Alex Burt (they/them)

Wow. A student organizer leading protests against Zohran Mamdani tonight reveals that she previously interned for him. Now she’s leading chants against the very politician she once worked for, accusing him of prioritizing his own political advancement over the people and movements that helped bring him to power. She delivers an ultimatum: The protests can stop when Mamdani stops the sale of stolen Palestinian land in NYC and abolishes the CUNY Board of Trustees, which advances Israel’s interests within the nation’s largest urban public university system. But she makes clear that she doesn’t expect him to deliver. In her view, Mamdani has become just another politician who makes promises to movements and then fails to meet their demands once in office. What makes her testimony particularly significant is that she isn’t someone who opposed Mamdani from the beginning. She worked for him. She believed enough in his political project to participate in it. Now she’s publicly confronting him. Her speech speaks to a broader frustration among people who placed their hopes in electoral politics as a vehicle for advancing Palestinian liberation. For some, the experience hasn’t strengthened their faith in political institutions. It has deepened their distrust.