(RNS) — Let us stipulate that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a very talented politician. So why would he insist that he intended to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested up until the point when he released a two-minute video saying he doesn’t have the legal right to do so?
Especially since, according to Politico, there were advisors during his mayoral campaign last year who informed him of “longstanding statutory barriers preventing a New York City mayor from ordering the arrest of a foreign dignitary.” Surely authoritative legal opinion on the subject could have been procured prior to last week.
The simple answer is that Mamdani was reluctant to violate a pledge he made during last year’s mayoral campaign. Not that the anti-Israel hard-liners in his base have given him a hard time for admitting he couldn’t do what he said he’d do. But at minimum, reiterating his pledge gave him repeated opportunities to denounce Netanyahu as a war criminal — which he did again to kick off his I-can’t-arrest-him video.
What’s backed up the denunciation has been that arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. The warrant, issued in November of 2024, conveys an indictment alleging Netanyahu is “responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024.” (At the same time, war crimes warrants were issued for former Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant and Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif.)
To be sure, an indictment is not a conviction. But if you have any doubt that Israeli policy in Gaza has violated the Geneva Conventions on war, take a look at David Kirkpatrick’s article on President Biden’s enabling of that policy in the New Yorker. One example is Israel’s refusal to allow the International Red Cross to visit Gazan detainees.
In The Horton-Kaiser Report, an estimable new news digest, co-editor Scott Horton points out that while the United States is not a party to the ICC and thus is not obligated to arrest Netanyahu and render him to The Hague for trial, “nevertheless, the United States has the right if it wishes to arrest him and render him to justice, and indeed, the US has rendered prior indicted war criminals in just this manner.” Of course, that’s not going to happen to Netanyahu because President Trump has said it won’t.
Responding to Mamdani’s video, Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon posted on X, “Enough with the blood libels,” equating the video with the centuries-old claim that Jews kill Christian children to make Passover matzohs. (These days, right-wing Israeli politicians hurl “blood libel” at anyone who blames them or their supporters for murderous violence, including other Israeli politicians.)
“He’s fomenting hate,” Netanyahu said in an appearance on Fox News. He went on to say that Mamdani, by calling Netanyahu a war criminal, was “trying to turn one group against the other.”
If Mamdani were (despite his denials) the antisemite many Jews think he is, he’d naturally want us to stand up for a leader as widely reviled as Netanyahu has become — including in Israel. Check out, for example, this assessment by David Horovitz, the centrist editor of The Times of Israel. As of now, just 33% of Israelis think Netanyahu is the best candidate for prime minister in their upcoming elections in October.
By steering clear of defending Netanyahu on the Anti-Defamation League’s Mamdani Monitor (which wiser heads in the organized Jewish community consider ill-advised public antagonism toward the mayor), ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt was, in effect, acknowledging Netanyahu’s toxicity. Instead, Greenblatt looked for a plausible line of attack on Mamdani’s “fixation” with arresting the prime minister, first calling it “political posturing” and then stating that it was “not political theater but a dangerous dereliction of duty.”
The point is that in a time of rising antisemitism, it’s better to assail Mamdani for not doing his job than to invite people who think Netanyahu is a war criminal to conclude that anyone who defends him is worth hating too.
