Mamdani's Charisma Had an Expiration Date

Tisch stays because Mamdani wants her to stay. Everything else follows from that.

Among the people is one whose talk of this worldly life pleases you. He calls God to witness what is in his heart, yet he is the most stubborn of adversaries. When he turns away, he hurries through the land to spread corruption in it and to destroy the crops and the livestock. God does not love corruption.

Al-Baqarah, 2:204-205

Last Thursday, just before four in the afternoon, Oscar Belgal backed his car into a spot near Marble Hill Avenue and West 225th Street. He is 28 and Dominican. A five-year-old boy was in the back seat. Two federal agents in masks and construction vests came up to the car. One had his gun out. Belgal pulled forward. At least one agent fired seven times. A round went into his neck below the left ear.

He survived and is in stable condition at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen. The boy was not hurt. Homeland Security says Belgal rammed the agents’ vehicles. Tisch gave reporters a different version. She said he was parking when a plainclothes agent walked up with his weapon drawn. She said the NYPD had no part in the operation and no city officers were there when the shots were fired. Officers arrived to find Belgal handcuffed on the ground and drove him to the hospital themselves.

Mamdani came to the scene that night and said nothing justified what had happened. He posted that ICE should get out of the city’s neighborhoods, hospitals and streets. The next day he said he had asked Trump to release Belgal and had been turned down.

Tisch stood beside him at the briefing. Her department’s Strategic Response Group cleared Canal Street for federal agents last November and arrested the protesters who had blocked them. In May, NYPD officers outside a Bushwick hospital held back a crowd while ICE drove away with an injured undocumented man. Mamdani said then that the police were not directly working with ICE and that he would review the city’s protocols. The review has produced nothing public. The SRG still exists. Tisch is still commissioner.

Mamdani can fire Tisch any morning he chooses. The City Council has no say. Albany has no say. No court can stop it. Of all the promises his supporters want kept, this one costs him nothing but nerve.

The demand has been on his desk since before he took office. Palestine solidarity groups and DSA members circulated a petition in December. The DSA caucuses Emerge and Marxist Unity Group called for her removal in November and again in June. On Wednesday a crowd outside City Hall, some of whom had canvassed for him, chanted that they charged him with genocide. Removing Tisch was at the top of their list.

The common explanation is fear. Fire her and the Post, the PBA and the donors come after him. The next shooting or attack gets pinned on him. Keeping Tisch is supposed to protect a socialist mayor from the charge that he let crime run.

Mamdani’s own explanation is that she purged Adams’s corrupt circle from the top of the department. She did. It was useful work and it is finished. What she has done since is run the NYPD the way she ran it under Adams.

Her record is not hidden. She is an heir to the Loews fortune. Her father, James Tisch, chaired the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and was president of UJA-Federation of New York. She calls herself a proud Zionist. Her brother has called Mamdani an enemy of Jews. She opposes bail reform and Raise the Age and defends the gang database. Last year she overrode the Civilian Complaint Review Board and an administrative judge to keep Lt. Jonathan Rivera on the force after he shot and killed Allan Feliz, an unarmed man pulled over for a seatbelt. In March she told the City Council the talks about the SRG were “not to disband” it.

Mamdani knew all of this when he asked her to stay. A man who campaigned against the billionaire class gave a billionaire heiress command of 35,000 armed officers. He has defended the choice through every crisis since. A choice repeated that often stops being a concession. It becomes his position.

His defenders say he is delivering so lets look at the record.

The rent freeze happened. In February he named six of the nine members of the Rent Guidelines Board. On June 25 the board voted 7 to 1 to freeze rents on about one million stabilized apartments, including the first freeze ever on two-year leases. It took effect on October 1. Working tenants will feel it and that matters.

It is also a one-year pause won through a board he stacked. Tenants in market-rate apartments get nothing from it. Landlords have sued, and a judge has ordered the mayor and board members to hand over their phones. The freeze holds for now. The landlords still own the buildings.

