David Morales, candidate for mayor of Providence, who will challenge incumbent Brett Smiley for the Democratic Party nomination in the Sep 9 primary election, has made disturbing statements that, in my opinion, should be disqualifying. Morales has characterized Israel’s conduct in Gaza as “genocide,” which is offensive and inherently antisemitic.
Why is local government preoccupied with foreign policy controversies? That’s a good question, but it hasn’t stopped city officials from staging distracting publicity stunts with the effect of driving a wedge through the community, such as flying the Palestinian Arab flag from City Hall to “globalize the intifada.”
It is fair to criticize the conduct of Israel, such as arguing that its response to the Hamas attack on Oct 7, 2023, was disproportionate or excessive. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is quite possibly less popular in his own country than in America, given that the Hamas attack occurred on his watch, in itself traditionally career-ending for a public official, and he is facing an imminent election he is widely expected to lose. It is even within the bounds of reasonable discourse to argue that Israeli conduct has reached the stage of war crimes, such as failing to take due account of innocent civilians and non-combatants.
But “genocide” Is a word with a specific definition: it does not mean simply killing a lot of people, which is pretty unavoidable in wars since time immemorial, but has a precise legal pedigree grounded in the Genocide Convention treaty of 1948. What is critical for our purposes here is that an essential element of genocide, as defined by international law, is the intent to destroy an entire people.
The word “genocide” was coined by legal scholar Raphael Lemkin in the 1940s to describe a new crime of such scope that we had no word for it: the intentional mass extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany under Hitler, two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, with the stated goal of killing every Jew on Earth.
The allegation that Israel has committed “genocide” is known as “genocide inversion,” grounded in a false worldview that Jewish Israelis are “European colonialists” seeking to displace indigenous peoples despite their own thoroughly documented history in the land going back more than 3,000 years and, therefore, necessarily implies an intent to wipe out the Palestinian Arab people, which is demonstrably untrue. If the goal of Israel were really genocide against the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza, it would be difficult to explain why the population has grown from 0.3 million to 2.1 million from 1967 when Israel acquired control of the territory to now, according to the International Data Base of the US Census Bureau, and is predicted to double again in the next few decades, currently increasing 2.07% every year with a birth rate of 3.38 per woman, and an average life expectancy of 74.8 years. Even using the word “murder” for deaths in Gaza improperly implies intent.
On the Club Ambition Podcast (Sep 15, 2025), Morales said, “We cannot turn a blind eye to the genocide that’s happening in Gaza. We have had thousands of innocent children and civilians that have been murdered. And as a taxpayer, alongside a lot of other neighbors in our city, I do not believe that our tax dollars should be going towards weapons that are being used to murder innocent people overseas.”
Morales used his official Twitter/X account to back a voter initiative plan to prohibit the city from doing business with any country that engages in “apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide,” avoiding any admission that it specifically targets Israel, a point called out by CCN Rhode Island. In 2024, the Providence City Council considered an ordinance of similar effect, which mayor Smiley said, “Reeks of antisemitism.” In a statement, Smiley wrote, “I am deeply concerned and disappointed in the city council’s proposed divestment ordinance. The ordinance is divisive and polarizing and will only make members of our Jewish community feel further isolated and targeted.” Anti-Israel rhetoric from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been seen by the Jewish community as contributing to a climate of fear, with incidents such as the stabbing of a man exiting the Jewish Center while wearing a yarmulke on Jul 23 by a suspect –– ironically but coincidentally named “Morales” –– who police said shouted, “Allahu akbar!”
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Not only is Israel not an “apartheid” state by any means, but one-fifth of its citizens are non-Jewish Arabs who enjoy full civil rights, including the right to vote and be elected to the Knesset, the national parliament, where they are soon expected to play a significant role in the electoral defeat of Netanyahu and the incumbent government.
Many people of good conscience are critical of Israel, and everyone acknowledges that the circumstances in Gaza are a humanitarian tragedy that has killed and otherwise gravely harmed untold numbers of innocent civilians. However, my view is that the blood of these innocents is on the hands of Hamas, the fanatical Islamist militant group that invaded Israel, intentionally murdering about 1,200 people, often raping them first, and abducting about 250 hostages, including children and elderly. For the “progressive left” to deny the obvious moral consequences of the Hamas attack is epistemic cowardice.
Israel withdrew in 2005 from Gaza in the dashed hope that the Palestinian Arabs would govern themselves and transition to peaceful mutual coexistence. Instead, Hamas exploited the Israeli withdrawal to escalate a civil war against rival Fatah, abandoning any effort to help their own Palestinian Arab people, in pursuit of an Islamist theocracy committed, in the words of the explicitly and literally genocidal Hamas charter, to destroy Israel and murder all Jews.
It has long been known that Hamas planned the attack at least one year in advance, evidenced by recovered notes handwritten by Yahya Sinwar, military head of the organization, as reported by The New York Times in Oct 2025, instructing the invaders to kill or kidnap anyone they encountered, burn entire villages, and “Slit their throats. Slit them as you are trained.”
Recently, more notes handwritten by Sinwar were released, dated August 24, 2022, more than one year before the attack, showing that he expected and wanted to provoke Israel to destroy Gaza: “Defense plan: The enemy will not hesitate to use all the means and weapons at its disposal, not only through attack but also by other means. It may even use a nuclear bomb. But first, it will be surprised by the attack and descend into chaos.… This campaign is a battle of life or death…”
Hamas counted on not only their own martyrdom, but taking the entire Palestinian Arab population down with them: that was their plan. Hamas strategy depended on useful idiots committed to aggressive ignorance, unwilling to confront the unpleasant reality of defensive war by Israel. For decades, Hamas has used children as suicide bombers, and publicly lists child soldiers as “killed in action.” Yes, many innocent Gazans died in a terrible tragedy, and maybe Israel could have acted differently to lessen that. But under no circumstances was this “genocide,” and insisting it was, falsely imputes intent to Israel, implying a necessarily antisemitic irony that the Jewish state emerging from the Nazi Holocaust intentionally perpetrated another one of their own.
Morales is factually wrong to accuse Israel of “genocide.” In the Democratic primary, he is running against an emphatically pro-Israel incumbent in Brett Smiley, who converted to Judaism a few years ago. The winner of the primary will face Republican candidate David Talan, who is also Jewish and has been emphatically pro-Israel for at least 30 years of his involvement in local politics. Regarded as unlikely to win the nomination, if Morales pulls off an upset the result will be a polarizing and divisive mayoral race that will embolden avowed antisemites and crazy people, no matter how much he insists he does not want that, bringing national attention to a nasty fight in which the city has no real stake.