A lot has already been said about this statement, including by the mayor himself, who doubled down despite witnessing first-hand last night how his hateful rhetoric feeds into the streets. The pro-Hamas movement in NYC turned his own language against him, accusing him of abandoning the Palestinian cause, yet even being confronted by the movement he has helped embolden apparently gave him no reason to reconsider. I am an Israeli and, at least for now, a New Yorker. A month after I moved to this city, my brother-in-law, Omri Miran, was kidnapped from his home in front of my sister and their two little girls. He spent 738 days as a hostage of Hamas, while my family, who fortunately survived the massacre, lived with the fear that he would never return. October 7 carries memories and pain that we should be allowed to process without having them recruited into someone else’s political campaign. Yesterday I wanted space to remember those we lost and reflect on what these past three years have meant for my family and community. Instead, the mayor’s statement, like similar messages from political leaders around the world, asked us to absorb libellous accusations alongside our grief. What makes this statement sinister is that it appropriates October 7, turning the anniversary of a massacre committed against us into an occasion to indict us. People murdered in their homes, families burned alive, young people slaughtered at a music festival, women raped and assaulted, and children dragged into captivity are afforded a paragraph before their suffering becomes the introduction to the mayor’s political agenda. He acknowledges Hamas’s “horrific war crimes,” but gives far more space to Palestinian suffering while largely removing the perpetrators, their ideology and their responsibility for what followed. There is nothing about the celebration of the massacre, the support for those who committed it or the participation of some Palestinian civilians. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organisations are embedded in Palestinian political and social life, and any discussion that claims to offer context must account for their decisions and actions. Palestinian suffering does not erase the agency of those who committed October 7. The imbalance runs through his choice of words. Israelis were “killed,” and the hostages become “251 others,” with nothing about the babies, children, parents and grandparents behind that number, or the starvation, torture, sexual violence and psychological abuse they endured. He offers no sense of what it meant to wonder whether you would ever return, or whether anyone would still be alive to welcome you. When he turns to Israel, however, he reaches for “genocide,” one of the gravest accusations in international law. Hamas “killed” and committed “horrific war crimes,” while Israel is assigned an “ongoing genocide,” with no explanation of how he establishes that legal conclusion. He presents his accusation with the certainty of a verdict, as though using the word settles the question. That choice of language changes the meaning of the entire statement. Once Israel is cast as the perpetrator of an ongoing genocide, mourning October 7 on its own terms becomes morally incomplete, and sympathy for the victims becomes a brief concession before the reader is directed towards the supposedly more pressing duty of condemning their country. His repeated use of “every” reinforces that framing, collapsing different incidents and decisions into one uninterrupted account of Israeli criminality in which Hamas’s operations, its use of civilian infrastructure and its choices disappear. The same selectivity shapes his line that “the suffering did not begin or end that day.” The conflict has a history, but he invokes it to move attention away from the massacre while ignoring the history of terrorism and wars against Israel. If he insists on wider context, that context cannot consist only of what supports his indictment. I believe Palestinian civilians deserve compassion, safety, freedom from Hamas and self-determination based on territorial compromise, mutual recognition and an end to the conflict. None of that requires appropriating the anniversary of our families’ slaughter, and there are 364 other days to make that argument. The mayor’s words carry the authority of his office. They shape how our neighbours see us, how people justify treating us and whether Israelis and Jews feel safe in this city. Having encountered the movement’s appetite for accusation himself last night, he should consider what it means for those who face it without his platform or protection. We deserve to mourn without having our grief appropriated, our dead reduced to a preamble and accusations against our country presented as unquestionable truths. There is a time and place for everything, Mayor Mamdani, but you could not give us even this one day.