The Mamdani-world operative serving as treasurer for a national anti-AIPAC campaign is now running a New York State committee seeking to oust three Republican lawmakers in Brooklyn — two of whom are Jewish.

State Board of Elections records show that attorney and activist Mark Hanna submitted paperwork to establish the Kings County Victory Project committee in late September. The PAC’s stated purpose is to boost the candidacies of three Democrats running against incumbent Republicans in centrist and right-leaning parts of southern Brooklyn: Joey Cohen-Saban, running against Assemblymember Michael Novakhov; Chris McCreight, seeking to unseat Assemblymember Alec Brook-Krasny; and Joyce Xie, vying against Assemblymember Lester Chang.

“I intended for it to be a bit more of a useful thing for the November elections, for any of the Democrats that are running in, like, contested Republican districts, to flip seats,” Hanna told Jewish Insider. 

Novakhov and Brook-Krasny are two of the most prominent elected officials from Brooklyn’s Russian-speaking Jewish community, which has grown increasingly Republican since the early 2010s. Cohen-Saban hails from the borough’s sizeable Syrian Jewish community, which is politically conservative but mostly votes Democratic in local elections.

Hanna worked with now-New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the 2017 City Council campaign of Rev. Khader El-Yateem, an unsuccessful bid backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, a campaign that Mamdani has credited with having “transformed” his political outlook and engaged him in local affairs. More recently, Hanna has served as treasurer of the American Priorities PAC, a self-styled anti-AIPAC effort which has taken in huge sums from Mamdani supporters in the tech sector and spent the funds boosting left-wing critics of Israel. Among the PAC’s most prominent recipients are Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and congressional candidates Adam Hamawy and Rev. Frederick Haynes III in New Jersey and Texas, respectively.

Hanna also ran alongside and served as election attorney for Carmella Charrington, who won a race for Democratic district leader — an unpaid but influential internal party position — as part of a left-wing wave in June. Jewish Insider discovered that Charrington had shared an Instagram post promoting industrialist Henry Ford’s infamous antisemitic tract ‘The International Jew,’ which she described as “the truth.” Hanna condemned Charrington’s comments at the time but declined to call for her resignation.

Hanna’s involvement with the new committee prompted an attack from the embattled Novakhov, who edged out Cohen-Saban in a tight race in 2024.

“I’ve said it before: my opponent keeps very bad company,” the incumbent said in a statement to JI. “Now we know that the same political operative helping oversee the effort to elect Joey Saban is also running the finances of a multimillion-dollar Super PAC working against pro-Israel candidates.”

But Cohen-Saban said he had no knowledge of the Kings County Victory Project’s existence, and did not want its support unless Hanna recanted his stance on Israel and denounced Charrington. 

“I’m a proud supporter of AIPAC, and if there is any organization, PAC, whatever you want to call it, that is trying to get involved in my race, but doesn’t share my values, I don’t welcome their help,” the Democratic challenger told JI, highlighting his family’s ties to Israel, where they lived after fleeing Syria but before coming to Brooklyn. “You need to share my values, and you need to have my interests in order to be able to play any role in my campaign, whether it’s direct or indirect.”

The race between Cohen-Saban and Novakhov has been one of the most closely watched in New York Jewish politics — not only because it pits two of the city’s Jewish immigrant populations against each other, but because a Cohen-Saban victory would add a pro-Israel Democratic to the dominant Assembly majority in a year that has seen a raft of anti-Israel candidates elected to the state legislature.

Cohen-Saban, McCreight and Xie are, like Hanna and Charrington, Democratic district leaders. But recent weeks have found them on opposite sides of an internecine battle for control of the Brooklyn party organization. Hanna, McCreight and Charrington are part of a left-liberal bloc seeking to remove the current centrist leadership, while Cohen-Saban and Xie have backed the present establishment. Cohen-Saban further highlighted that he was among the first district leaders to demand Charrington’s resignation after JI reported her remarks.

