In the first week of January, Israeli authorities issued a tender to construct over 3,400 new illegal settlements in the “E1 corridor” of the West Bank, a parcel of land that connects the ring of settlements surrounding occupied East Jerusalem with the major settlement city of Ma’ale Adumim. Capitalizing on the inaction of the international community, which failed to apply meaningful pressure on Israel to halt its genocidal war in Gaza, the Israeli state has fast-tracked its efforts to carve up the West Bank through land grabs, home demolitions, and the mass expulsion of Palestinians. The purpose of the E1 project has always been clear; as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said last August, it is intended to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state.”

Thousands of miles away, protesters gathered in the New York neighborhood of Kew Gardens, Queens, to demonstrate against an event advertising land sales in the occupied Palestinian territories. The event was hosted at the Young Israel synagogue of Kew Gardens Hills, in keeping with a broader pattern of settler recruitment fairs and real estate events hosted at synagogues and Jewish communal institutions across New York and New Jersey. The promotional materials of Tivuch Shelly, the Israeli real estate agency participating in the event, highlighted listings in Ma’ale Adumim—the city at the heart of the E1 project.

A viral video from the demonstration, which depicted protesters chanting in support of the Palestinian political faction Hamas, quickly commanded the headlines. Newly elected New York mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the chants, stating that they “have no place in our city.” Governor Kathy Hochul, Attorney General Letitia James, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also registered their outrage at the protesters’ language. None saw fit to address the rhetoric used by pro-Israel counterprotesters, who chanted “death to Palestine,” showered death and rape threats on their opponents, and brandished flags of the extremist right-wing Kach movement.

It’s not surprising that the pro-Palestinian activists found themselves placed under greater scrutiny than their pro-Israel counterparts. Almost every slogan that Palestinian rights groups use—including “globalize the intifada,” “from the river to the sea,” and even “free Palestine”—gets fed into the same media outrage cycle, providing a useful distraction from engaging with the concrete, rigorously articulated demands of the movement: cutting funding to Israel, imposing an arms embargo, and stopping the sale of unlawfully appropriated Palestinian land. As the past two years have demonstrated, the moderation of protest rhetoric has little bearing on establishment politicians’ bipartisan desire to quash the Palestine movement by whatever means necessary.

Now New York state and city officials are moving to criminalize protests near religious institutions. On January 13, Hochul proposed legislation that would ban protests within 25 feet of houses of worship, citing the Kew Gardens demonstration as justification. The New York City Council introduced a similar bill on Friday that would create “safety zones” outside of religious sites and schools.

Everyone should be free to practice their faith in safety, and such proposals may seem like common sense to some. But the protesters who gathered outside of Young Israel—many of whom were Jewish—were not motivated by the intention to prevent religious worship. They instead took to the streets to challenge the illegal, colonial theft of Palestinian land happening in their own backyards.

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If passed, Hochul’s ban would enable pro-Israel agencies to recruit Americans into Israel’s settlement enterprise or sell properties on confiscated Palestinian land, without fear of disruption from people of conscience. No wonder, then, that civil rights groups condemned the move, stating that land sales, regardless of their location, constitute a “central component of the dispossession of Palestinians.”

By framing criticism of Israel as indistinguishable from racially motivated bias and antisemitism, supporters of Zionism like Hochul seek to weaponize civil rights law to suppress political dissent. And by conflating support for war crimes with the exercise of faith—despite growing divides among Jewish Americans over Israel—Zionist groups are seeking to further institutionalize the “Palestine exception” to local, state, and federal restrictions on Americans’ ability to participate in colonial violence abroad.

While incidents such as the Kew Gardens protest are used to position Palestine activists as fringe extremists, opposition to US funding and military aid to Israel has become mainstream. Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza have alienated large swaths of the American public, spurring campaigns against local arms manufacturers, settlement-supporting nonprofits, and the government officials responsible for propping up US logistical, financial, and military support for Israel.

The consequences of enabling Israel’s atrocities have become clear in the past two years. Emboldened by the genocidal rhetoric of government ministers like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has skyrocketed. Since October 7, 2023, over 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed in Israeli attacks, with an additional 20,000 arrested. Settler groups, often in collusion with military forces, terrorize Palestinian communities with assaults, arson, destruction of livestock and olive groves, and summary executions. The price of complicity with Israel’s apartheid regime is the “systematic asphyxiation” of the West Bank.

In the wake of mass displacement and land seizures, Israel-affiliated nonprofits and real estate agencies in New York swoop in to auction off spots in settlements to the highest bidders at events such as the one that took place in Kew Gardens. This international, state-backed project of colonization warrants much greater scrutiny, media attention, and legal action. But the Democratic establishment in New York has largely failed to reflect the massive shift in the attitude of its base towards Israel. In doing so, they have ceded ground to right-wing forces seeking to roll back fundamental protections for political organizing and dissent against US foreign and domestic policies.

Mamdani has walked a more delicate path than Hochul. In the aftermath of an earlier protest outside of the Park East Synagogue last November, a spokesperson for the then-mayor-elect stated that “every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.” These two positions are both uncontroversial on their face. But they do not account for instances where a house of worship insists on promoting illegal activities for the benefit of what Mamdani himself has called a genocidal apartheid state. Whose rights should prevail in that instance? Mamdani hasn’t said.

Mamdani’s willingness to buck the shibboleths of the Democratic establishment, challenge corporate power, and uphold basic principles of international solidarity bolstered his appeal among New Yorkers of all stripes. His stunning electoral victory proved that expressing support for Palestinians and condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza no longer constitutes political kryptonite.

As a member of the New York State Assembly, Mamdani previously sponsored the “Not On Our Dime” bill, which aimed to revoke the charitable status of organizations that sponsored violence against Palestinians. At the time, Mamdani pointed out that the New York attorney general had the power to investigate New York–based organizations for enabling settlements, but “there [was] no application of existing law” because of the politically charged nature of challenging Israeli impunity. As mayor, Mamdani has the opportunity to leverage his relationship with Albany, and the powers vested in his position, to ensure that organizations profiting from dispossession of Palestinians no longer elude accountability. In his first week in office, the new mayor took the promising step of revoking a series of executive orders signed by former Mayor Eric Adams that sought to prohibit political boycotts in support of Palestinian rights and redefine the legal definition of antisemitism to include criticism of Israel.

Now, his administration faces pressure from political forces seeking to undermine a bottom-up movement for economic justice by manufacturing endless cycles of media outrage. It is the duty of the broad, progressive coalition that swept him into power to provide a countervailing force.

Mamdani’s election marked the beginning, not the end, of a long struggle to hold him accountable to his stated aims and prevent a rightward drift in strategy. The mayor must reject cynical efforts to clamp down on political dissent, summon his well-established public communication skills, and replace fearmongering with principled action against violations of international law.

We collectively bear the responsibility to provide a much-needed sense of perspective, prioritizing the real effects that New York policies have on everyday working people—and on the Palestinians struggling under the boot heel of Israeli domination half a world away.