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Zohran Mamdani’s Tisha B’Av contradiction
A fast day commemorating Jewish exile is an awkward thing to celebrate if you cannot admit where Jews were exiled from
“Wishing a peaceful Tisha B’Av to Jewish New Yorkers across the five boroughs. From sundown tonight until tomorrow, mourners will pause and reflect on the history and resiliency of the Jewish people. May all observing have a safe and meaningful fast.”
Zohran Mamdani’s Tisha B’Av message may be the most revealing political tweet of the year. Not because of what it says, but because of everything it accidentally admits.
Here is a politician who has defended the slogan “From the river to the sea”, dismissed Jewish concerns about its meaning, repeatedly amplified Hamas narratives following the atrocities of 7 October, uniquely focussed on the ills and evils of the only Jewish state and chosen to associate with figures accused of antisemitic rhetoric.
Yet this week he wished Jewish New Yorkers a meaningful Tisha B’Av. He spoke of “the history and resiliency of the Jewish people.” There is just one problem. Tisha B’Av destroys almost every historical claim upon which his worldview depends.
Why? Because it forces us to confront a question that a broken moral operating system cannot answer:
If Jews are merely colonial occupiers in the land of Israel, what exactly have they been mourning every Tisha B’Av for nearly two thousand years?
The answer begins in Jerusalem.
This isn’t simply another Jewish day of mourning. It commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. The loss of Jewish sovereignty, the beginning of exile.
If Jews are merely colonial occupiers in the land of Israel, what exactly have they been mourning every Tisha B’Av for nearly two thousand years?
For almost two thousand years, Jews have fasted on this day to mourn the destruction of Jerusalem and our expulsion from our ancestral homeland. Just think about what that means. Every year, every generation, across every continent, long before there was modern Zionism, a British Mandate, long before there was a State of Israel. Jews were mourning the loss of Jerusalem and praying to return.
Every Tisha B’Av is an unbroken act of historical memory. It is a living proof that the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel did not begin with modern politics, it began millennia ago.
Occupiers? Colonialists? How can a people spend nearly two thousand years mourning the loss of a homeland they supposedly never possessed?
Every Tisha B’Av answers that question. It is the annual reminder that Jews are not colonisers in Israel, we are the people who were colonised out of it.
That is why Mamdani’s tweet matters so much. Not because one believes it was well intentioned, not because one believes it was offensive, but because it reveals a moral operating system so broken that it can acknowledge Jewish exile, while denying the very place from which Jews were exiled. It can commemorate the destruction of Jewish Jerusalem while defending a slogan, “from the river to the sea,” that the majority of Jews understand as calling for the end of the world’s only Jewish state. It can speak the language of Jewish history while rejecting the lesson that history teaches.
A civilisation loses its moral bearings when it can commemorate the consequences of Jewish exile while opposing the Jewish conclusion drawn from that exile.
The reason that contradiction is so glaring is because Tisha B’Av does not stand alone. It is one chapter in a much larger story. The Jewish calendar is not a random collection of festivals and fast days, it is the story of a nation through the millenia of its existence.
Passover teaches freedom, Shavuot teaches purpose, Tisha B’Av teaches the cost of losing our homeland, Yom HaShoah teaches us what happens when Jews are left defenceless, Yom HaZikaron teaches us the price of defending ourselves, Yom HaAtzmaut celebrates the restoration of Jewish sovereignty.
They are not separate commemorations, they are cause and effect, one leads inexorably to the next, they are chapters of one unbroken story. But too many people want to edit the ending and that is what a broken moral operating system does. It doesn’t erase Jewish history, it edits its conclusion. This is where so many people lose the plot.
They admire the Jewish people who survived history, they are less comfortable with the Jewish people who learned from it. They commemorate Jewish suffering, they recoil from Jewish sovereignty. They celebrate the people who endured exile, they condemn the people who ended it.
That is Zohran Mamdani’s Tisha B’Av contradiction. He can wish Jews a meaningful fast while failing to recognise that the fast itself is one of the oldest, clearest and most enduring affirmations of the Jewish people’s indigenous connection to the Land of Israel.
The point of observing Tisha B’Av was never simply to mourn the past. It was to ensure that, as far as it lay within our power, we would never have to live it again.
The point of Israel was never to produce fewer resilient Jews.
It was to produce fewer Tisha B’Avs.
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