"Zohran Mamdani’s victory marks the end of Israel’s central place in U.S. politics
Zohran Mamdani's victory over Andrew Cuomo is a historic turning point for Palestine in U.S. politics. It reflects a growing fatigue with Israel’s role in American life and the slow implosion of Zionism under the weight of its own excess.
It may appear, at first glance, irrelevant—even absurd—that a mayoral contest in New York City, or the electoral fate of a councilwoman in Brooklyn, should hinge upon one’s position vis-à-vis Palestine. What, after all, does municipal governance—zoning, sanitation, housing affordability—have to do with the devastation of Gaza, the starvation of a people, the slow-motion spectacle of death under bombardment? And yet, this apparent disconnect—between the intimacy of local issues and the enormity of geopolitical violence—is precisely the condition under which American politics operates.
It is also within this disjuncture between scale and intensity, between geographic distance and ideological proximity, that something more fundamental becomes visible.
In this context, the victory of Zohran Mamdani over a figure so emblematic of institutional continuity and dynastic power as Andrew Cuomo is not a mere electoral anecdote. It is a political event. One that must be read not through the metrics of personality or campaign mechanics, but through the symbolic grammar of what is now speakable, representable, and electorally viable. Mamdani’s triumph indexes a shifting horizon—where Palestine, long treated as a 'third rail' of American politics, no longer electrocutes those who dare to touch it. It is, perhaps, not yet a mainstream moral consensus, but it is no longer a guarantee of political suicide."