Every week I link to the GoFundMe page for Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who live in Gaza with their four children and have been injured by Israeli bombs and displaced ten times since October 7, and are trying to leave. I know putting up a Go Fund Me for one family is totally inadequate given the scale of the horror in Gaza, and the millions of people there who need our help— and most of all, need an end to this monstrous slaughter. Still, it’s something.
Please considering helping.
Friday Zoom Call: Special Time
This Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at a special time: 11 AM Eastern. Our guest will be former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. He has recently called Israel’s assault on Gaza a “war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel” but denies that Israel is committing genocide and believes its actions were legitimate until the spring of 2024. He’s also argued that Israel’s current operation is fundamentally different from prior ones. I’ll ask what he would have done differently after October 7 and how he understands the fundamental nature of Zionism and the Israeli state.
Ask Me Anything
Our next Ask Me Anything session, for premium subscribers, will be this Wednesday, July 16, from 11-Noon Eastern time.
Cited in Today’s Video
The New York Times on Zohran Mamdani’s application to Columbia University.
Despite being expelled, Zohran Mamdani’s grandparents never stopped longing for Uganda.
Mahmoud Mamdani’s fight for a multi-racial Uganda.
Thabo Mbeki’s speech “I am an African.”
A letter by my father, Julian Beinart z’’ll, in the 1967 issue of Transition.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Emily Wilder reports on the group giving antisemitism trainings at Harvard.
I spoke to Democracy Now about Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington.
I talked on Bill Kalmenson’s podcast about a Jewish reckoning on Gaza.
The Trump administration used Canary Mission to find students to detain.
See you on Friday at 11 AM Eastern,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, I want to say something about this story that appeared in the New York Times based on hacked emails from Columbia University, that when Zoran Mamdani, who’s now the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, that when he applied to Columbia University, he listed himself as not only Asian, but also as Black or African American. And so, this has been depicted, you know, this has been discussed in a lot of political circles as, oh, this guy was trying to game the system to get advantage of affirmative action by pretending he’s Black when he’s not Black.
I think it fundamentally misunderstands who Zoran Mamdani is, who his family is. And part of the reason for this misunderstanding is there’s just such a profound ignorance in American political and media discussion, including in elite media and political discussion, of anything having to do with Africa, and in this case, Uganda. To understand why Mamdani checked off Black or African American, and then wrote—critically, wrote under it—Ugandan, you have to understand his family and the belief system of his family. His family were, on his father’s side, were South Asians who moved to East Africa, like many did, particularly from a part of India called Gujarat. And in his father’s family’s case, they didn’t just happen to be Asians who ended up in Uganda, they very much believed in the nation of Uganda as their identity.
What happened was that when the dictator Idi Amin took power, he expelled the South Asians from Uganda in a kind of racist action, because of a basically political-economic power play, in which he was aligned with a group of economic interests from the tribe of Baganda that saw an opportunity if they pushed out the South Asian economic interests that were in Uganda, and basically took their industry and their wealth. And they allied with Idi Amin to expel the South Asians from Uganda. Interestingly, another person whose family was also expelled, but from a radically different political perspective, is the family of Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI director.
But what’s critical to understand about the way this action was experienced by Mamdani’s family is that they saw themselves as having been expelled from their country, from their continent, even though, of course, they were not Black. That Zohran Mamdani talks about how his grandparents, once they had been expelled from Uganda to Britain, used to go every Sunday to Gatwick Airport in London and watch the planes taking off to Uganda, because they missed this place so much. It was their home. His father, Mahmoud Mamdani, the political scientist at Columbia, is one of the world’s great students of African politics, named Zohran Mamdani Kwame, right? He gave him the middle name of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of a decolonized independent African country in sub-Saharan Africa. This was part of Mahmoud Mamdani’s commitment to Africa, to being Ugandan. And indeed, Mahmoud Mamdani moved back to Uganda once the new president, Yowari Museveni, allowed South Asians to return. And he went to work at Makerere University, a great university in Uganda.
