— 🇮🇱/🇮🇷 NEW: A poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute between June 15 and 17 reveals that the majority of Jews in Israel believe Iranian civilian lives hold no value in the context of the Israeli aggression against Iran

When asked to what extent Israel should take the 'sufferings of the Iranian civilian population' into account, almost three-quarters of Jewish Israelis (73%) said 'not at all or to a fairly small extent.'

Similar polls have been conducted in the past regarding military operations in Gaza and Lebanon, with the majority of Israelis supporting genocide and ethnic cleansing, and a significant portion believing that 'Amalek should be erased' and that 'all inhabitants of an enemy city should be killed, including women and children.'

@Middle_East_Spectator

Rhetorically, this was among the less-remarked gifts of this campaign: to see and speak to working people in both the bonds of universality and with the dignity of specificity. But Mamdani wasn’t just making a gesture; he was choosing a side. While he vowed in the same speech to be “a mayor for every New Yorker,” his campaign has advocated, he said, “with no apology,” on behalf of a particular New York, a city where hours and commutes are long, paychecks stretched, and housing precarious. Such commitment shouldn’t count as rare or brave in urban politics, but it does. As a candidate, Zohran addresses city life with neither the doomsday paranoia of the MAGA right nor the vacuous optimism of so much mainstream Democratic rhetoric.

And Gaza. What does it mean that, in 2025, a mere call for equal rights for all Israeli citizens stirs more outrage than a plan for publicly owned grocery stores? Against two national parties in thrall to a genocidal regime and reflexively hostile to the very notion of Palestinian humanity, Mamdani spoke with the same force and clarity in defense of Gaza’s people as he did in support of working New Yorkers. Mamdani was always going to be labeled an antisemite by politicians and operators running cover for Zionist slaughter; his actual answers to all the rhetorical traps and ludicrous insinuations, the badgering questions about Israel and intifada, were almost irrelevant. Yet he did answer them, with conviction and without apology. Witness the interview with Stephen Colbert, where Mamdani meets the late night host’s anxious, circuitous interrogation about Jewish “safety” with plainspoken poise. The antisemitism panic has come so unmoored from empirical reality that any contact with that reality is a bracing risk.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/a-knock-at-the-door/