Why Mamdani is wrong: Gaza may be horrific, but it is not genocide
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani consistently claims that Israel’s war in Gaza constitutes genocide. Gaza’s suffering is horrific and Israel’s conduct in some instances may be problematic, but that does not justify Mamadani’s using that term.
Genocide means the systematic destruction of a people. It does not mean collateral devastation that occurs during combat. Under the UN Genocide Convention, it requires the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. It is intentional annihilation. Israel’s purpose was not to eliminate the Palestinian people. It was to destroy Hamas.
The Holocaust in Europe took place without any provocation on the part of Jews, while the war in Gaza began after the brutal October 7, 2023 attack, which killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped hundreds more. Hamas leaders openly admitted that their aim was to provoke Israel’s’ overwhelming response. The calamity that followed was the tragic loss of life that Hamas itself set in motion.
The conflict in Gaza that began with Hamas’s onslaught became an urban battle between a conventional army and a force embedded in civilian neighborhoods. Hamas positioned its fighters, weapons, and tunnels beneath homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals.
Mamdani and others speak as if every victim was an unarmed civilian. But by Hamas’s own admission, thousands of its combatants have fallen. That alone disqualifies it from being called a genocide. According to Hamas’s own statistics, thousands of its fighters were killed. In the Holocaust and other genocides, the dead were almost all civilians.
In Nazi-occupied Europe, Ottoman Turkey, and Rwanda civilian populations were deliberately hunted to extinction. In Gaza, the harm that Palestinian civilians suffered came about because they were trapped in a ferocious urban battlefield of Hamas’s making.
Gaza has been an urban conflict in which combatants from both sides accounted for a significant portion of the deaths. When insurgents fight from tunnels, apartment blocks, and hospitals, civilian deaths soar. Gaza’s density — more than 15,000 people per square mile — makes these deaths nearly impossible to avoid. Behind the tragedy lies the inherent complexity and difficulty of conducting war in dense urban settings.
Born in Uganda, Mamdani should know about the Rwanda genocide. The two countries are next to each in East Africa, and their histories closely linked. Mamdani’s father has written extensively about the Rwandan genocide. In Rwanda, more than half a million Tutsi civilians were murdered in a hundred days. What took place in Gaza is not at all comparable.
Syria’s civil war displaced over 13 million people, or 60 percent of its pre-war population. The reason for Gazan displacement was so that the civilians could be cleared from areas where they would be in danger. The Syrian regime’s aim was not to protect people from harm.
This is not a defense of all of Israel’s conduct. Yet Mamdani’s rhetoric is out of touch with reality. The mayoral candidate has attached himself to slogans filled with hatred. He likens Gaza to Rwanda and the Holocaust, which brings into doubt his judgement.
To call Gaza a war a genocide is to cheapen the term. Gaza’s agony is undeniable. Entire neighborhoods lie in ruins, hospitals barely function, and hunger stalks hundreds of thousands. Yet the war’s brutality reflects the catastrophic logic of modern urban combat, not a plan to exterminate a people.
The Palestinian people, stateless and traumatized, deserve a political horizon beyond rubble. But honest reckoning requires careful language. The enduring lesson of history is that urban wars are terrible. Gaza’s agony belongs to that tragic lineage. It is not Auschwitz.
We should not forget Vienna at the turn of the last century. The rise of Karl Lueger—mayor from 1897 to 1910—and Mamdani’s rapid ascent share unsettling parallels. In both cases, anti-Jewish rhetoric became intertwined with a promise of moral renewal and social reform.
Lueger modernized Vienna—expanding trams, public housing, and utilities—but he wrapped his achievements in the language of Jewish hatred. His normalization of antisemitism lowered taboos that made Hitler possible.
Mamdani’s rhetoric, while cloaked in the idioms of justice and liberation, comes dangerously close to repeating this pattern. Lueger built trams but paved the way to catastrophe. Let’s hope New York—and Mamdani—choose a different path.