Hanna, for his part, argued that he meant for the Kings County Victory Project to overcome these internal divides and focus on dislodging Republican electeds. However, he said that the ongoing legal battle for control of the Brooklyn organization had prevented him from raising meaningful funds for the PAC to date, and he was uncertain how much of a role it could play in next month’s elections. 

Brook-Krasny declined to comment for this article.

National security experts are warning that Jewish communities around the world could face increased Iranian threats following the recent accusation by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps orchestrated attacks last year on a synagogue and kosher restaurant in the country.

“We’ve seen Iranian penetration in many Westernized countries, with Australia now being the latest. Though to see direct evidence of a linkage to actual violence — not just disinformation campaigns or cyber campaigns — is very frightening,” Rich Goldberg, a senior advisor at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Jewish Insider. 

On Tuesday, Albanese announced the expulsion of the Iranian ambassador in Canberra — the first time Australia has expelled a foreign ambassador since World War II — as well as three other embassy staffers, and designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist group, after Australian intelligence indicated that Tehran was behind the 2024 attacks. 

Goldberg called it “earth-shattering” that Australia’s “left-wing prime minister, who may not agree on a whole lot of politics with the U.S., has been woken up to the very sobering reality of Iranian threats in his own country.” 

Goldberg urged Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union to “follow swiftly” in severing diplomatic relations with Iran, and for the U.S. and Australia to put diplomatic pressure on other governments to designate IRGC as a terrorist organization. Nearly all the major EU countries still have full diplomatic ties with Iran. 

“We know that Canada is highly penetrated by Iranian assets and the IRGC inside the country without having a very clear designation as a terrorist organization,” said Goldberg. “We’ve seen terrorist plots that are Iranian sponsored on British soil and the British government is still dragging its feet on prescribing the IRGC as a terrorist group. We know that they have operatives, both undercover as diplomats and as operatives, throughout the EU.” 

More than a year ago, the Biden administration’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, warned of the Iranian regime’s efforts to take advantage of campus unrest. In light of Australia going public with the Iranian threat, Goldberg urged the Trump administration to order an updated review of Iranian influence efforts in the U.S. 

“We all sort of forgot about that report, but it was big news at the time [even though] we never got a lot of detail on that,” he said. “Nobody has asked the question of what’s the current status of Iranian influence on protest movements or acts of violence in the U.S. We suspect that Iran has agents in the U.S. Some of those people have been arrested in the past. This has to remain a key priority for the FBI and [Department of] Homeland Security.”  

Matt Levitt, director of the Jeanette and Eli Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, called for increased awareness of “Iranian external operations around the world, including in the U.S., in which the IRGC and other Iranian government agencies increasingly pay criminal proxies to carry out acts of violence, intimidation, and even kidnapping and murder on their behalf,” he said in a statement to JI. 

Heads of security organizations that monitor American Jewish communal safety said that the latest news coming out of Australia — in addition to an already heightened fear of Iranian retaliation following the U.S. airstrikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities in June — make threats from Iran and its proxy groups particularly alarming. 

“The FBI and NYPD have had live investigations that have resulted in arrests of Hezbollah operatives in New York City casing out institutions,” Mitch Silber, executive director of the Community Security Initiative, which works to safeguard Jewish communities, told JI. “Iranians have a long timeline. Just because [an attack] hasn’t happened in the last six to eight weeks [since the airstrikes] doesn’t mean that the Iranians haven’t stopped plotting.” 

Silber pointed to the recent case of a Hezbollah operative in Texas purchasing 300 pounds of ammonium nitrate. “Why would you [purchase] an explosive if you weren’t thinking of potentially trying to use it somewhere in the U.S.?” he said. 

“These developments in Australia reflect yet another tentacle of the IRGC in its escalating influence campaigns: furthering violence, destruction and discord, with the Jewish community bearing the brunt,” Michael Masters, Secure Community Network director and CEO, told JI. 

“We applaud the Australian government for shining the disinfecting light of day regarding these attacks. It only underscores the continued need for reporting, coordination and proactive security efforts by and for the Jewish community.”