How the Israel-Hamas war became an issue in the Minneapolis mayoral race

The Israel-Hamas war hasn’t been core to the stump speeches, campaign flyers or social media messages of Mayor Jacob Frey or state Sen. Omar Fateh, his leading challenger, in the runup to this fall’s contest for Minneapolis mayor..

But it’s there.

The Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America included a pro-Palestinian stance as a litmus test for its endorsement. At the city’s DFL convention in July, a resolution passed calling on the city to boycott, divest and sanction the state of Israel, an issue that progressive advocacy group Our Revolution also asked about in its own candidate questionnaire.

More recently, Jewish media outlets have highlighted controversial statements by current and former Fateh campaign staffers about Israel.

How did a conflict on the other side of the world come to be an an issue in the Minneapolis mayor’s race?

While a ceasefire agreement has raised the prospect of peace in the region, two years of war has exacerbated tensions between progressives and establishment Democrats all over the country. It’s a divide reflected in the positions of the city’s two leading candidates for mayor and underscored by their backgrounds: Frey is Jewish and Fateh is Muslim.

Democratic socialist Fateh was an early critic of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas. He has called it genocide against Palestinians.

On Wednesday morning, Frey publicly called out threatening graffiti scrawled on Temple Israel that recalled Hamas’ attack. The two-year anniversary was Tuesday.

The war quickly became a flashpoint at Minneapolis City Hall in the months after the 2023 attack on Israel and the Israeli military’s subsequent bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

In January 2024, at the first meeting after progressives took control of the City Council, the council took up a symbolic resolution calling for a ceasefire and an end to U.S. military funding for Israel. The council approved it that month.

Frey condemned Israel’s bombing of Gaza and criticized Netanyahu. But he vetoed the resolution, calling it “one-sided” and saying it “uplifts the history of Palestinians and all but erases that of Israeli Jews.”

The council overrode Frey’s veto.

Payne and Chavez said it was a jab at a mustache Frey had begun sporting around the same time.

“At the time, nothing was made of this picture because everyone understood the context,” Payne and Chavez said in a statement. “Now retroactively going back and trying to manufacture a controversy that never existed to distract from such a sad day where over 100 neighbors’ belongings were bulldozed is harmful.”

A Frey spokesperson responded, “The photo of this effigy clearly speaks for itself.”

The war caused a rift among Democrats at the Legislature, too, with Fateh squarely in the middle.

One month after the Hamas attacks, Fateh emailed his Democratic colleagues complaining about a social media post by a DFL lobbyist and donor who quoted the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir saying, “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

“This makes it clear to me that nobody in the party” is at all concerned about their Muslim colleagues, staffers, or constituents, he wrote.

That March, Fateh was among nearly 46,000 Minnesota voters who refused to vote for President Joe Biden in the 2024 primary election to protest his administration’s handling of the war.

The issue attracted renewed scrutiny after Fateh began his run for mayor, with local Jewish leaders and the Jewish press highlighting public statements by Fateh and his staffers about Israel.

One of those statements came from Fateh’s response to the Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America candidate questionnaire. Candidates were asked to promise to boycott “Zionist lobby groups,” citing as examples American Israel Public Affairs Committee, J Street, Christians United for Israel and the Jewish Community Relations Council.

Steve Hunegs, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, worries Fateh would not work with groups like his. For Hunegs, it harkens back to treatment of Jews in the late 1930s and amounts to political red-lining of much of the Jewish community.

Local and national Jewish media have also surfaced several statements made by Fateh staffers in the wake of Hamas’ October 2023 attack.

Fateh’s former communications manager, Anya Smith-Kooiman, wrote on social media that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist and must be dismantled, according to now-deleted posts first reported by Jewish Insider.

Using a vulgarity, Smith-Kooiman also wrote that she wasn’t worried about Hamas because “the root of the problem is a colonial government segregating, ethnically cleaning, murdering Palestinians, stealing their land with impunity and not expecting a resistance group to violently fight back.”

Fateh’s campaign manager, Akhilesh Menawat, said Smith-Kooiman left the campaign weeks ago. She is a policy aide to state Sen. Erin Maye Quade, DFL-Apple Valley.

David Gilbert-Pederson, who is listed as a staffer in Fateh’s campaign finance report, also praised the Hamas attack. He likened it to protesters’ storming of the Third Precinct after George Floyd’s 2020 killing by police.

Smith-Kooiman and Gilbert-Pederson did not respond to requests for comment. The Fateh campaign did not comment on their social media posts.

Fateh has said he rejects all expressions of Islamophobia and antisemitism, calling the painting of swastikas on Temple Israel in December “a hateful act.” He released a statement saying he believes most Minneapolis residents want everyone to thrive, from Minnesota to Gaza.

“It is also reflected in polling that shows that overwhelmingly, voters across the country, Jewish and not, want to see an end to the genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza,” Fateh said. “I believe that I have a mandate to represent the will of voters and Democrats across the city who are working to elect me.”

Not all Jews are worried about Fateh’s stances on the Middle East. Last month, Fateh’s campaign held a “Jews for Fateh” fundraiser, where Fateh said he was proud to join Minneapolis Jewish community members and leaders and share “learnings from our Jewish and Muslim faiths about the importance of coming together and working towards our vision for our communities.”

“We understand that as Jewish and Muslim neighbors, there is more that connects us than divides us, and we are ready to work together to win in November,” Fateh said.

“I have seen him show up time and time again for the human dignity of people, and I have seen that be exciting to the Jewish people in Minneapolis who want their own dignity heard and the dignity and respect offered to Muslim, Arab, Palestinian members of our community as well,” Meisenhelter said.