New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani defended his decision to mark “Nakba Day” on official city channels, pushing back on criticism from Jewish community leaders.

Speaking at a press conference announcing a second municipally operated grocery store site in the Bronx, Mamdani said the May 15 post “commemorates the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from 1947 to 1949 during the creation of the State of Israel and for the year that followed.”

He added, “I firmly believe that acknowledging any one people’s pain does not preclude you from the acknowledgment of another people’s.”

“When it comes to New Yorkers like Inea and so many others, not only has their pain never been acknowledged, but so often we have seen that even their identity is up for debate,” he said, referring to the woman featured in the Nakba Day video.

“My message to Jewish leaders across the city is that my door is always open, that I look forward to welcoming a number of those leaders to Gracie Mansion this evening through Shavuot,” Mamdani said.

Eli Kowaz, a Middle East analyst, criticized the framing used in the video and remarks.

Mamdani “repeatedly says ‘Nakba survivor’ in the video and press conference, a term coined to invoke Holocaust equivalence,” Kowaz wrote. “Both Jews and Arabs lost roughly comparable percentages in 1948—less than 1%. Neither approaches the Holocaust death rate of two-thirds of European Jews.”

Kowaz added that while Mamdani used the term “’expelled,’ historians document that many Palestinians fled during the 1948 war for multiple reasons.”

“Some were encouraged to leave by those expecting a swift Arab victory,” Kowaz wrote, adding that the mayor did not mention that Arab states’ rejection of the 1947 U.N. partition plan, the ensuing Arab-Israeli war or the displacement of roughly 850,000 Jews from Arab countries during the same period.

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