Zohran Mamdani is 34 years old. That is too young to be mayor of New York City, and that explains a lot of things.

Digression. Of course, he is not the youngest person in history to take on positions of major responsibility. Look at what Alexander the Great did before dying at 32, and look at what Jesus did before dying at 33. End of digression.

But being 34 could explain his intemperate call for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu if he comes to New York to address the United Nations.

I am pretty sure he was not surprised that he did not have the authority to arrest Netanyahu and ship him off to The Hague. But he said he would do it, setting off an unnecessary firestorm, and giving Trump the opportunity to ridicule him and to, once again, show the Democrats to be a party of radical, lunatic, antisemitic leftists.

It also once again threw the Jews into a central place in American politics, which is the last place they should want to be. But there we are.

Of course, if Mamdani is too young to be where he is, perhaps Netanyahu at 76 (like Trump at 80) is too old to be where he is. But that is another story for another day.

Israel has made a lot of mistakes in recent years. One, of course, was permitting a cascade of security failures that allowed the devastating Hamas atttacks in October 2023. There is no reason that attack occurred with such severity. Had Israel paid attention to its own sophisticated security apparatus, it probably would have been nipped in the bud. Of course, a true internal investigation into what went wrong has been stymied by Netanyahu and the Knesset which he controlled.

And Mamdani and many others, including many scholars and Jewish scholars, believe Israel’s response has been genocidal. This is, to me, unimportant, because “genocide” is a word which clearly has ambiguous definitions, and whether or not Israel was/is committing genocide depends on the definition you are using.

But, genocide or not, many, including me, condemn Netanyahu and his government for their response, just as we condemn Hamas for its attack, which can also be called genocidal. I do not know if Mamdani has called the Hamas attack genocidal, but he has more than once called it a “horrific war crime”.

Mamdani has also said that a two state solution does not seem workable. This is now a mainstream thought, one I agree with, and one that is hard to disagree with in 2026. Whose fault is that? Probably everyone’s.

In 2018, Israel’s basic laws were changed to formally denote Israel as a Jewish State. Mamdani thinks that this was a mistake (as do I), just as I (and I am sure Mamdani) believe that calling the United States a Christian country is wrong. (Mamdani, by the way, says that he also disagrees with countries, such as Saudi Arabia, which elevate Islam.) Israel is 20% Arab and those Arabs are and always have been Israeli citizens and should be treated fully as such.

One of the important  Palestinian positions is that those displaced from Israel in 1948 and their descendants should have the right to return to Israel. This is a pisition which Mamdani appears to accept (to what extent, I do not know), as do many American Democratic Socialists, and one I strongly disagree with, unless Israel succeeds in expanding its borders into Gaza and the West Bank (something I also disagree with), which it might.

The American Jews are in an awkward position, the Democratic Party is in an awkward position, both caused by the actions of Israel and the responses of part of the left wing of the Democratic Party. This is very unfortunate when the most important domestic issue is the defeat of the Republicans. And Mamdani, and those Democrats who agree with his positions on the Middle East, are simply making this more difficult. As, by the way, is AIPAC, also caught in the middle, which has inserted itself into Democratic party contests, again bringing unwanted attention to Jews in America and feeding antisemitism.