If pro-Palestinian activists had designed a New York City mayor in a political science lab, they would have strained to do much better than Zohran Mamdani.
He is the Muslim son of a prominent anticolonial scholar whose childhood home often teemed with leading Palestinian American thinkers, primed since his youth in Uganda and post-apartheid South Africa to connect the pain of Palestinians to liberation struggles around the world.
Galvanizing at a microphone and disarming in person, he has helped guide and expand the Democratic Socialists of America as the Palestinian cause has become a defining D.S.A. focus locally and nationally.
His unwavering denunciations of Israel amid a rise in antisemitic hate have unsettled many of New York’s roughly one million Jews, most recently last week when he marked the anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, with a statement that dwelled largely on the suffering of Palestinians.
And yet there the mayor stood on this Oct. 7, a veteran protester being protested, stone-faced but visibly emotional as hundreds of people shouted at him from across a police barricade in Union Square.
“Traitor, traitor, come on out!” the chants echoed, interrupting a peace vigil organized by a progressive Israeli group that had hoped to honor those killed both in Israel and in Gaza. “You sold all your people out!”
Every mayor disappoints his friends in due time. The job is too complicated, the compromises too inevitable.
What is remarkable about this fissure is that the blowback has come over an issue for which the mayor has repeatedly and defiantly expended political capital, risking his standing with more moderate voters to remain in league with activists who are now demanding more from him anyway.
The anger at Mr. Mamdani over a matter so central to his political rise as the plight of Palestinians has doubled as an early test of the wider left’s capacity to corral its agitators, even with an avowed former agitator in charge.
It arrives at a moment when the left generally, and the D.S.A. in particular, is grappling more broadly with how to reconcile its rapid ascent into expanded power with a boisterous, largely hierarchy-averse coalition in which dissent is often encouraged and valorized.
Segments of the movement are debating in real time how much latitude Mr. Mamdani and other elected leaders deserve in areas as varied as policing, housing and comportment toward the Trump administration. And the answers can diverge sharply, sometimes dividing 30-something organizers — relative pragmatists who helped put socialists into office — and college-aged activists who remain skeptical about involving the D.S.A. in electoral politics at all.
Mr. Mamdani’s allies have sought to play down the tensions, especially around Gaza, as the attention-seeking spasms of a fringe faction. Many pro-Palestinian activists have come to the mayor’s defense.
The accusations against him include things that are plainly untrue — like being a Zionist, a term that has become a slur across much of the left as public opinion turns strongly against Israel.
And he is being asked to fulfill an activist wish list unlike any delivered to mayors in the recent past. It includes abolishing the City University of New York Board of Trustees (over investments tied to Israel); intervening in the programming decisions of local synagogues; and halting any military shipments to Israel through the city’s major airports, which the mayor does not control.
Practically, the movement from which Mr. Mamdani emerged is really several, with political goals and strategic instincts that only sometimes overlap.
It is young and socialist and left-of-socialist, and consumed with rent and grocery prices and public transit, but also with anti-Zionism and divestment and the Middle East views of Mr. Mamdani’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish and comes from a billionaire family that supports Israel.
The rancor has also coincided with escalating left-wing criticism over Mr. Mamdani’s handling of police affairs after an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent shot and wounded a man on Oct. 8 while the man was in a car with his 5-year-old son in Marble Hill, a neighborhood straddling Manhattan and the Bronx.
Taken together, the tumult has reinforced and deepened some knotty conflicts that have, until now, mostly burbled quietly.
Mr. Mamdani is caught between advisers who have privately urged him to promote the pro-Palestinian movement even more forcefully, according to people close to him, and those who think the city is hearing quite enough from its mayor on this subject.
Organizers are balancing a longstanding instinct to hold power to account, even and especially in their own ranks, against a growing recognition that Mr. Mamdani will not (or in some cases cannot) use his power in all the ways they might prefer.
The base is decentralized and strong-willed, a source of its potency and its volatility.
The D.S.A. itself is working to negotiate these disparate impulses internally.
The New York City chapter, with which Mr. Mamdani is closely affiliated, has afforded him some space. “Every force opposed to the democratic socialist project would like to divide the mayor from his organizational base,” Gustavo Gordillo, the chapter’s co-chair, said in a text message.
The national organization, which is generally considered more incendiary, has called for Ms. Tisch’s removal. The New York City chapter has also found itself in the precarious position of talking down the Young Democratic Socialists of America. The Y.D.S.A. initially endorsed the demonstration that disrupted the Oct. 7 vigil at Union Square, which began with a rally at City Hall.
Members from several college chapters participated in the protest, where some attendees chanted in support of Hamas and called for the deaths of Israeli soldiers. But the Y.D.S.A. withdrew its support for the gathering amid pressure from N.Y.C.-D.S.A., according to people familiar with the conversations. N.Y.C.-D.S.A. also issued a statement distancing itself from the protest.
“I think it pained him tremendously to hear the word ‘traitor’ being shouted at him,” Asad Dandia, an activist and historian who is friendly with Mr. Mamdani, said in an interview. “Oct. 7, 2026, and Oct. 8, 2026, were probably the two hardest days of his mayoralty. It’s the first time he’s been confronted with a real crisis that brings him in some tension with the movement. At the same time, he’s very good at responding to crises.”
In a brief interview last week, Mr. Mamdani suggested he understood why emotions were so raw, alluding to violence from Hamas, Israel and ICE.
“I think that people are restive, and so am I,” he said. “I am, frankly, furious.”
In some ways, activists said, Mr. Mamdani has been a victim of his own rhetorical success.
Only a few years ago, it would have been close to unthinkable that someone with Mr. Mamdani’s posture toward Israel could win citywide election in the nation’s ostensible Jewish capital — let alone that his rise might help to affirm an increasingly mainstream disapproval of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
But the realities of local government, even in a global city, can be bracing.
“Zohran proved you can be elected mayor of New York City with a principled position on Palestine and the genocide, paving the way for this year’s congressional primary winners, who will be closer to the levers of foreign policy,” said Andrew Bard Epstein, a mayoral campaign aide last year and a D.S.A. member, nodding at the success of left-wing candidates endorsed by Mr. Mamdani in House primaries. “But public opinion barely steers domestic policy, let alone empire.”
Nerdeen Kiswani, a founder of Within Our Lifetime, a pro-Palestinian group that endorsed the protest that marched to Union Square, suggested that anyone asking the movement to give the mayor grace was misunderstanding the purpose of advocacy.
“People want to remind him of why we voted for him and why we made him mayor to begin with,” Ms. Kiswani said. “It feels like a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, well, you know, we got someone in power. We don’t need to keep looking at what’s happening.’”
She lamented that Mr. Mamdani “issues so much condemnation when it comes to any slight, any perceived slight even, against folks in Jewish and Zionist communities” while he “barely says a whisper when it comes to things like this on Palestine anymore.”
Jewish leaders reject this assessment, to put it mildly, and they say the mayor’s statement on Oct. 7 was an example of why.
“I think the job of all leaders is to try and bring people together and try and bring down the temperature,” said Mark Levine, the city comptroller. “And on that front, I’m not sure that statement met that standard.”
At minimum, Mr. Mamdani’s loyalists and his Israel-defending detractors seem to agree on one thing.
“We are indeed living in a time of artificial intelligence,” said Amit Singh Bagga, a Democratic strategist who served in the administrations of Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Kathy Hochul, “for that’s what’s required to think that Mayor Mamdani has somehow abandoned the Palestinian cause.”
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