#WTH Macron, Mamdani, and the farce of "Palestine"

Yesterday, as rumored, President Emmanuel Macron of France announced that he would recognize a Palestinian state. “We,” he wrote on X, “will win the peace.”

Every word but “the” in that statement is a lie. There is no “we,” because there is no Palestinian government; only a kleptocracy enveloping a terrorist cell. There is no “will,” because there is no future tense without a partnership between Israel and a Palestinian government that can free Gaza and the West Bank from terrorism. There is no “win” because there is no victory here, other than the political victory that Macron seeks in France. And there is no “peace,” because the pathway to a sustainable Palestinian state does not run through either Ramallah, Gaza City, or Paris at this moment.

A couple of weeks ago, we had Commentary’s Seth Mandel on the pod to talk about Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s would-be mayor. Listen to the whole thing here. But one of the things that stuck with me was Seth’s description of Mamdani’s politics as a costume, performance art worn by the far Left to assert its bona fides on the question of Jew-hatred anti-Zionism. Mamdani likes to pretend that when he lived in South Africa (til the ripe old age of seven), he sported a keffiyeh. As one does.

Mamdani was a founder of his university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. His posturing began young, but it grew apace, “maturing” into a fanaticism that would not allow him to support a commemoration of the Holocaust when he was a state assemblyman. But what shines through most consistently throughout his career is Mamdani’s patronizing and transparent pandering to what he thinks of as “brown and black” sympathies: Ooooh, South Africa. ✊🏿 And his patronizing and transparent pandering to what he thinks are Muslim/antisemitic sympathies. Ooooh, Palestine. 🍉

Mamdani loves the costume; he adores the pose, but he cares little for the people he pretends to embrace. Macron is no different.

Why has Macron decided that now, while hostages still rot in Hamas’s hands in Gaza, is the time to recognize a Palestinian state? He insists his step is part of an effort to accelerate an end to the war in Gaza. How so? He wants “Palestine” and Israel to live in peace, respecting each other’s security. How so? Indeed, how is the recognition of a “State of Palestine” now going to solve any problems?

The answer is obvious to most: It won’t. Because the recognition of a “State of Palestine” is little more than a giant keffiyeh plastered around the neck of Marianne, the symbol of France. Me voilà, she says, from the river to the sea, blablabla. It is a reward to the perpetrators of October 7, and will neither advance the cause or the creation of an actual Palestinian state.

And why, one might ask, would Macron want to make such a substantively meaningless gesture? Well, perhaps it is because Macron is polling at an all-time low, below 20 percent… And perhaps it is because antisemitism is at an all-time high in France, and the deeply unpopular Macron believes that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Or perhaps it is because France boasts the largest Muslim minority in Europe, some 13 percent of its population. Or perhaps it is because, having surrendered to Islamist hordes in France after decades of failing to attempt to integrate its Muslim population, Macron believes it is time to elevate the prejudices of those hordes to national policy. Or, perhaps, lastly, it is because France’s resurgent right is pro-Israel….

Macron’s embrace of a pro-terrorist foreign policy for France has everything to do with… France, and nothing to do with the safety, well-being, or fate of the Palestinian people. In other words, it is little more than a pose designed to propitiate himself with the antisemitic far Left, much like, um, Mamdani.

A final note: Who gets screwed here? Sure, the Jews of France must suspect that this is their 1935, a moment to consider emigration. And doubtless the Israelis are also frustrated that the decades-long “peace process” has been nothing more than a sham. But the real screwees here are actual Palestinians — not their cosplaying mates in Europe and America, but the people who have to live under murderers, rapists, and thieves, fetishized by their western interlocutors, indifferent to the well-being of actual residents of the West Bank and Gaza. Pity them, because they are the real losers in this political mise-en-scène.

HIGHLIGHTS

Q: What the hell is going on in New York?

SM: What a good question. I think a lot of people would say hell is going on in New York. The answer is contained in your question. Hell is going on in New York. I mean, I think that what you're seeing is people who have, who're sick of Andrew Cuomo, and they voted for Zohran Mamdani and are now learning about him. But the question is whether it's too late to stop the momentum from him winning the Democratic primary. And whether there's a way for those, for people who might have a bit of regret about their votes to do anything about it.

