ZIP IT ZOHRAN

The Jewish Chronicle reports that Israel’s Oct. 27th election “is … set to be an extremely tense contest”. The face-off between P.M. Bibi Netanyahu and challenger ex-IDF General Gadi Eisenkot is expected to be extremely close. Bibi has been endorsed by Trump. Naturally.

Three years to the day from Hamas’s stunning attack on Israel, New York’s Mayor, Zohran Mamdani said “This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. 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”.

He should have stopped right there.

Instead, he went on to assail Israel:

“The suffering did not begin nor end that day. 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. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them—all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.

“Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity”.

Though I generally agree with him on his assessment of Israeli conduct, I have to differ with his assertion that Israel’s war in Gaza is “genocide”. He must know better: the plan to exterminate six million Jews was agreed on around a table at the Wansee conference by Hitler and his top military leaders in January, 1942; that was a planned genocide.

Razing Gaza has not eliminated Hamas. Far from it. However, it is indeed a war crime for which Bibi is unlikely ever to be tried. Civilians, sadly including thousands of children, are war’s collateral. Hamas deliberately plants its fighters among the civilian population — in schools, hospitals, other public places, and even homes. It is a deliberate strategy but for every militant killed, another takes his place.

The US obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Truman was cheered. Though the bombings killed an estimated 246,000 to 300,000 civilians, it ended WWII. No one accused him of genocide. Under Bibi, Israel has run amok. That he kept a war going to keep himself in power doomed many hostages in Hamas custody.

The Israeli election is too close to call.