It is no small matter that the world’s “second capital of the Jews” after Tel Aviv, namely New York, has elected a governor who openly condemned the genocidal war Israel is waging in Gaza, voiced support for a two-state solution, and aligned himself with Palestinian rights! It is New York, the city at the heart of the cultural, financial, and economic world, that said yesterday Zohran Mamdani represents it, with all the slogans he has championed, among them his solidarity with the people of Gaza.

This is one of many signs that have begun to appear around the world in the aftermath of the massacre. Never before has Israel’s image faced this degree of Western sentiment, stunned by what Gaza has witnessed, atrocities described by more than one international body as genocidal.

Israel is still living in a state of denial. The echoes of this shock certainly reach it, yet it continues to turn its face away from that ugly scene. More astonishing still is that we are not speaking here of Israel’s authorities, nor merely of its government or army. The party averting its gaze from genocide is Israel as a model, as a social and political structure.

No One in Israel Will Heed the Message Coming from New York

The country’s political spectrum will practice denial. From the far religious and nationalist right to the center-right and the opposition, all are steeped in denial. Nationalist sentiments have blinded them, and vengeance has become both state policy and society’s sole compass.

In Israel there is a very small minority that has begun to sense what Benjamin Netanyahu has done to the image of a state crafted to speak to the West. But the voices of this tiny minority are lost amid the shouting of Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Israel’s current condition is strikingly similar to that of Serbia when the country’s nationalist and fascist elites seized the emotions of the Serbs, leading most of them to follow the “Butcher of the Balkans,” Slobodan Milošević. To this day, the Serbs practice a comparable denial, and the effects of international isolation still hem in the state despite changes in its political system and the arrival of new elites to power. The Serbs continue to live forms of isolation, and their (non-nationalist) elites sense an implicit unwelcomeness and a kind of estrangement within Europe’s value system. For the crimes of the Milošević era were part of a nationalist and social order that was never held to account, even after the regime fell and its symbols were tried.

The Israeli minority fearful for “their Israel” is almost limited to a handful of Knesset members, a circle of Tel Aviv elites, and the newspaper Haaretz. As for those exultant over the massacre, they are the majority, and they have erected a “national” wall to repel the moral onslaught that the world has begun to mount. They reduce the tens of thousands of dead children to October 7.

They have no answer other than October 7, and they labor to equate what Hamas committed with the Holocaust, heedless of the early Zionists’ efforts to affirm the Holocaust’s singularity. Nor does it appear that anyone has yet grasped the clear failure of these efforts. The national-religious bond has blinded everyone.

Mamdani’s election in New York, home to the world’s second-largest Jewish community after Israel, is a message that is hard to deny. Among the young man’s voters were Jews who spoke not against Israel per se, but against its ascendant model, one that New Yorkers, and a large segment of its Jewish community, find hard to stomach. Linking that model to genocide has made its way into broad swaths of Western public opinion, and New York is a principal center of that opinion, indeed it extends beyond America in representing it. Israel has long invested in the city’s standing to project an image to the Western world as part of it. And here it is today receiving the first slap from the very city that once helped cast its image as an “island of democracy” in an undemocratic East.

But once again, there seems to be no one on the Palestinian and Arab side to receive this opportunity. What we present to the world comes in only two forms: on the one hand, the Arabs of the Abraham Accords and Trumpism; on the other, the various strands of Iranian “resistance”—from Hezbollah to Hamas, and including the Houthis and the Popular Mobilization Forces. These two options both bolster Netanyahu’s position, and neither cares to invest in the clear turn in Western public opinion.

Perhaps we ought to look for a Palestinian Zohran Mamdani to take up the task, but that is precisely what Netanyahu will not allow.