In counterintelligence, you learn to read a document twice: once for what it says, and once for what hides between the words and between the paragraphs. The second reading usually tells you more.
On Oct. 7, the third anniversary of the Hamas massacre in southern Israel, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a four-paragraph statement. I counted the words. The first paragraph, 49 words, is about Oct. 7. In the other three, 162 words by my count, Hamas does not appear.
The first paragraph does what an anniversary statement must. It calls the attack “horrific war crimes.” It says Hamas “killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others.” It grieves “alongside our many friends and neighbors.”
Then the paragraph breaks, and the statement turns: “The suffering did not begin nor end that day.”
After that sentence, there are no tunnels, no rockets, and no hostages. The word “Jews” never appears at all on the anniversary of the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, from the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel. The Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt noticed within minutes: “Not once do you say ‘Jews.’” Asked about the statement, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY), a fellow Democrat, said she did not think “anything should diminish from this day.”
“War crimes” appears three times: once for Hamas, twice for Israel. “Genocide” appears once, and it is not about Hamas. The final sentence begins: “To honor the dead.” It does not say which dead.
This is not a slip. It is a template. Last year, as a candidate, Mamdani marked the second anniversary with the same skeleton: Hamas’s crime first and briefly, then a “genocidal war” and a casualty count. The numbers changed. The architecture did not.
Nor is the pivot new. On Oct. 7, 2023, before the dead had been counted, the national leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani’s organization, declared that “today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.” The formula does one job: it moves Oct. 7 out of the category of crime and into the category of consequence.
The verdict also came before the ground war. On Oct. 13, 2023, six days after the massacre, Mamdani was arrested blocking traffic outside Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn home, at a protest whose banner read: “Jews Say Stop the Genocide of Palestinians.” Not one of the 251 hostages had come home. Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza began on Oct. 27.
Closer to home, Jewish Insider reported in March that the mayor’s wife, Rama Duwaji, had “liked” Instagram posts from Oct. 7 and Oct. 8, 2023, including one that, in the outlet’s words, “unambiguously celebrated the terrorist attack.” The outlet could not establish when she liked it. A City Hall spokesperson answered that the mayor “has been clear and consistent: Hamas is a terrorist organization.” On this anniversary, he was clear for 49 words.
In a mayoral debate last October, Mamdani said he was “proud to be one of the first elected officials in the state who called for a ceasefire.” He was early, and it is worth asking what that ceasefire would have frozen in place: the hostages in the tunnels, Hamas’s battalions intact, its leadership untouched. Hamas told us what it would do with the time. Within weeks of the massacre, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told Lebanese television that Oct. 7 was “just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” A ceasefire in October 2023 would not have been peace. It would have been the intermission Hamad described.
A ceasefire did eventually come. The one the Trump administration brokered last October brought all 20 living hostages home within days. In this year’s statement, the mayor, who spent two years demanding a ceasefire, calls this one “so-called.” He counts the Palestinians killed since it took effect. He does not count the five Israeli soldiers the military says have been killed since. He does not mention that Hamas, a year later, still has not given up its weapons, or that Israel says its strikes target fighters trying to rearm.
Then the numbers: “more than 74,000 Palestinians — including more than 21,000 children.” The statement cites no source. The count it echoes is kept by Gaza’s Health Ministry, which Hamas ran throughout the war. In fairness, a senior Israeli military official told reporters in January that the ministry’s overall toll was largely accurate. But the ministry does not distinguish fighters from civilians. Before the ceasefire, the Israeli military said it had killed at least 22,000 combatants. If that estimate is even close, as many as 3 in 10 of the dead the mayor mourned as victims of genocide were fighters on the side whose “war crimes” he had condemned one paragraph earlier.
As for genocide itself, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, coined the word in 1944 to name a specific crime, the intent to destroy a people. South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice has not reached a ruling on the merits. Under the court’s schedule, Israel’s final written pleading is due in May 2029. A United Nations commission of inquiry, Amnesty International, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars have used the word. Israel rejects it. None of them is a court. The mayor of New York City has delivered a verdict the World Court has not.
Then there is the line about “every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist.” The mayor knows at least one Gaza journalist personally. Motaz Azaiza, the photographer Time magazine named to its 2024 list of the world’s 100 most influential people, attended Mamdani’s election-night party last November.
In a podcast interview released in early September, Azaiza described Oct. 7. He said he saw a vehicle of Hamas’s military wing carrying Israeli captives, watched a crowd beat them, and filmed it. “But I did not publish those videos,” he said. “Because I did not want to ruin the lives of the people who were filmed.”
Azaiza has since said the interview was “distorted, poorly translated, and taken out of context.” Readers may judge what context improves “I did not publish those videos.”
In June 2024, Israeli forces rescued three hostages from the Nuseirat home of Abdallah Aljamal, a frequent contributor to the Palestine Chronicle, a U.S.-based news site. The Israeli military described him as a Hamas operative. In Gaza, “residential building” and “journalist” are not always the categories they appear to be in a mayor’s statement.
The audience for the other 162 words was not hard to find. On the afternoon of Oct. 7, Within Our Lifetime, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Pal-Awda rallied outside City Hall. New York City’s Young Democratic Socialists of America, the youth wing of the mayor’s own organization, posted the announcement, then took it down. Mamdani’s spokesman called the group “a separate org.” The flyer carried its slogan in two languages. The English reads: “Glory to the martyrs, victory to the resistance.” The Arabic adds a clause the English leaves out: “and what is coming is greater.” Ghazi Hamad made the same promise in 2023. He used numbers.
The crowd chanted: “Mayor Mamdani, pick a side, justice or genocide.” That evening, protesters at an Oct. 7 vigil he attended in Union Square called him a traitor. He had given them “genocide,” “apartheid,” and a “so-called” ceasefire. It was not enough. It never is.
MAMDANI’S OCT. 7 STATEMENT ISN’T PRO-PALESTINIAN. IT’S PRO-HAMAS
Forty-nine words for the dead of Oct. 7. One hundred sixty-two in which their killers are never named. In my former profession, we had a word for anything whose only job is to protect what comes after it.
We called it cover.
Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and columnist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he held senior positions in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work appears in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
