Habibi City: New York Magazine’s Antizionist Turn

It is said that a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. This insight tells against a growing faction of the Left exemplified by the 10 August issue of New York magazine. The issue’s cover story and 31-page feature, titled “Habibi City,” is ostensibly a celebration of New York’s growing Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) cultural scene. But the magazine is less interested in the rich diversity within that community than it is in a few individuals and organisations advancing a particular agenda. Some ideological traditions are honoured at the expense of others. Kurds and Druze are disregarded, while Jews are presented in almost entirely negative terms.

The issue’s centrepiece essay is written by Zaina Arafat (no relation), an award-winning Palestinian-American novelist and educator who grew up outside Washington, DC. “To be in SWANA community,” she announces, “meant embracing a set of shared beliefs: that Palestinians deserve human rights. That what happened in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7 constitutes a genocide. That social justice and social welfare override capitalist concerns. That to care is nonnegotiable.” The broad contours of the political coalition gathering under the banner of the Democratic Socialists of America, in other words.

A community that embraces a set of shared beliefs is not necessarily a bad thing, but the value of solidarity depends entirely on the merits of the cause in question. Unfortunately, the beliefs animating the “cultural ecosystem” and “rules of engagement” of the SWANA set represented in New York’s Habibi issue present problems. A fixed opposition to “capitalist concerns,” for instance, not only uncouples its adherents from the world’s greatest engine of prosperity, but it also conceals the fact that the free-market economy is a necessary condition for political freedom. Moreover, the belief that “what happened in Gaza” constitutes genocide is not the product of analysis or reasoning; it is simply a pronouncement that demands assent from every enlightened person.