And Mahmoud Mamdani has written, he writes in the London Review of Books, he writes about a group called the Asian African Association of Uganda, which was formed in the 1990s, that he was an admirer of and part of. And this group, in its founding document, right, quotes ‘we are not South Asians, for South Asians live in South Asia and are committed to making a future there. Nor are we overseas South Asians, who are part of a South Asian diaspora whose members aim to return home to South Asia after a temporary sojourn overseas. True, our origin is South Asia, but our present is African. Many of us hope to make a future in Africa. We are Africans of Asian origin.’
Asian Africans. This is the way in which Zohran Mamdani was raised. This is what he was trying to say, articulate, but in trying to do through this using these crude American categories that link the idea of being someone who is of African descent with the idea of being Black. But Zoran Mandani’s entire family identity, politics, history, is about saying that that’s not true, that being an African does not require you to be Black, it requires you to be living in Africa, or have roots in Africa, and have a commitment to the development of Africa—in this case, Uganda—as a place that is multiracial, multi-ethnic.
And one of the people that, um, that, uh, Mahmoud Ramdani quotes as one of the South Asians in Uganda who believed this most fervently was a man named Rajat Neogy, who edited a magazine called Transition. It was based at this great university, Makarere University, in Uganda that he edited along with Black Ugandans and South Asian Ugandans and whites and people from across the continent. And that was very important to me because we used to have copies of Transition, of this magazine in my home. I used to, you know, flip through them when I was in my father’s study growing up.
My father was born in Africa. My father was born in Cape Town. And although my father left, and although I do not call myself an African American, I was lucky enough to see some of that as well, this idea that there were Jews, and there were South Asians who were in South Africa who had a profound and deep commitment to being South African, which meant also being African, even though, of course, they were not Black. That some of the most important figures in the African National Congress, who devoted their lives, who went to jail for decades, who were assassinated, were of Indian origin, or of Jewish origin. The head of the ANC’s military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe, the ‘Spear of the Nation,’ arguably the guy who was the second most powerful figure in the African National Congress, Joe Slovo, grew up in Lithuania speaking Yiddish. And yet, he led the ANC’s armed struggle against apartheid.
This is also the politics, the history that I was inculcated with, that my parents, my father and mother, taught me—just like Zohran Mamdani’s—taught me about what it meant for us to be Jews who were in South Africa, just as what it meant for his family to be South Asians who were in Uganda. And, in fact, Thabo Mbeki, the second president of post-apartheid South Africa after Nelson Mandela, gave this extraordinary speech, which I will link to, called ‘I am an African,’ in which he talks about what it means to be an African. And he specifically talks about people who come from South Asia, even he talked about Afrikaners, even he talked about Afrikaners as Africans, right? Because he didn’t see African as a racial category.
Why does this matter in America today in the Trump era? Because Zohran Mamdani and his father were fighting against ethno-nationalism, against ethno-nationalist racism. One of the reasons that Idi Amin could do what he did to the South Asians of Uganda was because Uganda did not have birthright citizenship, which allowed him the constitutional legal basis to deport them. Idi Amin’s vision of Uganda is Donald Trump’s vision of America. That to be American is essentially to be white and Christian, and anyone else here is just a guest, not truly American.
Zohran Mamdani’s family politics taught him far away in Uganda, in Africa, to fight against the very ethno-nationalism that he is now struggling against in the United States. The very same ethno-nationalism that leads him to believe that Israel and Palestine should be a place where people are treated equally, where Palestinians and Jews are equal citizens, rather than being part of a supremacist political project. The supremacism of Idi Amin and of Jewish supremacy in Israel, and of Donald Trump, Mahmoud Mamdani’s entire life, his family history, was about struggling against this form of supremacism. And if you don’t understand that, and how it relates to the reason that he ticked those boxes for his Columbia application, you really don’t understand, I think, who this man is.
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