5 reasons to be upset about Mamdani’s October 7 tweet
Today, October 7, Jewish New Yorkers went online to discover that their mayor had tweeted from the @NYCmayor X account.
It began with an acknowledgment of the day’s pain: “This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.”
If it had ended there, I think Jewish New Yorkers would have been less justified in criticizing the statement. But instead, Mamdani kept going:
The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.
Three years later, we must 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 honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.
Mamdani’s statement is problematic on a lot of levels. Still, Jewish New Yorkers upset about it will continue to be accused of Islamophobia and hysteria. So here are five reasons the tweet is either inaccurate or inappropriate, and why readers should take these objections seriously.
- Mamdani shared 40 words of condolence for Jewish New Yorkers. He wrote 164 words about the impact of October 7 on Palestinians.
Using a day that is tragic particularly to Israelis and Jews, who lost their relatives and loved ones, to “All Lives Matter” the deaths of Israelis on October 7 — and to do it so disproportionately, with so much more attention given to Gazan victims of the conflict — is disrespectful and in poor taste.
- There was no coordinated Israeli response to Hamas’s terrorist attack until October 8, 2023 — and the IDF did not initiate a large-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip until October 27.
There are 364 other days of the calendar to grieve Palestinian losses (of which there are many). By choosing to grieve Palestinians on a day they were not victimized and some were in fact the aggressors, Mamdani shifts the focus from Jewish grief to the culpability of Jews and Israelis.
- Mamdani’s casualty numbers are shared in a way that does not address the ratio of combatant to civilian deaths. The Gazan Health Ministry “does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its figures.” If a more accurate estimate of civilian casualties is closer to ½ or ⅔ of that number, it is a mischaracterization that casts Israel in a more villainous light.
The widespread inflation of civilian deaths in Gaza has made honest conversations about this conflict even more difficult, because people are not in possession of the same facts.
- I have been critical of much of this war, but Mamdani’s accusations deliberately cast Israel as the villain in this saga, painting Israel as the bloodthirsty aggressor and claiming Israel targets ambulances, residential buildings, and journalists, all while starving Gazans by rejecting foreign aid.
And Mamdani is adding fuel to the fire. Words like “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “occupation” are contested and not-universally-agreed-upon descriptions of what’s happening in Israel/Palestine. They escalate the hostility and anger and leave no room for complex conversation and actual on-the-ground work.
- The grief of Jews around the world on October 7 isn’t equal to the grief of New Yorkers whose “tax dollars fund these war crimes.”
These experiences are not equivalent.
When you move beyond slogans and actually recognize what Mamdani is comparing here, it’s beyond apples and oranges.
Reject simple conflations, especially when they simply don’t make sense.
The grief of October 7 is Kfir and Ariel, frozen in death at 9 months and 4 years old. It is Rachel Goldberg-Polin screaming her son’s name at the border. It is Hostages Square and Bring Them Home pins and posters on every building, every telephone pole.
It is not the grief of the New Yorker who scans news headlines from the comfort of a coffee shop, protected from the loss and the pain and the lack of closure, with Free Palestine stickers on their laptops and no actual stake in any of this.
I hope Jewish New Yorkers get a real apology for this statement.
But I’m not holding my breath.
