Some days aren’t for arguing. They’re for remembering.
October 7th is one of them.
Three years ago, Hamas crossed into Israel and killed more than 1,100 people: at a music festival, in their kitchens, in their beds. They dragged 251 more into Gaza. Grandmothers. Babies. Kids who’d gone out to dance.
On the anniversary, a mayor’s job isn’t complicated. Say that those people mattered. Stand with the New Yorkers still carrying the loss. Then step back and let the day belong to them.
Zohran Mamdani couldn’t do it.
New York’s mayor gave the victims a few lines, acknowledging the “unthinkable loss” when “Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others.” Then he turned the rest of his statement, by far the larger share, into an indictment of Israel.
“The suffering did not begin nor end that day,” he said. “It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
He went on about bombs, drones, and turned-away aid. And he closed with a call 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.”
Notice the turn. It’s a pivot dressed up as compassion. The dead get a sentence. The Jewish state gets the charge sheet: genocide, apartheid, war crimes, complicity. All of it delivered on the one day the calendar sets aside for the people Hamas murdered.
You can believe whatever you want about the war in Gaza. Plenty of New Yorkers feel strongly, and that’s their right. But there are 364 other days to make the case. A man who picks this one is telling you what he thinks matters most.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, saw it the same way.
“What he is trying to do is hijack the only day we have for the victims and survivors,” Danon told The Post. “It’s like on 9/11 you talked about victims and al-Qaeda terrorists.”
That comparison lands because New Yorkers know it in their bones. Picture a mayor on September 11th offering a line of sympathy for the people in the towers, then spending the rest of his remarks on the sins of American foreign policy. He wouldn’t make it to the weekend with his standing intact.
Danon added a warning worth hearing: “He’s dangerous and sophisticated. He will go to both ceremonies and try to say he feels for both losses of life.”
Mamdani isn’t the mayor of some faraway place. He leads the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel. He’s already been widely criticized for making Jewish New Yorkers feel unsafe. Many of them have family in Israel. Some knew people who were killed or taken.
On Wednesday, they looked to City Hall for a simple word of comfort. They got a lecture.
Leadership is mostly knowing what the moment asks of you. This moment asked for something small and human: grief, with no asterisk attached. He couldn’t manage it.
New Yorkers should remember that.
