Nida.

I’m really so disgusted, as Netanyahu is saying he’s going to finish the job in Gaza, Mamdani didn’t even protest him when he was in NYC a few days ago for the general assembly, a far cry from his previous calls to arrest him. But for those who still defend this and don’t realize how harmful it is to Palestinians here’s a breakdown: He begins with “I condemn Hamas, of course.” By leading with this, he sets the stage that any discussion about Palestine must start with denouncing Palestinian resistance. That “of course” is especially insidious, it normalizes the expectation that condemning resistance is the baseline, unquestionable position. He calls Oct. 7 “a horrific war crime.” This treats an act of resistance against a colonizer as equivalent to the ongoing structural violence of settler colonialism. It accepts the lies that Israel has brainwashed the world with to manufacture consent for genocide. The framing strips the event of its context, 75+ years of occupation, dispossession, massacres, siege, and turns it into a crime in isolation. He then says, “the same set of beliefs… led me to describe what’s happening in Gaza as genocide.” This ties his recognition of genocide to the same “principled” framework that led him to condemn Palestinian resistance. It creates a false equivalence: as if condemning Hamas and condemning Israeli genocide flow from the same universal principle of international law. But genocide and resistance cannot be equated. One is the annihilation of a people. The other is the struggle of the colonized to survive. This is especially harmful as he positions himself as morally consistent and principled, but in practice he legitimizes Zionist narratives. By lumping Palestinian resistance and Israeli genocide together under the banner of “universal law,” he erases the material imbalance of power, Palestinians are being annihilated, Israel is the annihilator. This rhetoric gives cover to liberals and Zionists alike: they can point to him and say, “See, even your allies condemn Hamas while acknowledging genocide. This is the reasonable middle ground. But that “middle ground” is built on dehumanizing Palestinians, stripping them of the right to resist their annihilation. Zohran’s statement is insidious because it weaponizes the language of universality and human rights to flatten colonizer and colonized, resistance and genocide, into the same moral category. That false equivalence misrepresents reality and actively strengthens the Zionist framework at the very moment Palestinians most need their humanity affirmed.