island they purchased from the native residents for $24 worth of trinkets.
They came to what is today New York purely for economic benefit and did not hesitate to swindle the locals into ceding their homes. On that basis, New York City was founded and has thrived.
The mayor himself has even less claim than the Dutch interlopers to the land he now governs. He was born in Uganda and his family arrived in New York, not in 1967, but only in 1998. To my knowledge, when Mr. Mamdani and his family settled in New York, they did not receive the consent of the original native occupants of Manhattan or the self-important bureaucrats of the United Nations.
They bought or rented property without the acquiescence of any of the natives who had lived in Manhattan for thousands of years, and they settled in.
And Mr. Mamdani is the follower of a religious tradition that, for more than 1,000 years, has promoted the conquest of lands through violence.
Indeed, his religious ancestors conquered by the sword the land that is today Israel and massacred many of its Jewish residents, turning the remainder of those occupants into dhimmis, a barely tolerated minority in Islamic societies.
The notion that Jews who wish to purchase land in their traditional homeland are somehow violating rights based upon resolutions adopted by international institutions is repugnant — but regrettably, Mr. Mamdani fails to see this.
I suspect that he is not conversant in Yiddish, but he is unwittingly contributing to that language. His condemnation of the proposed private purchase of land by Jews in Israel, Judea and Samaria — the traditional homeland of Jews — provides an additional example of the meaning of the Yiddish word chutzpah, unremitting audacity.
There is another Yiddish word the mayor should get to know because it is especially applicable to him and to his reprehensible comportment: shanda. That word, which means a shameful or disgraceful act, truly describes the behavior of this man, whose hypocrisy, bigotry and prejudice seem to know no bounds.
It is indeed a shanda that a man like Zohran Mamdani sits astride our nation’s most important and diverse city and seems prepared to promote his biased agenda with impunity. New York City deserves better.
• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. He is the author of “Lobbying for Equality, Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights during the French Revolution,” published by HUC Press.
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