politicaljew:
Yesterday, Mayor Mamdani posted this. There is nothing fundamentally "wrong" with this statement, but I immediately thought about how anti- Zionists consistently omit part of the story when it comes to Jewish history because it might be uncomfortable to admit.
What is Tisha B'Av?
Tisha B'Av, which translates to the ninth of Av (a Hebrew month) is the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. It is a fast day mourning the destruction of both Jerusalem Temples: the First Temple by Babylon in 586 BCE and the Second Temple by Rome in 70 CE.
Tradition holds both fell on the same date and over centuries other calamities including the expulsion from Spain in 1492 have fallen on that day, reinforcing its role as a day of collective Jewish tragedy.
Observance is similar in severity to Yom Kippur: a 25-hour fast (no food or water), plus restrictions on bathing, leather shoes and marital relations.
So what's wrong with Mayor Mamdani's statement then? It is a deliberately vague word salad.
Read again: “mourners will pause and reflect on the history and resiliency of the Jewish people.”
Not a word about what is being mourned. Not the Temple. Not Jerusalem. Not the land whose loss this entire day of fasting exists to grieve. Tisha B'Av isn't a generic ethnic memorial day, it is a very grave anniversary of the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem, the exile that followed and the rupture of Jewish national sovereignty in Israel.
This is relevant because it is a pattern with antizionist rhetoric more broadly: it gestures at "Jewish history” because those phrases are portable, but it always avoids naming the actual content of that history, because so much of it is inseparable from Jewish peoplehood's relationship to a specific territory.
Pesach ends with "next year in Jerusalem." Yom Kippur's liturgy is soaked in longing for a restored Temple. Tisha B'Av mourns the loss of national home, not just a building. You cannot honestly engage with any of these without acknowledging that Jews are a people with an ancestral, textual, liturgical, unbroken claim to connection with that land.
So the move is to launder the specificity out. Swap "Jerusalem” for “the Jewish people." Swap "the Temple" for "history." The words sound respectful but they are chosen to be compatible with a worldview that treats Jewish sovereignty in that land as illegitimate.
They allow the speaker to be polite without conceding the very connection they have spent their career trying to relitigate.
This is the cornerstone of Diasporism: that Jewish belonging can be fully satisfied by memory, culture and religious practice wherever Jews happen to live, that the demand for a sovereign homeland is a historical accident rather than the logical conclusion of what Jewish peoplehood actually is.
The reason this method is so effective politically is that it doesn't ask anyone to deny Jewish suffering, Jewish history or even Jewish identity.
It only asks them to relocate that identity somewhere it can't make territorial claims; you get to be sympathetic to Jews as victims of history while being unaccountable to Jews as a nation with a present-tense political claim. This is the evergreen "people love dead Jews": societies are far more comfortable memorializing Jewish suffering than confronting Jewish agency. A murdered Jew is safe: tragic, teachable, useful as a moral lesson about someone else's history of hatred, can only be spoken for. A living Jewish polity that votes, defends itself, makes claims and says no is not safe in the same way, because it can talk back.
Mamdani's statement is the diplomatic version of that same reflex. Mourning "the Jewish people" in the abstract costs nothing; naming the Temple, Jerusalem, the actual national loss the fast commemorates, would mean acknowledging that the thing being mourned is a homeland and that the people mourning it rebuilt exactly that homeland eighty years ago and that this rebuilt homeland is the same one his politics are organized around delegitimizing.
The statement keeps Jews in the register where they are easiest to sympathize with: historical, wounded, resilient. Anything but sovereign, present and entitled to the same rights as other nations, including the right to self- determination and self-defense.
