Zohran Mamdani never hides how he feels about Israel.
His October 7 anniversary post already had critics on the left and the right fuming.
But one reporter dug up something about New York City’s First Lady that’s even harder to explain.
New York City’s First Lady Picked One Strange Client
Jon Levine of The Washington Free Beacon published a report on Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D).
Duwaji is an illustrator. And according to Levine, her work has turned up in an odd place.
The place is a company called Olive Odyssey. It sells olive oil out of Wyoming, of all states, and its website bills the business as a “gateway for Palestinian farmers.” On a grocery shelf, that sounds about as harmless as a jar of honey.
The Free Beacon painted a much darker picture. Levine described the outfit as a “virulently anti-Israel olive oil company that celebrates Palestinian violence, trades in antisemitic imagery, and sells expensive bottles that celebrate an OG Palestinian terrorist who shot down a British plane.”
That’s a lot to pack into one sentence about cooking oil.
Per the report, Duwaji has made at least two illustrations for the company, both since October 2025. That timing matters. It puts her work for Olive Odyssey a month before New York City voters chose her husband as mayor.
The $62 Bottle Comes With a Backstory the Label Skips
Here’s where things get strange.
Right near Duwaji’s bio on the Olive Odyssey website, Levine found the company selling a $62 bottle of extra virgin olive oil. The label carries a portrait of a man named Khalil Abu Osba. The website calls him a “Palestinian resistance fighter.”
That’s the gift-shop version.
When Levine reached out, Olive Odyssey pointed him to an Instagram video from Lubna Abu-Osba, who identifies Khalil as her grandfather. In the clip, she says someone named Faour approached her and asked to commemorate him.
“She did a drawing of my grandfather, and she put it on a bottle of olive oil. And I could not be more honored that she did that, and that his legacy after 75 years is still in Palestine,” Lubna Abu-Osba said in the video.
One note of fairness here. The “she” in that quote points to Faour, not to Duwaji. The report doesn’t claim the First Lady drew that particular bottle. It says her bio and that bottle sit side by side on the same company website.
But the granddaughter had already filled in the rest of the family legacy years earlier. In an August 2019 Instagram post, she wrote about her grandfather’s exploits during the British Mandate for Palestine.
“My grandfather, Khalil Ahmed Abu-Osba, he fought in the resistance and shot a British plane out of the sky with his rifle, he was sentenced to death, and imprisoned in Acre, he escaped with 3 other freedom fighters,” she wrote.
The photo she posted alongside it showed her grandfather holding a pistol.
So the face on the $62 bottle belongs to a man whose own granddaughter says he shot down a British aircraft. Britain fought beside America in World War I and World War II. Older readers don’t need a history lesson on what that alliance meant.
The Company’s Social Media Feed Gets Worse
The bottle wasn’t the only thing the Free Beacon flagged.
Levine described Olive Odyssey’s social media accounts as “cartoonishly anti-Israel.” One post, according to the report, showed Israel as a skull with dead Palestinians in its mouth. Others attacked Israel as a “zionist state” and used the phrase “From the river to the sea” in Arabic.
And then there’s the salad.
Yes, the salad. Olive Odyssey’s website apparently holds a grudge against “Israeli salad.” According to the report, the company complained that somebody “stripped” the dish of its Palestinian “roots” and cynically “repackaged” it.
Chopped cucumbers and tomatoes have now joined the front lines of a grievance campaign run from Wyoming. Ranchers in Cheyenne probably didn’t see that one coming.
What Mamdani’s Allies Now Have to Answer For
Nobody has to like Rama Duwaji’s choice of clients. She has every right to draw for whoever she wants. That’s what free speech means, and it cuts in every direction, including the directions the Left doesn’t like.
But voters have every right to notice. And they have every right to ask whether this is a one-off or part of a pattern.
Because the timing couldn’t have been worse for the mayor. The Free Beacon story landed right alongside the backlash over Mamdani’s own post marking the anniversary of the October 7 terror attack in Israel, which killed about 1,200 people.
Critics on both the left and the right accused Mamdani of minimizing those deaths. They said he fixated on what his post called Israel’s “devastating, ongoing genocide” in Gaza instead of the people murdered that day.
Put the two stories next to each other and a reasonable New Yorker might start to wonder what kind of politics run through that household. Maybe that’s not entirely fair. Plenty of political spouses have careers of their own, and nobody should answer for every client a husband or wife takes on.
Then again, the First Lady of the biggest city in America isn’t a private citizen anymore. She’s a public face of her husband’s administration, whether she asked for the role or not. And the company she chose to work with didn’t hide what it stood for. It put it on the label.
Picture the Uproar If a Republican Did This
Flip the parties for a second.
Imagine a Republican mayor’s wife doing illustrations for a company that sold a bottle honoring a man who shot down a plane belonging to a close American ally. Imagine that same company posting a skull-shaped drawing of a nation with bodies in its teeth.
The networks would run it wall to wall. Every morning show would lead with it. Reporters would camp outside City Hall until somebody resigned.
But this story has mostly trickled out through outlets the legacy press prefers to ignore. And the Mediaite write-up of the report includes no response from Duwaji or from City Hall.
Maybe an explanation is coming. Nobody should hold their breath.
New York City is home to one of the largest Jewish communities anywhere on earth. Those families watched their mayor’s October 7 post. Now they’re reading about the company his wife has been drawing for. It’s hard to imagine many of them shrugging it off.
And here’s the part City Hall should worry about most. A mayor can delete a post or walk back a phrase. A paper trail of artwork on a company website is a lot harder to scrub.
Expect Mamdani’s allies to wave all of this away as a smear cooked up by right-wing media. That’s the standard play whenever a Democrat gets caught near something ugly. But the quotes in this story didn’t come from Mamdani’s critics. They came from the company’s own website, its own social media, and the granddaughter of the man on the bottle.
A $62 bottle of olive oil probably shouldn’t become a citywide controversy.
But in Zohran Mamdani’s New York, apparently even the salad comes with a political agenda.
Sources: Mediaite, “Report Reveals Mamdani’s Wife Provided Art For Company Celebrating ‘Terrorist’ Who Shot Down a Plane,” October 7, 2026; The Washington Free Beacon, report by Jon Levine, as cited by Mediaite.