What I Saw at New York’s Anti-Israel October 7 Rallies

Yesterday was a reminder of the difficulty that the pro-Palestine left has with showing grace even for the dead.

On the third anniversary of the day that Hamas gunmen and freelance killers arrived in Israel on motorcycles and paragliders and trucks, and slaughtered children and grandparents and mothers and fathers and dancing young people, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani put out a statement that was empathetic and modulated in tone … for about 50 words.

“This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers,” Mamdani began.

“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.” Alas, then came the next 162 words, as the young mayor indulged his anger with Israel.

He apparently felt obligated to give New York City—which is home to the biggest Jewish population of any city on the globe—a history lesson that seemed to suggest that Israel brought the October 7 tragedy upon itself.

“The suffering did not begin nor end that day,” he wrote.

“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.” [ Jonathan Chait: Progressive activists are sometimes on the wrong side of history ] On he went, referencing Israeli war crimes and apartheid and unbearable grief and American complicity in it all.

By the time he concluded, he had turned grace into a cudgel.

Ammiel Hirsch, a prominent New York rabbi and a longtime peace advocate, called the statement “morally perverse” and likened it to “sticking a knife into the pain of the Jewish community.” Mamdani might have thought his statement to be provocative enough to satisfy even the most anti-Zionist, anti-Israel leftist.

But portions of New York’s pro-Palestine community were insistent about observing the anniversary with a Citywide Protest Resisting Genocide since 1948 .