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To be clear, Mamdani did not run as a firebrand of unrepentant anti-Zionism. He conceded, symbolically and rhetorically, to the anxieties of some the liberal Zionist electorate. He sought a middle ground—tempering his moral commitments with gestures of reassurance, striking a posture that neither retreated from his history of solidarity with Palestine nor fully embraced the uncompromising clarity that Palestine often demands. And that, too, is telling.

It is precisely this calibrated ambivalence—this oscillation between affirmation and reassurance—that invited criticism, even from within Mamdani’s own base, and for those who worked with him in building and disseminating the Palestine movement. His campaign’s equivocations around the question of Israel’s “right to exist,” and his hesitant invocation of a long-standing grounding in pro-Palestinian politics, sparked unease.

For some, it echoed the familiar choreography of moral retreat: a gesture of concession that risks metastasizing into posture, then into position, and eventually into principle. The fear, voiced not out of cynicism but historical memory, is that one concession invites another—and that, over time, the cumulative weight of these concessions will fold Mamdani into the very establishment his victory seemed to defy.

There is, in other words, a profound anxiety that the dialectic of incorporation is already in motion: that the system, unable to fully neutralize Palestine as a politics, will instead absorb it as discourse—sanitized, defanged, and made legible only through the grammar of “balance”, “two sidism”, and lack of empathy for Palestine.

Mamdani’s electoral success may mark the symbolic end of Palestine as a third-rail issue, but it also raises the unsettling possibility that this normalization comes at the price of its radical edge. That to enter the political bloodstream is also to risk being filtered by it, and conceding too much ground for it, too.

His win, then, is not solely an endorsement of Palestine as a cause, but a testament to Palestine’s altered status as a question. No longer a line that cannot be crossed, it has become a contested terrain—one in which candidates can engage, hedge, affirm, or deflect without automatic disqualification. That shift is monumental. It speaks to the cumulative force of decades of organizing, to the moral aftermath of Gaza’s unendurable visibility, and to the weariness of younger voters and many progressives with the cold, procedural evasions of their predecessors.

In that sense, Mamdani’s success is not only about what he said, but about what no longer needs to be unsaid. The enforced silences are cracking—not with revolutionary rupture, but with the slow, grinding attrition of imperial consensus. What once had to be hidden can now be tentatively named, even if symbolic concessions are also made. What once marked the outer edge of the acceptable is now folded—awkwardly, cautiously, but definitively—into the domain of the political.