New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Thursday that he will not attend Sunday’s annual parade honoring Israel, a decision that breaks with a long-standing ritual for city leaders and immediately sharpened the fight over how New York’s top elected official navigates Israel and Palestinian rights.
Mamdani said he had told voters during the campaign that he would not go, and he said his view of the Israeli government was already clear. Even so, he pledged a robust police presence along Fifth Avenue so the parade could go off “seamlessly and peacefully,” with his administration preparing for weeks to keep everyone who takes part safe.
The parade, which has gone by different names over the years, has traditionally been treated as a must-attend event for mayors, governors and other political leaders. This year’s decision lands days before Sunday’s march and follows the mayor’s office release of a video two weeks ago commemorating the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe used to describe the displacement of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel’s establishment.
That video only widened the friction. Supporters of Israel said it should have acknowledged the mass displacement of Jews from Muslim-majority countries and the role of the Holocaust in the drive to establish a Jewish state, while Rabbi Marc Schneier called Mamdani’s decision not to attend “a slap in the face to all Jewish New Yorkers” and said of the Nakba video, “Do us a favor, stay home. We don’t need you. We don’t want you.”
Mamdani’s office has tried to separate the parade from the politics around it, but the split is now impossible to miss: New York City police commissioner Jessica Tisch said she would march and made clear, “It is the mayor’s decision not to march, and it is my decision to march proudly.” Inea Bushnaq, who described herself as someone who has always felt like an outsider, said the political debate still lands personally for her: “I’ve lived in different places, and I’ve always been an outsider,” she said, adding that “it’s the soft hills of Palestine that actually touched me.”
The city says it has been preparing for weeks, and Sunday will show whether that security message is enough to steady an event that has become a test of political loyalty as much as a parade. For Mamdani, the absence is now the message, and the only question left is how loudly that message will echo once the crowd reaches Fifth Avenue.
