Habibi City’s SWANA Isn’t a Region. It’s a Loyalty Test.

New York Magazine’s 31-page package on Arab and Muslim life in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York, branded “Habibi City” (published on August 10, 2026) has already drawn condemnation for the obvious reason: it frames Zionism, the belief that Jews have a right to sovereignty and self-determination in part of their indigenous homeland, as a species of hatred alongside xenophobia and Islamophobia, while barely acknowledging that Jews are themselves an indigenous people of the region it celebrates.

That criticism is correct, but it undersells the problem. The deeper issue is not that one magazine feature got Jews wrong. It is that the entire framework the piece relies on, the term “SWANA,” Southwest Asia and North Africa, was constructed to erase everyone whose history is inconvenient, not just Jews, and it does so while posing as scholarship rather than what it actually is: a political loyalty test dressed up as geography.

SWANA presents itself as a neutral geographic term, a more accurate replacement for “Middle East,” which admittedly carries its own colonial baggage. But geographic accuracy is not what the term serves. In practice, “SWANA,” particularly as promoted in the “Habibi” piece, functions as a cultural and political identity, one built around shared grievance against the West and against Israel, and it absorbs into that identity peoples who have almost nothing in common except having once lived under Arab or Islamic rule. This is not new. It is an NYC diaspora version of a much older project.

In the region SWANA claims to describe – Arabization and Islamization were not gentle processes of cultural diffusion. They were conquest, followed by centuries of legal, linguistic, and religious coercion that steadily erased the region’s actual indigenous populations.

Princeton professor and historian Bernard Lewis spent a career documenting this: the Copts of Egypt, once the overwhelming majority, reduced over centuries to a persecuted minority in their own homeland. The Assyrians and Chaldeans of Mesopotamia, speakers of Aramaic, the language of the region before Arabic arrived, pushed to the brink of extinction. The Berbers of North Africa, the Kurds of the Fertile Crescent, the Baloch of the Iranian plateau, all absorbed, marginalized, or violently suppressed by whichever Arab or Persian nationalist project happened to be dominant at the time. Jews were one indigenous people among several who were conquered, subordinated under dhimmi status, persecuted, and periodically expelled. The Ottoman millet system that “Habibi City” romanticizes through Café Barzakh’s salon decor was not pluralism. It was a hierarchy that assigned each religious minority its permitted place, always beneath the ruling faith.

“SWANA” repeats that erasure by different means. It takes a region defined by irreconcilable internal differences: a Copt who fears the Muslim Brotherhood has nothing in common politically with an Egyptian Islamist, a Baloch nationalist executed by Tehran shares no cause with the regime that killed him, and folds them into a single “cultural ecosystem” defined by opposition to Israel and the West. The SWANA category touted by NY Magazine holds together only because it quietly excludes anyone whose actual history would break the consensus. That is not an accident. It is the mechanism, and it is the same mechanism colonialism has always used: define the group, then decide who is permitted to belong to it.

Look at who “Habibi City” includes, and how. Iran appears in the piece as a source of nightlife branding, bonfire-jumping mayors, Persian New Year parties in Williamsburg bars. What the piece does not mention is that most Iranian-Americans, especially the large Los Angeles diaspora, are fiercely opposed to the Islamist regime that controls their homeland, and many are among the most pro-Israel constituencies in the country. The Islamic Republic executes Baloch and Kurdish dissidents with regularity and represses Ahwazis in the country’s southwest. None of that fits the SWANA branding. So, none of it appears in “Habibi City.”

The same selective inclusion applies closer to home. Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, whose families lived in the lands now called Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and Iran for millennia before being expelled in the twentieth century, are SWANA by any honest geographic definition. They do not appear in “Habibi City” as members of the community it describes, because their history complicates the story the piece wants to tell (and sell). A Syrian Jewish New Yorker whose family was driven from Aleppo is, geographically and ethnically, exactly the kind of person the acronym claims to represent. Politically, however, he is inadmissible.

This is the pattern worth naming plainly: SWANA is not a description of a region’s peoples. It is a membership test, and the price of admission is agreement on Jews and Israel. Pass that test and your grievances count, your culture is celebrated, your restaurants get written up in New York Magazine. Fail it, whether you are a Mizrahi Jew, a pro-Israel Iranian, a Baloch nationalist, or a Copt who blames Islamist mobs rather than Netanyahu for his community’s suffering, and you disappear from the story entirely, no matter how indigenous you are to the region.

The irony is that “Habibi City” markets itself as an act of reclamation, a pushback against decades of Western caricature, a chance for the region’s diaspora to finally tell its own story on its own terms. But a coalition that can only cohere by excluding its own unique groups and dissidents is not reclaiming indigeneity, let alone telling an honest story. It is performing the same erasure that Arabization and Islamization performed on the ground in the MENA for centuries, relocated now to Brooklyn supper clubs and dressed up as progress.

The real story of the Middle East and North Africa is one of astonishing ethnic diversity ground down by centuries of conquest and forced homogenization, a story in which Jews, Assyrians, Yazidis, Copts, Kurds, Amazigh, and Baloch all have a claim to indigeneity that predates the Arab conquest and the spread of Islam by centuries.

The real story of the Middle East and North Africa is one of astonishing ethnic diversity ground down by centuries of conquest and forced homogenization, a story in which Jews, Assyrians, Yazidis, Copts, Kurds, Amazigh, and Baloch all have a claim to indigeneity that predates the Arab conquest and the spread of Islam by centuries. New York Magazine had the material to tell that full story. It chose instead to build a far smaller, much more political one, and to cast everyone that homogenization left out, starting with the Jews, as the problem.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.