Zohran Mamdani once said mayoral candidates should pledge to boycott Israel. Now that he’s running, he’s not so forthcoming.
Resurfaced 2020 video shows Mamdani urging progressives to embrace BDS, press local officials on boycotts
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on June 4. Photo by Yuki Iwamura/AP Photo/Bloomberg via Getty Images
By Jacob Kornbluh June 5, 2025
In 2020, Zohran Mamdani had clear expectations of the candidates in the 2021 New York City mayoral election: they should not only embrace the right to boycott Israel, they should join the boycott.
Now that he’s running for mayor, Mamdani is making the same evasions he called out as “bullshit” five years ago.
“Ask each one of them what they think about BDS,” he advised activists who were then getting ready for the 2021 mayoral race, referring to the movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel.
“And not what they think about the right to engage in it, because people will try and conflate the two, and it’s not the same,” he said. That was an evasion, he told the 2020 Zoom event hosted by the Adalah Justice Project, a U.S.-based Palestinian advocacy group, and such evasions were “bullshit.”
Asked Thursday about the unearthed video, which streamed then on Facebook and Instagram, his campaign told the Forward that Mamdani “has been crystal clear from day one of this campaign that his focus is squarely on lowering the cost of living for working and middle-class New Yorkers and delivering a safer city for everyone.”
Yet Mamdani 2020 version insisted that Palestine politics were local. He said BDS is why he joined the Democratic Socialists of America — to which he still belongs.
“There are ways in which to make what seems to be an international battle into a local one,” the newly elected state legislator said then. He admired DSA for holding local politicians to account. “For me, it’s so obvious and so clear that if you’re going to say that you stand for these things within the confines of this border, then why would you say that you don’t stand for them elsewhere, just because of where it’s located in the world?” he said.
In this 2020 convo, Mamdani says NYC mayoral candidates should be pressed about supporting BDS against Israel.
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) June 5, 2025
“There are ways in which to make what seems to be an international battle into a local one.”pic.twitter.com/jvzDWAPck4
Mamdani is running second, just behind former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, among nine candidates in the June 24 Democratic primary.
At Wednesday night’s first televised debate, he hyped the local angle to deflect a question about continuing the tradition of mayors visiting Israel in solidarity with the city’s growing Jewish community.
“My plans are to address New Yorkers across the five boroughs and focus on that,” Mamdani said, referring to lowering costs and expanding affordable housing.
When pressed again by the moderators on whether he would decline to ever visit Israel, Mamdani said he doesn’t need to travel to Israel to support the Jewish community.
“I’ll be meeting them wherever they are across the five boroughs,” he said, “whether that’s in their synagogues and temples or at their homes or the subway platform — because ultimately, we need to focus on delivering on their needs.”
Mamdani, 33, co-founded the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College, which he attended from 2010 to 2014.
Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS Movement, has stated that the goal of BDS is to apply economic pressure on Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and to abolish Israel as a Jewish state.
Jewish voters, historically a crucial voting bloc in the Democratic primary, have tended to lean more to the right on Israel.
The Jewish Community Relations Council has for more than two decades been taking council members and other local politicians on yearly educational missions in which they meet with top officials, Jewish and Arab community leaders and journalists, and tour historical and strategic sites.
The annual trips were a contentious issue in the 2021 city elections. The DSA’s city chapter then required candidates who sought their endorsement to pledge not to travel to Israel if elected. They later clarified that it referred specifically to the sponsored trips.
Candidates who shared views similar to Mamdani’s were soundly defeated in races where Jewish voters and pro-Israel spending played a decisive role. Mamdani is among the top three choices for Jewish voters in the crowded primary, behind Cuomo and Brad Lander, who is Jewish.
Four of the nine candidates – Andrew Cuomo, former Comptroller Scott Stringer, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and investor Whitney Tilson — said Wednesday that Israel would be their first international destination if elected mayor.
In an interview with the Forward last month, Mamdani demurred when asked if he would implement any form of Israel boycott as mayor. Pressed, he said he would end some Adams administration policies he regarded as illegal, but did not go into detail.
Does Mamdani recognize Israel and how?
At the debate, Mamdani was questioned about his refusal to recognize Israel specifically as a “Jewish state.” Mamdani has said the country has a right to exist “as a state with equal rights,” a remark that had already triggered backlash from his hard-line anti-Israel base.
In an interview with the local Fox affiliate Thursday morning, Mamdani said he’s “not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.” As in America, he added, “equality should be enshrined in every country in the world.”
What Mamdani said about BDS in 2020
During the hour-long conversation in 2020, Mamdani urged progressives to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a local political issue. “This fight for justice is one that has no borders,” he said. He called for “political pressure” on local officials.
He also criticized progressives who have “gotten off without any accountability about where they stand on these kinds of issues,” and encouraged activists to press them with tough questions and not accept what he called “a bullshit answer” about First Amendement rights.
