Mamdanis Israel dodge is nothing but bad faith and hypocrisy

It’s a shame, really: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is such a strong supporter of pluralism that he has to single out the state of Israel for unique opprobrium.Asked by Jonathan Karl of ABC News whether he supports Israel’s status as a Jewish state, Mamdani said he doesn’t — he’d only support Israel “as a state with equal rights.”“I believe that any state that privileges one religion over another is one that I can’t tell you I support,” he continued, “whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.”Mamdani makes it sound as though Israel is a theocracy, and so he has to withhold his support until such time as it meets his exacting standards for state neutrality in religious matters and freedom of conscience.That’s true, sadly, of Saudi Arabia. When is the last time, though, that you heard Mamdani or his movement, the Democratic Socialists of America, inveighing with great moral passion against Saudi Arabia? This Mamdani line of argument is built on a falsehood about Israel and is transparently an exercise in bad faith and double standards. Israel doesn’t have an official religion — repeat, it has no state religion. Instead, it is the homeland for Jews.Its Basic Law says that Israel is “the nation-state of the Jewish people, in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.”In other words, Israel is for the Jews in much the same way, say, that Poland is for the Poles or Japan for the Japanese. That these countries have distinct national identities defined by the peoples that live in them doesn’t mean they aren’t free societies. The Israeli Declaration of Independence says the Jewish state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.”And, indeed, there is freedom of religion in Israel.Christian, Musli...