Free buses are off the table this year after Albany refused to pay for them. City-owned grocery stores will not open before 2027. Free childcare exists as a state pilot for two-year-olds with roughly 2,000 seats at launch, in a city of more than eight million, and nobody can say how later years get funded. Hochul gave him that pilot and refused to raise taxes on the wealthy. His platform depended on that tax. Without it the program is a press release with a waiting list. He has not picked a public fight with her over it.

The Department of Community Safety was meant to take mental health calls away from armed police. Nine months in it is an office in City Hall and a deputy mayor.

On policing he has moved furthest from what he promised. He said he would hold NYPD headcount flat. His executive budget added 580 uniformed positions to a department budgeted at about $6.59 billion. NYC-DSA voted unanimously to condemn it, and the hires were dropped from the final deal on June 29. He backed down. He also proposed it in the first place.

The rest has not changed. The department’s overtime budget was $929 million this year and projected spending is above $1 billion. The NYCLU found criminal summonses up 29 percent in the first quarter over the same months under Adams, with stops running at Adams-era levels. The city is still defending the gang database in court. The Legal Aid Society counted 493 misconduct claims settled between January and July at a cost of more than $53 million. Working people in this city are paying for their own abuse.

In late January the family of Jabez Chakraborty, a young man in a mental health crisis in Queens, called 911 for an ambulance. Two officers came instead and shot him within a minute of arriving. Mamdani’s first statement praised the officers. In his first week in office police killed two people in separate incidents, and Tisch said the officers acted as they should. Mamdani promised to work with her on the investigations.

The pattern holds across nine months. When a promise can be kept by a board he appointed, he keeps it. When it means fighting the governor over money or his own police department over power, he gives a speech.

Start where the story starts. In 1917 Balfour, the British foreign secretary, promised a land that was not Britain’s to give to a movement whose people mostly did not live on it. The Palestinians who did live there were not asked. Britain then ruled the country for three decades and crushed the Arab revolt of the late 1930s while Zionist settlement grew under its protection. In 1948 some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and villages, and their descendants are still refugees. In 1967 Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and it has held them ever since. Gaza has been under blockade since 2007. Between 2008 and mid-September 2023, the UN counted 6,407 Palestinians killed in the occupation and conflict against 308 Israelis. That is roughly 20 Palestinians for every Israeli. About 1,400 died in the 2008-09 assault on Gaza. More than 2,300 died in 2014. Israeli airstrikes alone killed 3,212 Palestinians over those fifteen years. This was the ordinary condition of Palestinian life. It rarely made the news in New York, and no mayor issued statements about it. October 7 is one date in more than a century of dispossession and killing. It is not where the story begins.

Mamdani says genocide. His October 7 statement this week said Israel has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, among them more than 21,000 children, and more than 1,400 since the so-called ceasefire. On his first day he revoked the Adams orders that bound the city to the IHRA definition of antisemitism and barred city boycotts of Israel. The ADL counted more than 80 people in his transition with ties to pro-Palestinian groups. He has called Netanyahu a war criminal. Brad Lander says he is a strong supporter of Palestinian freedom.

His supporters booed him anyway, and they had reasons. His statement led with the Hamas attack and mourned the Israeli dead before it said a word about Gaza. Only then did it say the suffering did not begin or end that day. The clock still starts in 2023. There is no Nakba in it, no 1967, no blockade, none of the 6,407 Palestinians killed in the fifteen years before. Occupier and occupied are mourned in the same breath, as if the two losses were the same kind of event.

The statement also takes Israel’s account of October 7 as settled. The record is messier. On the night of October 6, Shin Bet and military intelligence watched dozens of Israeli SIM cards switch on inside Gaza. Senior officials, among them the Shin Bet chief and the head of Southern Command, held consultations through the night with the chief of staff’s knowledge. They decided not to raise the alert, partly so as not to expose their intelligence sources, and agreed to reassess in the morning. More than a year earlier, Israeli officials had obtained Hamas’s 40-page battle plan, code-named Jericho Wall, and written it off as unrealistic, the New York Times reported. The army approved the Nova festival’s final day after one of its own officers raised concerns.

