At Yom Kippur service, NYC’s Lander, Mahmoud Khalil accuse Israel of ‘genocide’

NEW YORK — Jewish New York Congressional candidate Brad Lander and the anti-Zionist activist Mahmoud Khalil accused Israel of genocide during a Yom Kippur ceremony in New York City on Monday.

“As someone who feels the connection to Israel, who care about it, I feel today so deeply that my vidui, my confession, must center on my, on our, complicity in what I view as genocide in Gaza,” Lander told a crowd at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.

Lander is the former New York City comptroller and an ally of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He won a Democratic primary for a US House seat earlier this year and is expected to win the general election.

He acknowledged hesitancy about labeling the war in Gaza as a “genocide” and rising antisemitism.

“For those Jews who share that connection to Israel, when we confess our collective transgressions today before God, how can you not join me in seeing the wanton destruction of Gaza, the famine exacerbated by lack of aid, the land theft and murders in the West Bank, at the center of our shared transgressions?” he said. “We have been culpable.”

The event podium had a sign that read, “For the sin of genocide we atone.”

Khalil, a former Columbia University protest organizer, said, “It’s tough to repent at a time where our tuition fees, our tax dollars, our votes are being used to kill, to maim, to displace Palestinians.”

“The Zionist project is trying to make us forget that we’re all one, that we’re all humans,” he said.

“May God remember that Israel is committing genocide,” he said. “May God, through all of us, hold Israel accountable.”

NOW: Mahmoud Khalil Speaks at Yom Kippur Yizkor Service for Gaza at Grand Army Plaza Brooklyn NYC

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The Yom Kippur event was led by the far-left groups Jews for Economic and Racial Justice and Rabbis for Ceasefire. Organizers said the anti-Zionist groups IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace were collaborators.

Several hundred, including several far-left New York City councilmembers, were expected to attend, organizers said ahead of the event.

Lander is a longtime fixture in leftist Jewish circles in the city who has leaned into anti-Israel politics since the start of the war in Gaza, while identifying as a “liberal Zionist.”

He defeated US Rep. Dan Goldman in the primary campaign earlier this year. Both Lander and Goldman are Jewish progressives, but Lander is more anti-Israel and made criticism of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC central to his campaign.

Lander told The New York Times in June that the AIPAC attack line made him “queasy” given antisemitic tropes about Jews and money, but said, “I have to.”

Late last month, anti-Zionist activists at a protest berated Lander as a “little Zionist bitch,” among other epithets.

Khalil was a prominent organizer at Columbia University as anti-Zionist protests rocked the campus. He gained prominence when the Trump administration detained and attempted to deport him last year. The case remains in the courts.

Speaking to other audiences, Khalil has demonized Israel and Zionism, demanding that the “Zionist genocidal project and the ideology of supremacy that it’s built on collapse completely.”

Genocide is an international crime with a strict legal definition, and anti-Israel organizations have been accusing of trying to change that definition to vilify the Jewish state. No international courts have determined that Israel committed genocide.

Some Jewish scholars and activists consider the genocide charge libelous and harmful to Jews, along with charges of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.