But that I think is what's happening, is that this guy came along and he seemed energetic and funny and nobody really paid that close attention. But it's a blue city in a blue state and a blue primary electorate in a blue city, in a blue state is usually very blue and very small. And so, it's made up of activists and people, the door knockers convinced to get out there and vote for whatever reason they told them. I think that that is what happened. What is happening is that the train is rolling, and nobody has proposed a serious way to stop the train before it rolls off the cliff.

Q: Tell us about Mamdani himself, what’s his background?

SM: Goes without saying that there's somebody in Columbia in his family. And I believe he came aboard in the late '90s as their African studies director from Uganda. He was born in Bombay, this is Mahmood, he was born in Bombay, but grew up in Uganda and that is where Zohran was born. Zohran's mother is Mira Nair, who is an Academy Award nominated filmmaker. It's an Indian family, but Zohran was born in Uganda. And then when he was about five they moved to South Africa, which is actually an interesting part of the story to come back to. But he is about five, when he was I think seven, they moved to New York City. And so, his life has been Uganda, South Africa, but mostly America.

And so, when he talks about the kind of things he talks about, the third worldism that he talks openly about, or the Global South, all these buzzwords, these progressive buzzwords, the truth is that the memories he has before America are probably not so strong.

And the reason I brought up the South Africa is for ... There was an interesting thing that he said the other day. There was, or somebody posted a video of him eating rice. This went around a lot, because people were criticizing him for eating rice with his hands. But the more interesting part of the video to me was where he was saying, "Growing up in South Africa, it was normal to wear the keffiyeh on behalf of the Palestinian struggle and to internalize that struggle and all that." And again, he was there from ages five to seven. There's no way that he walked around with any sort of socio-political consciousness of any kind. And there's certainly, I would be willing to bet anyway, that there's no pictures of him in a keffiyeh at five years old, it wouldn't really make sense. But that tells you a lot about him, because Zohran Mamdani is one of those people who thinks that anti-Zionism is a personality. And we all know these people, that they think anti-Zionism is a full personality and they adopt it, and that's just who they are.

Q: Where does this “personality” come from and what does it inform?

SM: America's complicity, et cetera, in America's defense of Israel. He sees it as a sort of neo-colonialism. And that he speaks the same as the progressives on campus do. Because again, he was raised in American academia. He was formed, I should say, in the world, in the atmosphere of American academia. He was not fully formed in Uganda, which he left by the time he was five. He was not fully formed spending two years as a young child in South Africa. He came to America and he lived in this intellectual milieu with his mother, the filmmaker, and his father, the radical professor. And that is really where he got all this stuff from.

So, he tries to present it as well, so worldly, "I was in South Africa and as toddlers we walked around with the keffiyeh, of course, and in Uganda, this and that." But the truth is that his influences are the same as you see on campus everywhere else, and his father is a really big part of that, so a lot of this is constructed. The idea that he would look into a camera and say, "When I was growing up in South Africa it was totally normal to walk around in the keffiyeh and internalize the Palestinian struggle, et cetera, et cetera."

Q: Is anything about him genuine?

SM: Although he has this radical world around him, really a radical bubble I would say, he still kind of makes stuff up. He's still constructing this persona very carefully in ways that are A: unnecessary, if you're in this world of the Columbia-type political radicalism. But he seems to think that he has a problem with authenticity, that he has to prove his authenticity.

And he also seems to recognize that people, especially on the left who are already open to his ideas, take them more seriously when you say words like Uganda and Cape Town and things like that, especially South Africa given its history with apartheid and all that. I think that he is presenting himself as a much more foreign-formed person than he really is. He strikes me as a sort of privileged American kid who is sort of swimming in academia and the academic world and that brand of progressive intellectualism.

Q: What sort of stances is he taking in these Marxist circles?

SM: When he's talking to the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, which again is also, those are his people, his environment. He said that the goal is to seize the means of production. So, one of his quotes is, "To seize the means of production." Which is really just not even euphemistically speaking. I remember when Barack Obama was heavily criticized for saying, "We got to spread the wealth around." And that was taken as a sort of as a Marxist euphemism or something. But Marx, this is Marx recreation. And so, "Seize the means of production," is the kind of things that he says. He had a plan where he proposed raising taxes on neighborhoods that he said, and we quote, "Richer and whiter." Those are his words. He's comfortable playing these racial games, despite his own, or maybe because of his own struggles with his own authenticity and all that.

