In a video released earlier this week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sits behind his desk and looks directly at the camera. He starts with a stark declaration: “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.”

As he goes on, he soberly details the horrors that Prime Minister Netanyahu has inflicted on the civilian population of Gaza since 2023. The more than 73,000 confirmed dead. The tens of thousands of maimed children, their limbs often having to be amputated without anesthesia because of Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s medical infrastructure. The starvation. The killings of journalists and aid workers. The “targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers,” aimed at “denying newborns even the chance to live.”

Little wonder that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued a warrant for the prime minister’s arrest. When Mamdani was running for mayor, he argued that the next time Netanyahu comes to New York, the NYPD should put him in handcuffs. Many argued that this would exceed the authority of New York or any other municipality, especially given that, although a large majority of the countries in the world recognize the authority of the ICC, the United States does not. In the new video, he reluctantly agrees, saying:

My administration has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant if Benjamin Netanyahu came here. It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government, however, does — and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.

And I want to be equally clear: Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City.

The video was a political earthquake. It has received tens of millions of views across social media platforms. Israel’s defenders have been predictably furious.

The Strange, Lazy Arguments of Netanyahu’s Defenders

The Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a statement saying that “Mayor Mamdani did not simply express a personal political opinion” but rather “used the authority, symbolism, and credibility of the mayor’s office to issue what amounted to an official public address declaring that the democratically elected leader of the world’s only Jewish state is a ‘war criminal’ who is ‘not welcome in New York City.’” This, they said, was a “profound misuse of the office entrusted to [Mamdani] by all New Yorkers.”

Why Israel being the “only” Jewish state is supposed to be relevant is anyone’s guess. (Were condemnations of South African president P. W. Botha in the 1980s objectionable because South Africa was the only country dominated by the Afrikaner ethnic group?) And the claim that Israeli elections are “democratic” is risible. Since 1967, Israel has not only controlled the West Bank but built many cities full of its own citizens there, and it treats those settlers as “living in Israel” rather than “living abroad” for every legal purpose. But the millions of Palestinian residents there have never been given Israeli citizenship, since doing so would mean there would be “too many” citizens of the wrong ethnicity. That’s simply not a democracy.

More importantly, though, you don’t have to be ideologically opposed to Zionism, or have any particular opinion about the geopolitics of Israel/Palestine, to agree with Zohran’s call for the federal government to join the ICC and enforce the warrant against Netanyahu. You simply have to believe that international law should be applied equally to every nation on the planet.

The widespread claims that Jewish New Yorkers (a great many of whom voted for Mamdani and agreed with every word of the video) are somehow “endangered” by his call to arrest a genocidal leader simply don’t pass the smell test. The problem with Netanyahu isn’t that he’s Jewish, any more than the reason the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin is that Putin is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Rather, the belief of Mayor Mamdani, the ICC, and the multiple United Nations inquiries that have found that Netanyahu committed genocide in Gaza is that laws apply equally to everyone, and that no political office in any state should protect war criminals from being brought to justice.

It’s been nearly three years since the beginning of Netanyahu’s campaign to systematically eliminate any possibility of normal Palestinian life resuming in Gaza. In that time, an estimated 90 percent of the civilian population have been displaced from their homes by the Israeli military. A few months after the operation commenced, South Africa’s legal filing at the ICC included twelve pages of quotes from Israeli officials expressing genocidal intent. On the ground, it has been one of the best-documented genocides in human history. Anyone around the world with access to social media could see a continual stream of photos and video clips of murdered and maimed men, women, children, and babies; of mass destruction rained down on civilian targets; and of war crimes being carried out face-to-face by Israeli soldiers. Some of those soldiers, apparently utterly indifferent to the world’s reaction, filmed themselves posing with the lingerie of Palestinian women who’d been killed or fled for their lives, or playing with the toys of dead or mutilated children. And all this time, as the mayor noted in his address, “we, as Americans,” continued to “pay for the bombs that do the killing.”

After three years of steadfast American support for the genocide, the reaction of an overwhelming majority of people who left comments on Mamdani’s video seemed to be shocked relief that a prominent elected official was willing to state the case this plainly and forcefully. While the mayor’s critics may sneer that the city’s lawyers wouldn’t sign off on him ordering the NYPD to carry out the arrest themselves (“see, he overpromised!”), the reaction of ordinary people to the revelation that someone who mutilated tens of thousands of children is allowed to strut around New York without fear of arrest is more likely to be shock and disgust.

As Mamdani emphasized, the federal government does have the power to bring Netanyahu to justice if the prime minister sets foot on American soil. Donald Trump, of course, has no interest in exercising that power. But every Democrat who runs for president in 2028 should be asked whether they plan to heed the mayor’s call to enforce international law.

The Bottom Line

Much of the commentary from media talking heads has been about the politics of the video. Will the mayor get points with voters for stating the case so powerfully, or lose points for being unable to order the arrest himself as he’d initially hoped? How will this change city hall’s relationship to the White House? Does the whole thing distract from other aspects of Mamdani’s agenda?

If you care about human rights and international law, though, all of this is distantly secondary. For decades, each new New York City mayor would visit Israel to prove his great love for that country. (As far as I can tell, just about exactly none of the people currently complaining about Mamdani weighing in on Israel/Palestine instead of sticking to local matters ever complained about this practice.) Even the fairly progressive Bill de Blasio made the pilgrimage. Mamdani’s immediate predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, liked to talk about the “unbreakable bond” between his city and the Middle Eastern ethnostate. Two years ago, the idea of a New York City mayor sitting behind his desk and stating plainly that Israel’s leader is a war criminal who should be behind bars would have been utterly unthinkable.

Clearly, the world has changed. It’s long past time.

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