Mahmoud Khalil Used a Passover Seder to Call for the End of Israel and Attack NYC's Comptroller on Bonds

The man Mayor Mamdani welcomed to Gracie Mansion is now telling New Yorkers to pray Israel ceases to exist — and instructing city government on financial policy

Mahmoud Khalil stood in front of a crowd at an outdoor "As a Jew" Passover Seder in New York City today and told them to pray for the elimination of Israel.

"Freedom last year, today let's all pray together that by next Seder the Israeli occupation, the Israeli genocidal regime will have ended," Khalil said into a microphone, addressing the assembled crowd on the last day of Passover.

He did not stop there.

Khalil then turned to city financial policy, targeting Comptroller Mark Levine by name. Levine has defended Israeli bonds as sound investments. Khalil's answer was to reframe the entire question. "Mark Levine says investing in Israeli bonds — he says they are solid investments with high returns," Khalil told the crowd. "It's not surprising that our economy is profitable. That is what Israel's economy is: a war economy. That's why there is high yields. Buying these bonds only ensures the injustice and the system of occupation continues."

Then he went further, asking the crowd directly: "New Yorkers want to be war profiteers? Do we want to be war profiteers benefiting from the killing and dispossession of Palestinians? No!"

This is the man Mayor Zohran Mamdani invited to Gracie Mansion for dinner.

The Gracie Mansion Connection

In March 2026, Mayor Mamdani hosted Khalil and his family for iftar at Gracie Mansion. Mamdani posted the photo himself, describing Khalil's detention as the cost of "exercising his First Amendment rights." The mayor of New York City was not embarrassed by this association. He was proud of it.

That matters now. Because Khalil is no longer just a protest leader making the media rounds. He is standing at outdoor civic events, targeting sitting city officials by name, instructing New Yorkers on how their city's money should be managed, and calling on a crowd to pray that a sovereign nation ceases to exist — all on the last night of Passover, at a Seder organized under a Jewish banner.

The "As a Jew" framing of these events is not accidental. It is operational. It provides political cover, blunts charges of antisemitism, and allows a Palestinian activist facing federal deportation proceedings to stand before a crowd invoking Jewish ritual while calling for the end of the Jewish state. Khalil understands exactly what he is doing. He has been doing it for years.

The Columbia Pipeline

Khalil graduated from Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. So did Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of Within Our Lifetime, who built her own platform for anti-Israel organizing out of the same institution. Columbia SIPA is not incidental to this story. It is a production facility. It takes raw activist energy, gives it credentials, a network, and a megaphone, and releases it into New York's political bloodstream.

The university spent years insisting that its antisemitism problem was contained — a campus issue, a student conduct matter, something to be managed with task forces and sensitivity training. A Columbia antisemitism task force ultimately found widespread discrimination targeting Jewish and Israeli students. The institution's response was to keep producing the people who organized that environment and handing them graduate degrees.

Khalil leveraged that platform masterfully. He went from graduate student organizer to national figure, from ICE detention to Gracie Mansion dinner guest, from campus encampment leader to outdoor Seder speaker targeting New York City's comptroller on municipal bond policy. That is not a coincidence. That is a career trajectory built on institutional access that Columbia made possible.

We said it before and we will keep saying it: the universities' Jew-hate problem is not a campus problem. It is everyone's problem. It graduates, and then it shows up at your city's budget debates.

The Bonds Fight Is Real

Khalil's attack on Mark Levine was not rhetorical filler. It landed in the middle of a live political fight.

Former Comptroller Brad Lander divested city funds from Israeli bonds in 2023. Levine, his successor, has defended reinvestment, calling the bonds solid and high-yield. Mayor Mamdani has opposed reinvestment. The stage was already set for a confrontation between the mayor and the comptroller over whether New York City's pension funds should hold Israeli debt.

Now Khalil has entered that fight directly, standing in public, calling Levine out by name, and telling a crowd that anyone who buys Israeli bonds is a war profiteer. This is pressure. It is organized pressure, timed to a religious occasion, aimed at a specific official, delivered by someone who had dinner with the mayor last month.

The through-line is not subtle. Mamdani wants divestment. Khalil wants divestment. Khalil speaks at a Seder, names Levine, calls the bonds war profiteering. Mamdani's position gets crowd-sourced moral authority from a figure the activist left treats as a martyr. Nobody coordinates anything on paper. Nobody has to.

The Islamophobia Committee and the JFREJ Nexus

This was not Khalil's first recent appearance in an official city context. Earlier this year, two progressive City Council members hosted him at a City Hall briefing on Islamophobia. He sat alongside his lawyers and other pro-Palestinian advocates in a City Hall conference room, advising city legislators on policy.

Council Minority Leader David Carr called it an elevation of "radical terrorist sympathizers." Speaker Menin distanced the Council's leadership from the event. None of that stopped it from happening.

Now Khalil is appearing at JFREJ-adjacent outdoor Seders, invoking Jewish liturgy to call for the end of Israel, and targeting elected officials by name. JFREJ — Jews for Racial and Economic Justice — has spent years building the infrastructure of the anti-Zionist Jewish left in New York. Their Seder events are not prayer services. They are political operations dressed in ritual clothing. Khalil standing at one, holding a microphone, on the last night of Passover, is the convergence of several years of network-building made visible in a single moment.

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What This Is

Khalil has 19-plus attorneys fighting his federal deportation case. He has the mayor of New York City in his corner. He has City Council members giving him City Hall access. He has JFREJ and the "As a Jew" Seder circuit giving him a Jewish-coded platform. And he is using all of it to call for the elimination of Israel, the defunding of city investment in Israeli bonds, and the political isolation of any official who disagrees.

The people running interference for him — in the law, in City Hall, in the progressive Jewish organizational world — will tell you this is about free speech and due process. And on a narrow legal level, they are not wrong that Khalil has rights. But rights are not endorsements. Platforming is a choice. Gracie Mansion dinners are choices. City Hall briefings are choices. Every institution that handed Khalil a microphone made a choice.

The crowd at today's Seder prayed, on instruction, that Israel will not exist by next Passover.

The mayor who runs this city had that man to dinner.

New Yorkers should know both of those things.

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