Once the fighting started, the army turned its guns on its own people. Commanders invoked the Hannibal directive, the doctrine that permits killing a captive rather than letting him be taken. Haaretz, working from military documents and soldiers’ testimony, found it was ordered in at least three places under orders that drew no line between captured soldiers and captured civilians. Yedioth Ahronoth reported that combat units were in effect told to stop every vehicle heading back to Gaza at any cost, even where hostages might be inside. In the week that followed, elite troops examined about 70 vehicles that never made it to Gaza because a helicopter gunship, a drone or a tank had hit them. In some of them everyone inside was dead. A police source told Haaretz that an Apache firing on gunmen at the Nova site apparently also hit festivalgoers. The police later distanced themselves, saying their inquiry covered only police conduct. At Be’eri, a tank fired two shells into a house holding 14 hostages. Thirteen died.

Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone pieced this together from survivor and pilot testimony and published it on October 27, 2023. He was denounced as a propagandist. The Israeli press spent the next nine months confirming the substance. Haaretz said there was no way to know how many Israelis their own army killed that day. Three years on, Netanyahu still refuses a state commission of inquiry, though more than 70 percent of Israelis want one. None of this appears in the mayor’s statement. He accepted the state’s version of the day and built his rebuttal on top of it.

Colonial powers have always found this posture useful. Grieve for everyone and you never have to name who did what to whom. Since October 2023 more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed. Gaza’s Health Ministry counted 1,005 dead after the ceasefire as of June, and Mamdani’s own figure this week was over 1,400. Israeli strikes continue most weeks. A man this careful with words knows exactly what his framing does.

The rest of the day followed the same logic. He released the statement. He went to the October 7 vigil and sat facing forward while people who had voted for him jeered. Afterward he went to a Palestinian restaurant on the Upper West Side for a private dinner with Palestinian New Yorkers. Each audience got an appearance. None of them got a decision.

The Netanyahu business went the same way. As a candidate he promised to arrest Netanyahu if he came to New York. In July he said city lawyers were looking into it. Then he conceded the city had no authority and passed the matter to a federal government that had already refused. In September he told reporters, “To New Yorkers I have never encouraged them to protest,” and said he would likely be elsewhere in the city during the visit. He then turned to the traffic and security plans he would announce with Tisch.

So the mayor who calls Netanyahu a war criminal had his Zionist police commissioner run security for Netanyahu’s trip. Netanyahu got an escort. The protesters got the SRG. Mamdani stayed away.

Even the focus on Netanyahu does work for the other side. It shrinks a state’s policy to one man’s crimes. In December 2023, during the heaviest bombing, an Israel Democracy Institute poll found 66 percent of Israelis opposed American requests to scale back bombing in populated areas. Israelis who oppose the war exist and deserve respect. They are a minority. The war has been a project of the Israeli state with broad public backing, built on decades of occupation. Blaming Netanyahu alone spares the state, the public that backed the war, and the American officials who keep the weapons coming.

Look at whom Mamdani spends his political capital protecting. Late last year Chi Ossé, a DSA council member from Brooklyn, moved to challenge Jeffries in his primary. Jeffries leads the House Democrats and has long been a target of the left for his support of Israel. Mamdani worked to stop the challenge. He went to the DSA endorsement forum himself, and reporting at the time said he worried a fight with Jeffries would cost him Hochul’s cooperation in Albany. DSA declined to endorse Ossé and the challenge died. The socialist mayor’s first major intervention in his own movement was to protect the party leadership from it.

