Zohran Mamdani’s antisemitism plan cannot survive his October 7 statement - opinion

Mamdani’s plan was written to show that he takes antisemitism seriously. His October 7 statement showed it was written to give him cover for the hatred he keeps feeding.

On September 29, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his plan to combat antisemitism. He noted that Jews are about 12% of the city’s population but the victims of roughly half of its reported hate crimes. He promised a city where Jews would be “not only safe, but celebrated” and pledged more money for hate-crime prevention.

On October 7, the third anniversary of the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, he posted a statement that undid every word of it.

That post, viewed more than 13 million times, runs about 210 words. Roughly 50 concern October 7. Some 140 indict Israel: An “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” “occupation and apartheid,” food aid “turned away,” and “our tax dollars” funding “war crimes.” Hamas is named once and never again. By the end, Israel is the only perpetrator.

This is now how antisemites posing as mourners mark the date. Mamdani wrote that Hamas “killed more than 1,100 Israelis,” dropping the foreign workers from Thailand, Nepal, and elsewhere among the roughly 1,200 dead. His statement has no women raped at the Nova music festival, no children shot in front of their parents, no families burned alive in their safe rooms, no terrorist hacking the head off a body while another filmed it on a GoPro. It never mentions Kfir Bibas, abducted at nine months old and murdered in Gaza along with his four-year-old brother, Ariel, and their mother, Shiri. Hamas’s conduct over the next two years also goes unmentioned.

That conduct answers the question he dodges: who kept this war going? Brett McGurk, president Joe Biden’s lead hostage negotiator and no Benjamin Netanyahu partisan, served an administration that paused arms shipments to Israel. His new book describes Hamas lying about how many hostages it held, refusing to release the young women promised under the November 2023 deal, and sitting for weeks on an American offer that met most of its demands while six hostages – among them Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Carmel Gat, and Eden Yerushalmi – were murdered in a tunnel under Rafah. McGurk says the war would never have ended without the hostages coming home. Hamas spent two years bargaining over the living and the dead.

Mamdani’s numbers fare no better. His “more than 21,000 children” comes from Hamas’s health ministry, which in March 2025 quietly dropped some 3,400 “fully identified” deaths from its lists, 1,080 of them children. His “more than 1,400 Palestinians” killed since the ceasefire includes at least 420 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists and ignores the dozens of Gazans Hamas executed in the streets to reassert control. As for food aid “turned away,” a UNICEF-coordinated survey in July put acute malnutrition in Gaza at 0.2% to 0.8%, at or below prewar levels and far under the global child-wasting rate of nearly 7%. Gazans have described Hamas seizing aid in the war it started and reselling it to them at black-market prices.

Mamdani blames every destroyed building on Israel, too. Hamas dug some 600 kilometers of tunnels beneath Gaza’s homes, schools and hospitals and let no civilian shelter in them. Senior official Mousa Abu Marzouk said in October 2023 that the tunnels were for fighters and that protecting civilians was the UN’s and Israel’s job. When the IDF warned Gazans to leave combat zones, Hamas told them to stay. A mayor honoring the dead might have mentioned the terrorist army that used them as cover.

Mamadani right that the suffering did not begin on October 7, but the history undercuts his antisemitic fable. Arab mobs murdered Jews in Jerusalem in 1920, Jaffa in 1921, and Hebron in 1929, where in a single morning they slaughtered 67 Jews after the circle around Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and the era’s dominant Palestinian Arab leader, spread the lie that Jews were plotting against al-Aqsa. There was no Jewish state then, and no “occupation” to blame.

Husseini’s leadership rejected a Palestinian Arab state in 1937, 1939, and 1947. He spent World War II in Berlin as Adolf Hitler’s honored guest, urging Arabs over Nazi radio to kill Jews wherever they found them. His successors were offered a Palestinian Arab state in 2000, 2001, and 2008 and refused each time. In 2005 Israel pulled every soldier and civilian out of Gaza; Hamas answered with terror, rockets, a violent takeover and, eventually, October 7. Hamas’s charter declares the land from the river to the sea an Islamic trust no one may surrender and quotes a hadith about Muslims killing Jews. Ninety-four years after Hebron, Hamas named its invasion and massacre “Al-Aqsa Flood.” From the mufti to Hamas, the throughline is a violent, fascist Islamist rejection of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the land.

None of this is hidden. The mayor left it out on purpose.

The genocide-libel itself collapses against the record. Genocidal regimes do not warn civilians to evacuate, pause fighting to vaccinate children against polio, or truck food to the people they are supposedly exterminating. In every genocide on record, the killers controlled when the killing stopped. In Gaza, Hamas could have ended the war any day by freeing the hostages and surrendering. Spreading that libel as mayor of the largest Jewish city outside Israel is reckless at best.

Anti-Jewish hate crimes rise in New York

The results are measurable. NYPD data show anti-Jewish hate crimes up about 8% in the first eight months of his tenure, with Jews targeted in more than half of all confirmed hate crimes. When the plan was announced, Israel’s consul general in New York, Ofir Akunis, warned that antisemitism would keep rising until the mayor recognized his own anti-Israel language as its main driver. Nine days later, the mayor delivered that same language to an audience of millions.

Most Jewish New Yorkers have no use for grant programs from a mayor who marks one of the worst days in Jewish history by calling the Jewish state a “genocidal apartheid regime funded by their taxes.” They have seen where that rhetoric leads: to their campuses, their synagogues, their streets.

Mamdani’s plan was written to show he takes antisemitism seriously. His October 7 statement showed it was written to give him cover for the hatred he keeps feeding.

The writer 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.