But he's fully comfortable saying things out loud, specifically that you normally hear euphemistically, right? Normally you hear, so you very rarely hear, "We should tax white people more." And usually you hear just certain neighborhoods, privileged neighborhoods, certain zip codes, things shouldn't depend on your zip code. Whether you have a supermarket or a dollar store shouldn't depend on your zip code, et cetera. Whether you go to a good school shouldn't depend on your zip code. People talk about the changing neighborhoods and gentrification in cities in New York and elsewhere. They use these terms to say, "There's a lot of white people around and they're making everything more expensive or they're changing the character of the neighborhood, and I don't like it." But he just says, "We should tax white people more." Which is a preposterous thing to say, or white neighborhoods I should say, because that is to be fully accurate, white neighborhoods. What that means, I don't know, maybe wherever the New York Times building is located on 8th Avenue or whatever, but I don't know what white neighborhood really means

Q: Is he married to particular social change or ready to play into these radical-left political fads?

SM: Then there was another one he wanted to get rid of, the statue of Christopher Columbus, which is again, that's a sort of stock progressive thing. And we went through this period of time where we started taking down statues of Confederate generals and ended up taking down statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and all that stuff. So, in a way that's sort of a moment in time story. But again, it also shows that he signs on to all of the fads, all of the progressive political fads. He's therefore, so whatever is in, he'll say things like, "Queer justice, defunding the police is queer justice." Or whatever, he'll combine all these different buzzwords to make a perfect intersectionality salad. And so, it's just, he will, if people are saying words like queer justice, at one point in time he will just add those words to the end of every sentence.

That's kind of what he does. And so, he's a mush at this point after all these years. I say, well, after all these years he's like 34. But after all these years he's a mush of concepts. And that is sort of where he comes from.

Q: What’s the story on his inability to condemn “Globalize the Intifada”?

SM: Now, the big one that really caused the stir was when he was on a Bulwark podcast, he was asked point-blank whether he can condemn the phrase "Globalize the Intifada." He not only refused to do it, but he spun himself in circles to talk about what people might mean when they say that. What disadvantaged groups might mean when they say that. He hears it as a cry for freedom and equality and a sort of striving for rights and all that stuff. But again, this is kind of like the checking that Black or African American box on the Columbia application in that he knows, he knows what Globalize the Intifada means. He's not confused. He knows the implications of Globalize the Intifada as a phrase.

Q: Where is the start of his publicly antisemitic personality?

SM: I think you start with the Students for Justice in Palestine, the chapter, because people who were around at the time have explained that they were people at other groups. J Street on campus, by the way, was one of them. Have said that Mamdani when he really took control of the group. But first he co-founded it, but then he really sort of, at least 51%, let's just say he really was the guy in control. He instituted what they called a policy of non-normalization. If you were at a liberal group like J Street, you weren't able to have events with Zohran Mamdani's SJP either. Because essentially what he did was say, "We won't work with anybody who thinks Israel has a right to exist." That's what non-normalization means. J Street is too extreme for them, because J Street thinks that Israel has a right to exist. I mean, that's about the long and short of it. And so, he started this way and he's never really veered off of that particular one.

Q: Were these views publicized during the campaign?

SM: He was asked during the campaign a couple of times, once at a mayoral debate, at the primary debate, about whether he thinks that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. So, this was the question asked of the first crop of university presidents who walked into the woodchipper of Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx and other Republican members of Congress, especially on the Education Committee, who were holding hearings on antisemitism after October 7th, 2023. And this was the question that tripped up the first group. "Can Israel exist? Should Israel exist as a Jewish state? Or what right does it have to exist as a Jewish state?" And I think that the way that Claudine Gay, she was president of Harvard at the time, she is not now, although she's still affiliated with Harvard. But Claudine Gay was the first to be asked that question. And she turned it around and she said, "I believe that Israel has a right to exist." Or whatever, something like that. And just repeated the whole phrase without the words Jewish state. And her fellows, her peers on the bench there, the other college presidents who were there at that time with Claudine Gay just echoed that.

