Hochul’s Silence in the Face of Mayoral Overreach Is Worrisome

Mayor Mamdani’s zealous, almost rabid denunciations of Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu have spurred much interest in the roots of this uncommon affinity for geopolitics on the part of a local elected official. While other local officials have taken positions, and even sides, on Middle East issues before, none have made those concerns as central to their administrations anywhere near the extent to which Mamdani has.

A consensus seems to be forming that the mayor’s ideology-based policies are a direct application of his father’s academic literature. Indeed, the Mayor has acknowledged helping edit his father’s texts.

In books like Neither Settler Nor Native, the virulently anti-Israel elder Mamdani argues that the nation-state model is inherently violent and that Israeloperates fundamentally as a “settler-colonial” entity built on the dispossession of an indigenous population. This rigid formulation erases Jewish ties to the land, indigenous Middle Eastern Jewish histories, and the existential threats Israel faces from regional adversaries. And this is the milieu in which Mayor Mamdani spent many of his formative years.

So, when the mayor adopts inflammatory rhetoric, he is operating within an established family dogma that views such language not as a call to violence against civilians, but as justified dismantling of state structures and myths.

And because New York City seems destined to have a mayor with an obsessive ideological thing about Israel and the Jews and Western philosophy generally – and ready to act on it – a restraining offset in the state house in Albany is so essential. Sadly though, Governor Hochul has shown that she is clearly not up to the task. In fact, she has emerged as an enabler of the mayor and his excesses.

Astonishingly, when Mamdani was advised by his own legal team that he lacked authority to arrest Netanyahu and responded with a call urging everyday New Yorkers to take to the streets in protest, while simultaneously demanding that President Trump intervene to arrest him, Governor Hochul did not offer a public comment.

When asked about this latest outrage and the mayor’s escalating rhetoric, Governor Hochul declined to issue a direct rebuke. Instead, she claimed she had “never spoken” to the mayor about the matter, while offering a mild acknowledgement of public “frustration” and voicing her own personal disagreements with Israeli policy.

In contrast, the other day Nassau County Executive and GOP gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman stood alongside local Jewish community leaders at a packed “United Against Hate” rally in Manhattan to deliver a fierce rebuke of Mamdani’s incendiary anti-Israel rhetoric.

We believe Blakeman rightly observed at the Manhattan rally that “there is no question that Zohran Mamdani’s rhetoric has fueled all of the antisemitism and the violence we now see in the city.”

Blakeman and the courageous Jewish community groups who stood shoulder-to-shoulder in Manhattan are drawing a clear line in the sand. They are reminding New Yorkers that leadership requires accountability, moral clarity, and a fundamental duty to keep citizens safe. We applaud Blakeman and those community leaders for refusing to be silenced, defending the truth, and demanding that the toxic rhetoric coming out of City Hall stop immediately.

And we urge all of our readers to keep all of this in mind come election time this November.