City Hall Notes That Mayor “Has Made His Views Clear” on Israeli Government, Also on Parades, Also Generally
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
NEW YORK, NY — Mayor Zohran Mamdani confirmed this week that he will not march in the Israel Day Parade on Sunday, breaking what has been a longstanding mayoral tradition and describing his decision by noting that he has made his views on the Israeli government “abundantly clear,” which is accurate — Mamdani has been abundantly clear about many things, which is one of the qualities that distinguishes him from previous mayors and one of the qualities that makes his mayoralty continuously eventful.
The Tradition and the Break
Every New York City mayor since the parade’s expansion into a major civic event has marched in it. The parade, which celebrates Israel’s independence and draws substantial participation from the city’s large Jewish community, has been a standard entry on the mayoral calendar — the kind of appearance that mayors make as a gesture of inclusivity toward a significant part of the city’s population regardless of the mayor’s personal foreign policy positions, because mayors are technically in charge of garbage collection and zoning rather than Middle East diplomacy.
Mayor Mamdani’s position is that his views on the Israeli government are clear enough that marching in the parade would communicate something he does not intend to communicate. This is a coherent position. It is also a position that every previous mayor managed to navigate by treating the parade as a statement about New York’s Jewish community rather than a statement about Israeli government policy, which is a distinction that Mamdani has decided not to draw in this instance.
The city’s Jewish community, which is itself not monolithic in its views on either Israel or Mayor Mamdani, has responded with the range of reactions that diverse communities produce when a mayor takes a publicly divisive position: some furious, some supportive, some focused on the specific question of whether parade attendance constitutes political endorsement, and some frustrated by the annual transformation of a community celebration into a vehicle for national foreign policy debates.
The NYC Mayor’s Foreign Policy Portfolio
New York City mayors do not set foreign policy. They are responsible for a municipal government that manages approximately 300,000 employees, a $110 billion annual budget, the education of 1.1 million public school children, and the basic functioning of a city of 8.3 million people. The foreign policy implications of their parade attendance are, in the constitutional sense, zero.
And yet New York City mayors routinely take positions on national and international matters because New York is New York: its politics are national politics in compressed form, its mayor speaks to a global audience regardless of the topic, and the city’s population includes constituencies whose identities are bound up in international situations in ways that make local governance and global politics permanently entangled.
Mamdani’s decision reflects his genuine convictions, which have been consistent throughout his political career. Whether those convictions are compatible with the full range of constituency management that the mayoralty requires is a question his term will answer over time. The parade decision is one data point. The Knicks are another. The sinkhole at LaGuardia is perhaps the most relevant data point of the week, since it involves something mayors can actually fix.
What New York Thinks
New York City’s opinion on Mamdani’s parade decision is, characteristically, distributed across every possible position with equal volume. The New York Post has opinions. The Village Voice demographic has different opinions. The outer boroughs have opinions that don’t always appear in the publications that cover the outer boroughs. This is the condition of governing New York: every decision is simultaneously too much and not enough for somebody, and the mayor who tries to please everyone discovers what every previous mayor has discovered, which is that this is a city of 8.3 million people with 8.3 million opinions and a talent for expressing them.
The Office of the Mayor has not issued a follow-up statement, which is correct. Mamdani said his piece. The parade will happen. The city will continue. This is how New York works: loudly, divisively, and continuously.
NYC political satire, Mamdani coverage, and New York civic life: Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
More satire: McSweeney’s and Betoota Advocate.
The Politics of Civic Ceremony and What It Requires
The argument for mayoral participation in ethnic and religious community celebrations, regardless of a mayor’s personal views on the politics associated with those communities, rests on a distinction between the community and its political representatives elsewhere: the Jewish New Yorkers who march in the Israel Day Parade are not, as individuals, Israeli government policy, and the parade itself is a celebration of Jewish identity and community in New York rather than a referendum on Israeli politics. Previous mayors have made that distinction and marched. Mamdani has decided not to make that distinction in this case, or more precisely, to decide that the distinction is insufficient given the clarity of his stated views. Whether this is principled consistency or a failure of the pastoral dimension of the mayoralty is a debate that will not be resolved by any single article, and the city will continue having it across the next several years of this administration. The parade will be attended by hundreds of thousands of people regardless. The mayor’s absence will be noted, discussed, and used as evidence for whatever position the discussant already held. This is New York. The discussion is the civic fabric.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/