Zohran Mamdani did pretty much exactly the same thing. He picked up on that, which is that you can take the Jewish state, the Jewish part out of it and spit the answer back at the questioner. And sound clever, I guess. But he basically repeated verbatim what Claudine Gay did at that hearing. And as we all know, nobody bought it when Claudine Gay did it. She's no longer the president of Harvard University. That was the beginning of the end for her and other presidents, of people who the public felt were tiptoeing around these things that were obviously wrong because they didn't want to condemn them. And so Zohran Mamdani, yes, he'll say that Israel has the right to exist. He doesn't say as a Jewish state. And that's another thing he won't really bend on.

Q: In his current role, are these views effecting his political behavior?

SM: And more recently though, he's a state assemblyman, he's been in office for now close to four years, three and a half years. And he suddenly decided at the last time that the resolution, essentially condemning the Holocaust is really what it was, came around, and he had already declared his candidacy for mayor of New York City. He declined to back it in the assembly, and he also declined to back another one that was talking about the Israel as a friend of the United States or whatever. He's somebody who ... He doesn't just express anti-Zionism and then say, "Oh, you're linking Zionism and Judaism. You're the one who's combining the two. I didn't say anything about the state of Israel." You can see that he won't condemn an antisemitism resolution, by the way, the easiest one in the world to condemn. I don't know how anyone would struggle with that. And I also don't know why he thinks he would get in trouble for that.

Full transcript here

SHOWNOTES

The Improbable Rise of Zohran Mamdani (Joshua Chaffin & Victoria Albert, The Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2025)

The Mamdani Millionaires Supporting the Socialist for NYC Mayor (Kevin T. Dugan, The Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2025)

Mamdani’s Comment on ‘Intifada’ Motto Fuels Tension in Mayor’s Race (Nicholas Fandos & Daana Rubinstein, The New York Times, June 21, 2025)

BDS-supporting Zohran Mamdani personally urged Ben & Jerry co-founder to boycott West Bank: video (Carl Campanile, The New York Post, June 17, 2025)

What Zohran Mamdani has actually said about Jews and Israel (Gabe Friedman, Jewish Telegraph Agency, July 1, 2025)

Mills' rejection of ASA boycott misunderstands the movement (Zohran Mamdani & Sinead Lamel, Teh Bowdoin Orient, January 10, 2024)

Zohran Mamdani Shared ‘sick’ video mocking Hannukah and ‘cosplaying Jews,’ advocacy group charges (Shane Galvin, New York Post, July 6, 2025)

Zohran Mamdani, Twitter, October 31, 2024

Zohran Mamdani, Twitter, September 26, 2024

Zohran Mamdani, Twitter, June 3, 2024

Zohran Mamdani, Twitter, October 14, 2024

Zohran Mamdani, Twitter, November 26, 2023

Zohran Mamdani, Twitter, October 8^th, 2023

Zohran Mamdani, Twitter, May 31, 2023

Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application (Benjamin Ryan, Nicholas Fandos and Dana Rubinstein, NYT, July 3, 2025)

Dems to Mamdani: Take My Party, Please! (Seth Mandel, Commentary, June 27, 2025)

Brad Lander and the Collapse of NYC’s Jewish-Political Establishment (Seth Mandel, Commentary, June 25, 2025)

New York City and the Jews (Seth Mandel, Commentary, June 24, 2025)

Mamdani’s Astonishing Hezbollah Propaganda (Seth Mandel, Commentary, May 29, 2025)

Yes, It’s a New Middle East (Seth Mandel, Commentary, June 26, 2025)

Anti-Israel Resolutions Aren’t about Israel (Seth Mandel, Commentary, June 30, 2025)

How Dare Israel Win a Defensive War! (Seth Mandel, Commentary, July 7, 2025)

Mamdani Brings Third World Prejudices to New York (Sananand Dhume, The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2025)

What Will Really Happen if New York City Goes Socialist (Jeffery Sonnenfeld, Steven Tian, Stephen Henriques , Time Magazine, June 26, 2025)