On July 21, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal” and an “architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,” while acknowledging he had no authority to do anything about it. But Mamdani’s national prominence as a progressive leader makes his comments disturbing and worth rebutting.
This assertion, irrelevant to his duties as mayor, reveals a deliberate ignorance of the facts. As demonstrated below, Mamdani’s contention is reduced to a claim that Israel committed genocide by resisting a terrorist group that deliberately uses its own civilians as human shields.
For starters, Israel’s war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’ attack, including the murder of over 1,200 men, women and children, including babies, on Oct. 7, 2023. And Hamas made clear that these attacks would continue. On Lebanese television later that month, a Hamas politburo member, Ghazi Hamad, stated that the October 7 attack “is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third and a fourth.” Israel had no choice but to respond.
Second, as part of its efforts to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza, Israel’s military made phone calls, dropped leaflets, and sent text messages to civilians residing in buildings in Gaza designated for attack to give them an opportunity to escape. The Israeli air force would also target a building with a loud, but non-lethal, bomb to warn civilians that they were in the vicinity of a potential target so that they could avoid harm. That does not sound like genocide.
By contrast, Hamas’ strategy was to put its own civilians in harm’s way by building a tunnel system under cities that dared Israel to kill civilians in order to get to Hamas’ warriors. Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas leader, acknowledged that Hamas’ tunnels were for protecting its fighters, not Gazan civilians, stating that protecting Gazans was not Hamas’ responsibility.
According to the Modern War Institute at West Point, “[f]or the first time in the history of tunnel warfare,” Hamas “built a tunnel network to gain not just a military advantage, but a political advantage, as well” because “Hamas weaved its vast tunnel networks into the society on the surface,” such that “[d]estroying the tunnels [was] virtually impossible without adversely impacting the population living in Gaza.”
In short, Hamas deliberately used tunnels beneath populated cities, including civilian hospitals and schools, in an effort to give Israel the Hobson’s choice of surrender or causing civilian deaths. Hamas even hid Israeli hostages in its tunnels.
As a result, Prime Minister Netanyahu observed, “We are using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines “genocide” to require, among other elements, the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” This requires in legal terms, “dolus specialis” — a specific intent to destroy a substantial part of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
But Israel’s intent was to defeat an armed terrorist organization, whose express intent is to destroy the Israeli people (which qualifies as genocide).
Indeed, Hamas’ charters establish this specific intent to destroy a national group, that is, genocide. Its original charter in 1988 expressly called on “Islam” to “obliterate” Israel. Hamas’s subsequent charter in 2017 asserts that its goal is to “liberate Palestine,” which it states “extends from the River Jordan … to the Mediterranean,” which, of course, translates to the erasure of Israel.
Moreover, Hamas intended to sacrifice its own Palestinian civilian population in Gaza by deliberately putting them in the line of fire, suggesting an intent to destroy a part of their own national, ethnic and religious group.
Mamdani’s ill-considered accusation of genocide against Netanyahu, however, illustrates a bigger problem — basing one’s opinion on television images of the destruction in Gaza (which were solely caused by Hamas’ strategy), rather than bothering himself with the facts.
In his last book before he died, Henry Kissinger lamented that the printed page has “lost its former dominance” and “the costs of television are substantial, privileging emotional display over self-command.” Mamdani’s ignorant opinion illustrates Kissinger’s concern, relying on emotional display rather than the facts. If his mayoral administration continues to elevate emotions over facts, New York is in for a bitter four years.
Daniel M. Kolkey is an attorney, former judge, and former counsel to Gov. Pete Wilson. He serves on the board of the Pacific Research Institute.