By Jimmy Bitton
Tel Aviv
If you didn’t hear the other day, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that more than 70,000 Palestinians had been killed and immediately placed that number beside the word “genocide.”
We don’t usually call attention to fallacious negative pronouncements here, whereupon they’re given more oxygen. But there are certain people, at certain times, that absolutely require being called to task. Alternate realities cannot become permanent realities unless they get called out in real time. And so…
Mamdani did not tell the public how many of those killed were Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad combatants. He did not acknowledge that Hamas’s casualty figures make no distinction between civilians and fighters. He did not mention Palestinians killed by failed Palestinian rockets, internal violence, or other causes. He simply presented every reported death as though Israel had deliberately murdered 70,000 civilians. That omission is not incidental. It is the argument. None of this diminishes the suffering of innocent Palestinians. Civilian deaths are tragic, and they deserve to be discussed honestly. But honesty requires distinguishing civilians from armed members of Hamas — the terror group that began this war by massacring Israelis. Mamdani erased that distinction because the undifferentiated number serves his political purpose. “70,000” creates the emotional impact. “Genocide” supplies the accusation. Hamas jihadists disappear entirely from the sentence. Genocide is a specific legal allegation requiring evidence of an intent to destroy a protected group as such. A cumulative wartime death toll — particularly one that includes an unknown number of combatants — does not establish that intent. Mamdani did not demonstrate genocide. He merely pronounced it, relying on the emotional force of a number he refused to examine. Mamdani used the authority of his office to convert disputed wartime statistics into a predetermined ideological verdict. That tells us something important about him. He is acting as an activist who already knows the conclusion and selects only the fragments of facts that help him reach it. New Yorkers should ask a simple question: if their mayor is willing to erase every combatant from the Gaza death toll in order to manufacture a genocide narrative, on what other subjects is he prepared to manipulate the truth for political effect? The problem is not merely that Mamdani is biased against Israel. The deeper problem is that he appears willing to treat accuracy as expendable whenever accuracy interferes with his ideology.
JIMMY BITTON’s is the host of the Echoes of Jewish History podcast (https://tinyurl.com/ey4pyut6) and the founder of Echoes Media. His mission is to change the conversation about Israel where it matters most: on LinkedIn, where business leaders, executives, policymakers, and decision-makers shape conversations inside companies and institutions.
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