Mamdani accidentally offers insight into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

His erasure of New York City neighborhoods echoes his belief in the Palestinians’ supposed right to Israel.

By Kenneth Levin,, Gatestone Institute

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recently released map of ethnic enclaves in the city provides unintentional but instructive insight into the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

The map labels neighborhoods as “Little Palestine,” “Little Egypt,” and “Little Pakistan,” along with other ethnic identities.

But absent is any acknowledgment of, for example, the city’s prominent and historic Italian, Irish, Jewish, or Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Their history and prominence are simply erased.

The distinction given to recently arrived Muslim immigrant communities and the erasure of historic and important non-Muslim groups is virtually a carbon copy of the ludicrous claims by Palestinians and their supporters that the Palestinians should be acknowledged as the exclusive claimants of what is now Israel and that the Jews are recent foreign interlopers whose presence should be nullified and erased.

It is of a piece with Mamdani’s call for the liberation of Palestine “from the river to the sea”; that is, the extirpation of Israel and its Jews.

It is likewise of a piece with the rhetoric of the Muslim retreat attended by Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, on the French island of Corsica, over the 250th July 4 celebration. There the Virgin Mary was declared to be a “Palestinian woman.”

The reality is, of course, the opposite of the Palestinian false history, or “narrative.” Jewish history in the land goes back more than 3,000 years. Islam didn’t even exist for most of that time.

Mary was, of course, a Jewish woman. The Jewish presence in the land, even when diminished by forced exile imposed by various conquering empires, was unbroken throughout that entire history.

The Muslim presence only began in the late seventh century, when Arab forces seized the area from the Byzantine Christian empire that then controlled it.

The land was sparsely populated in modern times until the last century. From 1516 until World War I, it was essentially part of the Ottoman Empire.

In the 1830s, the ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, broke from his allegiance to the Ottomans, conquered the area that is now Israel, and encouraged the migration of Egyptians into the area to reinforce his hold on it.

By 1841 the Ottomans had pushed Muhammad Ali’s forces back.

They, likewise wanting to strengthen their hold on the area, subsequently encouraged the migration of Muslims fleeing Christian colonial inroads (for example, Muslims from the Caucasus fleeing Russian expansion; Muslims from the lands that are now Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, seeking to escape French imperial conquest; and Muslims from what is now Iran, migrating from upheaval there). The first half of the twentieth century also saw large-scale Muslim immigration into the area.

Again, the Jewish presence during this period was unbroken. Jews were, for example, a plurality in Jerusalem—that is, their numbers exceeded those of Muslims or Christians—in Ottoman counts early in the 1800s and a majority in Jerusalem from the mid-nineteenth century.

There has never been a Palestinian Arab state. The land was under the control of the British via a mandate ratified by the League of Nations after World War I.

When, in 1947, the United Nations voted to divide the mandate into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, the Jews agreed, and the Arabs rejected the proposal.

Palestinian leaders have continued to reject two-state solutions whenever they have been agreed upon by Israel, as in 2000, 2001, and 2008.

They continue to hold out for what Mamdani advocates, an Arab state “from the river to the sea,” with the Jewish state annihilated.

The only coherent use of “genocide” to characterize events in the area is the genocide advocated by the Arab side, where Hamas—the darling now of much of the American Left—calls in its charter for the annihilation of all the world’s Jews as a religious obligation, and the Palestinian Authority advocates the murder of Jews in its media, mosques, and schools and uses much of its annual budget to provide pensions to people for doing exactly that, murdering Jews.

If Mamdani were to publish a map of neighborhoods “from the river to the sea” and associated ethnicities, he would no doubt replicate the methodology he applied to the New York City map, a methodology reflecting the aspirations of Palestinian leaders: every neighborhood on the map would be a “little Palestine.”