Hamas<\/a> surrenders or it\u2019s removed from power as a fighting force.<\/p>\n![\"New](\"https:\/\/images.jpost.com\/image\/upload\/f_auto,fl_lossy\/c_fill,g_faces:center,h_537,w_822\/700136\"\/)
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pictured during his first day in office, January 1, 2026. (credit: Dave Sanders\/Pool via REUTERS)<\/p>\n
Those demands may be accepted or rejected, but their existence reveals the war\u2019s stated purpose. A campaign fought to force an enemy\u2019s surrender, as the Allies fought Germany and Japan in 1945, is fundamentally different from a campaign whose purpose is the destruction of a people.<\/p>\n
No historical genocide had an off-switch. The Holocaust would not have ended had Europe\u2019s Jews surrendered. Rwanda\u2019s killers did not pause for concessions from the Tutsi. The Ottoman authorities did not offer Armenians terms under which the deportations and mass killings would cease.<\/p>\n
In each case, extermination was the point. The killing was not a means to an end; it was the end itself. By contrast, from the outset of the war, Israel publicly identified military and political conditions that would bring the war to a close. Equating a war fought for surrender with campaigns fought for annihilation drains the word \u201cgenocide\u201d of the very meaning that gives it moral force.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s conduct is also difficult to reconcile with the claim of exterminatory intent. Throughout the war, it facilitated the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, supported polio vaccination campaigns that reached more than 500,000 Gazan children, and issued evacuation warnings by leaflet, text, phone call, and other means before military operations.<\/p>\n
Military lawyers were embedded in the targeting process, giving them the authority to reduce the size of a munition, delay a strike, or cancel one altogether when anticipated civilian harm was deemed disproportionate under international humanitarian law. Israel\u2019s critics count the strikes that occurred. Almost no one counts the strikes that never happened because military lawyers stopped them.<\/p>\n
Israel tries to reduce civilian casualties<\/p>\n
None of this settles every question about proportionality. Armies often fight well and badly within the same campaign. But a military that warns civilians, facilitates massive aid, vaccinates children in enemy-controlled territory, and routinely aborts strikes to reduce civilian casualties is simply not behaving like a military engaged in the extermination of a people. Whatever else one calls it, it\u2019s not \u201cgenocide.\u201d<\/p>\n
The deeper problem is moral and historical, not legal. For centuries, Jews have been cast not merely as wrong or even dangerous, but as uniquely malevolent \u2013 poisoners of wells during the Black Death, ritual murderers in the blood libel, a secret corrupting hand behind governments and markets in modern antisemitism.<\/p>\n
Ordinary events or conflicts become evidence of extraordinary Jewish evil. Many Jews hear \u201cuniquely genocidal\u201d applied to the only Jewish state through that lens \u2013 not because Israel should be immune from criticism, no democracy is, but because it is judged by a vocabulary applied to no other nation at war. That is not criticism. It is hyperbolic exceptionalism masquerading as principle.<\/p>\n
The selectivity gives it away. Mamdani built a public identity around condemning Israel long before he held office, and this pattern has continued in City Hall.<\/p>\n
When an anti-Israel mob tried to storm a New York synagogue hosting an event for Jews exploring immigration to Israel \u2013 his office\u2019s response was to accuse the synagogue of violating international law.<\/p>\n
This was followed by him libelously describing a Hamas terrorist killed by Israel as a \u201cjournalist\u201d and by repeatedly making genocide accusations culminating in his viral video calling Netanyahu an \u201carchitect of genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n
Against this backdrop, an identifiably Jewish man was stabbed on the Upper West Side, steps from the Barney Greengrass restaurant. And the day after that, Mamdani named 18 lawyers to the panel that screens judges, including those who hear hate crime cases, in a city with more Jewish lawyers than any other in America, yet not one of them was Jewish.<\/p>\n
Taken together, these episodes reveal a pattern. Mamdani has not built a comparable campaign (or any campaign) against Iran, whose regime executes dissidents, crushes protests by the thousands, and exports terror across the region \u2013 nor against any other government genuinely responsible for mass atrocities. \u201cGenocide\u201d is the word he reaches for once, against one country. That is not a legal judgment. It is a target.<\/p>\n
His defenders will say officials must be free to condemn what they believe violates international law. Fair enough. But authority carries a corresponding duty, and it scales with the accusation.<\/p>\n
The more inflammatory the charge, the greater the obligation to get it right. \u201cGenocide\u201d is not a synonym for a brutal war; it describes something categorically different, and every time it is stretched to fit a war that doesn\u2019t meet its definition, the word has less left for the next atrocity that does.<\/p>\n
That is the real charge against Mamdani. Not that he is wrong about Israel and Gaza, though he certainly is. It is that he has taken a word forged to describe the mass-extermination of millions of Armenians and Jews and applied it to a war whose legal characterization remains deeply contested.<\/p>\n
A war whose approximately 72,000-person death toll \u2013 according to Hamas-run authorities \u2013 combines civilians and combatants and is compiled by institutions that attribute virtually every death in Gaza to Israel. It is the casual invocation of history\u2019s gravest accusation.”<\/p>\n
A mayor willing to spend that word so cheaply \u2013 and who has repeatedly minimized or sidelined Jewish concerns at home \u2013 has told New York\u2019s Jews how lightly he regards the fears of a community confronting a historic surge in antisemitic hostility.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Few words carry the weight of \u201cgenocide.\u201d Raphael Lemkin coined it in the shadow of the Holocaust to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[496,7889,537,1411,14814,37,389,49,4204,8983],"class_list":["post-229568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-germany","tag-hamas","tag-holocaust","tag-israel","tag-japan","tag-middle-east","tag-new-york","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117010288354284792","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}