Mamdani’s One Country Rule

Zohran Mamdani has a universal principle, and it applies to exactly one country on earth. Asked on ABC’s This Week on Sunday whether he supports Israel as a Jewish state, the mayor of New York said he could not support “any state that privileges one religion over another, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.” Equality, he said, “should be enshrined in every country in the world.”

Every country. Let us hold him to it.

Start with the company he chose for Israel. Saudi Arabia forbids the public practice of any faith but Islam, bars non-Muslim houses of worship, and can impose death for apostasy or blasphemy, all of it documented year after year by the State Department and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Israel is not that, and a man who cannot tell the difference has no business lecturing anyone about it. Israel establishes no religion and jails no one for heresy. It is the nation-state of a people, which is a different thing entirely. Jewishness is peoplehood, a matter of shared ancestry and language and history and an indigenous tie to a particular land, not a catechism you recite to belong. The world is full of nations built around a people: Japan for the Japanese, Ireland for the Irish, Poland for the Poles, Armenia, Greece. We do not call them theocracies. When Mamdani drops the only Jewish homeland into a sentence with Riyadh, the trouble is not only the country he picks out. It is that he does not understand what that country is.

He did not fail a values test. He failed a definitions test.

But take his test at its word anyway. If he truly cannot support “any state that privileges one religion over another,” he has a long boycott ahead of him. Greece’s constitution names the Eastern Orthodox Church as the country’s prevailing religion and opens in the name of the Holy Trinity. The United Kingdom has an established church, a king who serves as its Supreme Governor, a law requiring that king to be a Protestant, and twenty-six bishops who sit by right in Parliament and help write the nation’s laws. These are liberal democracies and close allies, and Mamdani has never once said he cannot support them. His own standard, applied honestly, runs straight through London and Athens. He aimed it at Jerusalem alone.

Here is the part that should end the argument. Even by his loose test, Israel comes out cleaner than the states he spared. An Arab Muslim, Khaled Kabub, has sat on Israel’s Supreme Court since 2022 as the first permanent Muslim justice in the nation’s history. Arab citizens are a fifth of the population. They vote, send their own parties to the Knesset, and have sat in its governing coalitions. Run the test in good faith and Israel is the hardest state on his list to convict. Yet it is the only one he convicted.

Compare it to say, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, where the constitution names Islam the state religion, where the president must by law be a Muslim, where a 1974 amendment declared the Ahmadi minority non-Muslim and a 1984 ordinance made it a crime for an Ahmadi to call his house of worship a mosque or to pray as a Muslim, and where a blasphemy accusation can carry a death sentence. Like Saudi Arabia, it is a confessional state. These countries are organized around a creed, and they punish you for holding the wrong one.

But here is the mayor’s record, in his own actual footsteps. He marched in New York’s Pakistan Independence Day Parade, for the republic that jails members of a religious minority for praying. He would not walk for the one country in the neighborhood where a member of that minority sits on the high court.

A principle you enforce against a single country on earth is not a principle. It is a tell.

A real objection to the marriage of religion and state is a serious position, and a respectable one. Plenty of thoughtful people hold it, including plenty of Jews. But a person who actually holds that conviction holds it against every flag, including the ones he enjoys saluting. He does not march for the Islamic Republic and then lecture the Jewish state. Mamdani holds his conviction against one country, and equality with a single exception is not equality. Universalism that stops at one border is just particularism in a better suit.

So name the thing. The IHRA definition of antisemitism, used by the State Department and thirty-five states, lists among its examples the act of holding Israel to a standard demanded of no other democracy. That example describes, to the letter, what the mayor did on Sunday. And it is not my label. It is historically New York’s own. The city made IHRA the working standard of every agency in June 2025, and the governor had already called the definition a vital resource. Then Mamdani took office, and on his very first day he revoked it.

He did not fail the test. He repealed it. And he repealed it because it names what he does.

Criticizing the Israeli government is not antisemitism, and the definition says so in its own words. Anyone may fault a policy, a law, or a war. But a rule written for the Jewish state and for no other stops being criticism of policy. It becomes the double standard the definition names, the oldest hatred in a newer vocabulary.

Run it through the test we use for every other prejudice. If a mayor struck the city’s definition of anti-Black racism from the books, then the next week held Black New Yorkers to a standard he held no other community to, no one would call it a coincidence. They would call it what it is. The Jewish New Yorker is owed the same honesty.

Mamdani is not a columnist with opinions about the Middle East. He is the chief executive of this city. He runs the police department that investigates hate crimes, in a year when Jews are eleven percent of New Yorkers and more than half the reported victims. He runs the schools, signs the permits, awards the contracts, and sets the tone every agency beneath him follows. When a mayor erases the shield his own government built for a minority, then performs on camera the very conduct that shield was meant to catch, the message travels from City Hall to the street, the campus, and the schoolyard.

A double standard at the top is a permission slip below.

New Yorkers do not need a mayor who agrees with every Israeli policy. They do need one who can recognize antisemitism when it is dressed up as principle. On Sunday, Mamdani did not just fail that test. He explained why he got rid of it.