In his first round of executive actions, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani revoked a set of Israel-related executive orders issued by his predecessor Eric Adams — including a directive barring city agencies from participating in boycotts or divestment initiatives targeting Israel, and the formal adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.

The revocations were announced alongside other first-week priorities, including housing and governance reforms, signaling that for Mamdani, protecting civil liberties and the right to political speech are part of the same project as governing a city.

The Israeli government responded by accusing Mamdani of antisemitism. The accusation was widely noted for its irony: the charge came in response to his revoking an order that had conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Mamdani, a democratic socialist and former New York State Assembly member, won the mayoral election on November 4. Throughout his campaign he consistently defended boycott as a legitimate, nonviolent form of political expression and criticized the IHRA definition as a tool for suppressing speech rather than combating actual antisemitism — a view shared by many Jewish legal scholars, civil liberties organizations, and members of the Jewish community itself.

The Adams-era orders represented exactly the kind of government overreach that civil rights advocates have documented across the country: the use of executive authority to place Israeli government policy beyond the reach of ordinary political dissent. Mamdani’s first-week reversal is a meaningful signal — both locally and nationally — that the suppression of pro-Palestinian speech is not an inevitable condition of American governance. It is a policy choice. And policy choices can be reversed.