Mamdani’s Toxic “Did Not Begin” Oct. 7 Statement

October 7 was the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. So, one would have thought that the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish community outside of Israel would mark its third anniversary by mourning the victims of the atrocity and identifying the perpetrators without hedging, and stand with the still grieving families. Instead, he took it as an opportunity to issue a statement slamming the Jewish state. But read carefully, it delivers much more than a harsh critique of Israeli policy. It treats Israel as something less than a legitimate, sovereign state.

The statement released by the mayor’s office last week begins by acknowledging “the horrific war crimes of October 7” and reporting that “Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others.” Even that understates the toll: Israel’s official count is about 1,200.

Then comes the pivot: “The suffering did not begin nor end that day.”

After that single mention of Hamas, the rest is an indictment of Israel. The mayor accused it of a “devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza,” said “our tax dollars fund these war crimes,” and called on New Yorkers to “refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”

To frame the entire statement as he did with the line that says the suffering “did not begin” on October 7 is to supply context, which is a polite word for justification. If October 7 was not a beginning, then it must have been a response. But a response to what? Not to an Israeli presence in Gaza; Israel withdrew every soldier and every settler from Gaza in 2005. And Hamas answered that withdrawal with nearly two decades of rockets, and finally, a massacre.

The only “beginning” that fits the mayor’s observation is Israel’s existence itself. That is what “occupation” means in the jargon of the movement Mamdani comes from; Tel Aviv is as “occupied” as Hebron. The mayor describes himself as an anti-Zionist. He knows how the word is used by those who chant it.

The complaint about “complicity with every arms shipment” is not an objection to a particular weapon or a particular strike. Every shipment means every shipment: the interceptors that protect Israeli cities from Hamas rockets and the air defenses that have shot down Iranian missiles aimed at Israeli homes. It is a demand for a total arms embargo in all but name.

Every sovereign state has an inherent right of self-defense, recognized in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. No one at City Hall proposes cutting off arms to Saudi Arabia as it strikes the Houthis in Yemen, or to Ukraine as it strikes back at Russia. Singling out one state to be stripped of the means to defend itself while its enemies are armed by Iran presumes that this state alone lacks that right. A state without the right to defend itself is not, in any meaningful sense, a sovereign state.

Then there is what the Mamdani statement didn’t say. Hamas has refused to disarm; as recently as February it rejected an Israeli ultimatum to give up its weapons. Yet the mayor’s statement does not call on Hamas to lay down its arms, to renounce terror, or to accept Israel’s existence. It names Hamas once, as the author of a past event, and never again.

Thus, the message is: the terrorist organization keeps its guns and is barely mentioned. The democratic state with an elected government and recognized borders is to be cut off. That is not an even-handed call for peace. It is the posture of someone who regards Hamas as a party to a conflict and Israel as an illegitimate enterprise.

Some New Yorkers have chosen – misguidedly in our view – to question Israel’s conduct of the war with Hamas. But a mayor who dates the conflict to before October 7, who would deny Israel alone the weapons to defend itself, and who cannot bring himself to demand that Hamas disarm, is not debating policy. He is questioning whether the Jewish state is entitled to exist as other states do.

The largest Jewish community outside Israel should hear Mamdani’s statement for what it is, and the mayor should be asked, plainly and on the record, whether he regards Israel as a legitimate sovereign state with the right to defend itself.