Then there is Lander. Mamdani cross-endorsed him in the mayoral primary and endorsed him for Congress. In June Lander beat Goldman in NY-10 with about two-thirds of the vote. He now calls Gaza a genocide and refuses AIPAC money. Look at what he did when he held power. As comptroller he was custodian of the city’s five pension funds. Before he took office the funds held less than $250,000 in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons maker. Under him that rose past $1.5 million, the Daily News found. Early last year, asked how he would pressure Israel to end the war, he told a progressive audience the funds were “proudly invested” in Israeli companies, Elbit among them, and that of course they would not divest. He let about $39 million in Israel bonds run off and called it fiduciary housekeeping, not politics. He left more than $315 million in Israel-based assets in place. In 2022 he moved to pull city pension money out of Russian securities within weeks of the invasion of Ukraine. Rank-and-file members of DC 37 petitioned him to treat Israel the same way. He refused.

This is the man who tells reporters Mamdani is a strong supporter of Palestinian freedom. One says genocide and keeps Tisch. The other says genocide and kept Elbit. Both are sold to New York as the left wing of the Democratic Party.

No one can know what is in another person’s heart. That judgment belongs to God. What a politician does in office anyone can judge.

On September 21, on his way to the UN, Trump spent an hour with Mamdani at Gracie Mansion. He told reporters it felt like old home week. They talked about a housing project in Queens. It was their third friendly meeting since the election, after the Oval Office in November and the White House in February. Seventeen days later, agents working for Trump shot a man in Marble Hill with a child in his car. Mamdani’s response was to ask Trump to let the man go.

A campaign of tenants, immigrants, students and workers frightened the people who own this city. Real estate money was spent heavily to stop him. Wall Street predicted an exodus. More than a million people voted for him anyway. Nine months later that movement’s energy is being spent on press conferences and photo ops at bus depots while the structures it targeted stay in place.

Whatever his intentions, the results are the same. The landlords keep their buildings and sue over a one-year pause. The Tisch family’s daughter runs the police. The SRG keeps its funding. ICE keeps operating in the city. His voters are told change takes time.

This is why the Obama and Clinton wing will defend him when the left turns on him. He keeps young voters, immigrants and the angry inside the Democratic Party and off the streets. The party gets a radical face without changing anything underneath it. A growing number of New Yorkers see the two parties as a single arrangement for managing the rest of us on behalf of the rich. Republicans send masked agents into the Bronx. Democrats issue statements about it. The Tisch family does well either way.

His defenders say he has to be pragmatic. He governs a divided city of eight million. He has to survive Trump, Hochul, the tabloids, the PBA and a national party that would welcome his failure.

His voters did not ask him to take an ethnic side. They asked him to call a genocide a genocide without balancing it against the grief of the people carrying it out. They asked him to stop letting his police department work for ICE. That was the platform he ran on.

Pragmatism has to be in service of something. The right calls him a communist and will keep doing so whatever he does. He has a million votes and his first year, when a mayor has the most room. If he will not use it now, there is no reason to think he will in year two, when the budget gap is larger, or in year three, when he is raising money for reelection, or in a second term, when he no longer needs the people who put him there.

Firing Tisch would cost him a bad week of coverage. Keeping her tells everyone who believed his campaign that it was marketing.

His base has started keeping records. Wednesday’s chant came from people who organized for him. The DSA vote against him in June was unanimous. The Legal Aid Society and the NYCLU are publishing reports on what his police department does.

New Yorkers watched the arrest pledge turn into a traffic plan. They watched the promise to disband the SRG turn into a working group. They watched the flat-headcount promise become 580 new officers until they made enough noise to stop it. They watched him stand next to Tisch while a man from Marble Hill lay in a hospital bed with a federal bullet wound in his neck.

The Quran describes a man whose speech pleases you while he works corruption in the land. Mamdani speaks well. He has kept the machinery of this city exactly as he found it. That is what a charlatan is.

Fire Tisch. Disband the SRG this month. Bar the NYPD by executive order from doing crowd control for ICE. Stop hosting the president whose agents are shooting New Yorkers, divest from Israel. But the thing is he has also stopped criticizing the President which was one of his critique of Eric Adams. Since he won’t be doing any of the above his supporters, me included, have a right to protest his bullshit.