Last week, speaking of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s grandstanding speech about Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip to America (he urged federal authorities to arrest him), Tom Friedman wrote this: 

“What if Mamdani actually wanted to be a bridge builder between Israelis and Palestinians, a role for which he has the unique capacity and talent? If he did, he would declare his intention that on the day Bibi arrives in New York City for the U.N. General Assembly, he would convene a seminar at his office and invite Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Jewish experts to discuss the only just and stable solution: how to forge two separate states for two peoples living in that area between the river and the sea.”

Friedman often says kind of silly things in badly written columns, but this seems especially ill-informed. 

“What if Mamdani actually wanted to be a bridge builder between Israelis and Palestinians[?]”

And what if amoebas could play the piano? as my law school professor Charles Black once said. 

The “actually” in Friedman’s sentence is kind of a weird flourish, because it implies that Friedman believes Mamdani claimed to want something that he has hypocritically failed to pursue, which is not the case at all. 

Indeed, Mamdani is no hypocrite, he has never claimed to “actually” want to build bridges between Israelis and anyone else. 

What if Hitler had “actually” wanted to create a multi-ethnic society?; imagine what, with his charisma, he could have accomplished: he would implement an official policy against antisemitism and create a nationwide human rights commission, ensuring that all nationalities were fully protected. What if Fidel Castro had “actually” wanted to create and popularize new and experimental forms of musical comedy throughout remote areas of Asia? If he did, instead of bringing Communism to Cuba, he would have devoted his life to a cappella composition and started a tiny musical troupe to tour Outer Mongolia, mixing the harmonies of Hayne van Ghizeghem with the vocalizations of Zhou Xuan. What might that have been like? I mean, what if Donald Trump “actually” wanted to promote an egalitarian society in which there are no rich people and no poor people? If he did, he would give all his money to charity and live a spartan existence in a little hut, while urging his fellow billionaires to join him. 

That would all be nice, I guess, but not worth discussing at length in a New York Times column.

Just as Hitler didn’t want to create a Germany friendly to Jewish people, just as Donald Trump doesn’t want to eliminate the disparities between rich and poor, just as Fidel Castro didn’t care much for a cappella composition, and just as amoebas don’t play the piano, Mayor Mamdani doesn’t “actually” want or even “actually” claim to want to be a bridge builder between Israelis and Palestinians. 

He doesn’t even believe that there is such a thing as an “Israeli” entitled to a separate nation-state. He does not believe that Israel is even a state. 

He is part of a political movement, which he has never disavowed, that believes an invading European army is occupying Palestine and should be violently repelled. His party, the Democratic Socialists, favors violent attacks against Israel. He full-throatedly endorsed a primary candidate who celebrated the October 7 massacre. His own wife celebrated the October 7 massacre. It took Mamdani two years to criticize the October 7 massacre, and then only under significant political pressure. 

His central and lifelong political goal, more important than affordability, rent control, free pre-K or state-run grocery stores, is to kill the two-state dream. (This is something that Palestinians in the territories don’t want as much as Mamdani does, incidentally, but their preference isn’t really Hizzoner’s concern.) 

So he would never call for “two separate states” on what he views as occupied land any more than Lindsey Graham would have called for the annexation of half of Ukraine by Russia in order to be a bridge builder between Russians and Ukrainians. 

I don’t agree with Mamdani, I wish he would become an advocate for peace instead of endless war, but we might as well wish for amoebas to play the piano. 

What if Mamdani wanted to pursue something that he believes is a complete moral abomination? Well, he wouldn’t. This should have been the shortest column ever, and then quickly deleted. 

^^^

Addendum Number One: Those of us who oppose Mayor Mamdani have a hard time being intellectually honest about him, so let’s be clear: I hate his obsession with Israel and what I believe is an insensitivity to Jews, but he is otherwise a good and effective mayor who gets the streets cleared during a blizzard, learns from his mistakes and carries through on his promises. Criticisms of him must recognize his effectiveness, which make him especially dangerous. 

Addendum Number Two: Professor Black made his “amoeba” remark in class in response to a student’s proffered hypothetical. Unfortunately, no one wrote it down and put it on the internet, till now. I wasn’t the student. His response was unfair, but funny. In researching this column, to see if the “amoebas” quote was an original attribution or if Professor Black got it from somewhere, I Googled “What if amoebas played the piano?” Well, Google has switched over to a kind of tone-deaf AI, which, rather than telling me that the quote could not be found anywhere, instead told me this: “If a single-celled amoeba could play the piano, it would lack fingers, bones, and a brain, meaning it would have to ooze across the keys to press them, creating slow, wet, amorphous micro-tones driven by cytoplasm shifting inside a translucent membrane.” Something that I guess most of us already know, but thanks AI, I guess. 

This column was written by Steven S. Drachman, a novelist, &c.