New York's mayor has a really weird obsession with Israel.
The point was never to enforce the law. It was to show his Jew-hating supporters what a "tough guy" the mayor of New York City thinks he is.
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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Zohran Mamdani just made a social media video announcing that he cannot arrest Benjamin Netanyahu. As in: the prime minister of the State of Israel.
Read that sentence again.
The mayor of New York City — the person responsible for governing one of the largest, most expensive and most complicated cities in the world — felt compelled to address his constituents about his inability to arrest the prime minister of a country nearly 6,000 miles away.
Netanyahu does not govern New York. Israel is not within New York’s jurisdiction. The New York Police Department does not enforce the decisions of international courts. And the mayor of New York does not get to conduct American foreign policy.
Yet Mamdani spent more than a year promising that if Netanyahu came to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, he would have him arrested.
Legal experts repeatedly explained that he could not do this. The United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court, and New York City has no independent authority to execute its warrants. After reviving the promise in an interview with The New York Times and announcing an “active conversation” with the city’s legal department this week, Mamdani finally conceded the obvious: His administration lacks the legal power to arrest Netanyahu.
But instead of quietly acknowledging that his campaign promise had been legally impossible, Mamdani recorded a video.
“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal,” he declared, calling him “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.” He insisted that Netanyahu belonged before a court of law before acknowledging that New York City could not place him there.
That contradiction is revealing.
Mamdani says Netanyahu belongs before a court, yet he has already delivered the verdict. There has been no trial. Netanyahu has not been convicted by the International Criminal Court. The court issued an arrest warrant based on allegations that Israel disputes, but Mamdani speaks as though the legal process has already concluded.
Apparently, Netanyahu needs a court to determine his punishment but not his guilt. That is not respect for international law. It is politics dressed in legal language.
Why did this require a social media video?
Very few reasonable New Yorkers woke up wondering whether the mayor could enforce an international arrest warrant against a foreign head of government. There was no municipal emergency. No local law needed clarification. No city agency required guidance.
The video existed because the arrest pledge was never really about arresting Netanyahu. It was about being seen wanting to arrest Netanyahu.
The original promise allowed Mamdani to present himself as morally uncompromising. It gave his supporters a fantasy in which the mayor of New York could transform the city into an independent tribunal for Israel. Whether the promise was constitutional, practical, or even remotely within the powers of the office was secondary. The applause came from making the threat.
Once the city’s lawyers confirmed that the threat could not be carried out, Mamdani faced a political problem. He could admit that the pledge had been unserious. Or he could preserve the performance by recording himself passionately explaining that although he could not arrest Netanyahu, he still really, really wanted to. He chose the video.
The legal policy disappeared, but the symbolism survived.
This is what happens when politicians become content creators. Governing is slow, difficult, and frequently boring. It requires negotiating budgets, managing agencies, repairing infrastructure, and accepting compromises. Posting a video slandering the Jewish state’s prime minister is easier. It produces instant “moral clarity,” instant engagement, and instant praise from the people (the Jew-haters) already inclined to agree.
The city may not have obtained an arrest, but Mamdani obtained valuable content for his ilk.
New York City has enough problems of its own. Residents are struggling with housing costs, transportation, public safety, sanitation, education, and the everyday difficulty of remaining in a city that increasingly feels unaffordable. These are not glamorous problems. Solving them does not generate the same emotional reaction as declaring a foreign leader a war criminal.
But that is the job.
Mamdani was elected mayor — not secretary of state, attorney general of the United States, or prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. His authority is enormous within New York and almost nonexistent outside it. That distinction should matter.
A mayor is free to have opinions about foreign affairs. He can criticize Netanyahu, Israel, the war in Gaza, or American foreign policy. But there is a difference between expressing an opinion and turning City Hall into a stage for international political performance.
Mamdani did not merely say that he opposed Netanyahu. He made a specific promise to use the police power of New York City to seize a foreign head of government, while completely (and probably knowingly) lacking the authority to do so.
Imagine if a conservative mayor promised to arrest a foreign leader beloved by “progressives,” despite being repeatedly told that municipal law provided no basis for the arrest. The pledge would correctly be described as authoritarian, reckless, and legally illiterate. Mamdani’s politics do not make the behavior more responsible.
There is also an obvious question that Mamdani and his supporters would prefer not to answer: Why is this consuming his attention?
The world contains dictatorships, terrorist organizations, military juntas, and governments accused of horrific abuses. Foreign officials from countries with appalling human rights records pass through New York regularly for meetings at the United Nations.
Yet Mamdani has made the arrest of Israel’s prime minister part of his political identity. The fixation itself deserves scrutiny.
For a particular segment of Western politics, Israel is not simply another country whose government can be criticized. It is the country that must constantly be placed on trial. Its leaders must be arrested. Its soldiers must be prosecuted. Its supporters must be interrogated. Its existence must be justified again and again.
Other conflicts are treated as tragedies. Israel is treated as a crime scene.
That obsession inevitably reaches beyond Netanyahu. New York is home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the world outside Israel. Many New York Jews have family in Israel, have lived there, have visited repeatedly, or consider the country part of their identity. When their mayor turns the hypothetical arrest of Israel’s current leader into a recurring political spectacle, they understand the message: Israel will occupy a uniquely prosecutorial place in this version of New York’s politics.
Israel will not merely be criticized. It will be indicted, condemned, and threatened whenever an opportunity arises — even when the threat has no legal foundation and no connection to governing New York City.
The most disturbing part of Mamdani’s pledge is the order in which everything happened: First came the promise, then came the legal review, finally came the admission that he lacked the authority. That is the opposite of responsible government.
A serious candidate first determines what the law permits and then makes a promise. Mamdani made the emotionally satisfying promise and left the lawyers to discover whether reality would cooperate. It did not.
His defenders may argue that no harm was done. Netanyahu was not arrested. The city ultimately recognized the limits of its power, but failed political theater still tells us something about the performer.
It tells us that Mamdani was willing to campaign on a power he did not possess. It tells us that he was prepared to invoke the New York Police Department in an international dispute without first establishing that he had a lawful basis to do so. And it tells us that after the proposal collapsed, he remained more concerned with reaffirming the accusation than acknowledging the recklessness of the promise.
He did not apologize for misleading voters. He made another video about Netanyahu.
In the end, Mamdani arrested no one. He changed no law. He advanced no prosecution. He protected no New Yorker. He ended no war. He helped no Palestinian. He brought no hostage home. He simply created another spectacle in which a Jewish leader was symbolically placed in handcuffs for the approval of a political audience.
That is what New York looks like in modern politics.
It does not always require an actual arrest. Sometimes the accusation is enough. Sometimes the threat is the product. Sometimes a politician invokes courts, warrants, and police officers not because he possesses the authority to use them, but because the image of prosecuting Israel communicates the identity he wants to project.
Mamdani could have responded to the legal review in one sentence: New York City does not have jurisdiction, and the matter belongs to the federal government. Instead, he delivered another indictment — because this was never primarily about what New York City could legally do, it was about showing his Jew-hating supporters whom he wanted punished.
Zohran Mamdani is entitled to a lot of things, but he is not entitled to pretend that the mayoralty gives him powers it does not. New Yorkers elected a mayor, and they would be best off if he stayed in his lane.
He's not tough. He's a sicko creepy creep, like all Jew hating bottom feeders. Maybe he should actually work on being mayor of NYC for awhile. The job he was elected to do. There are now homeless encampments, flooding throughout the City, and of course a rise in antisemitic hate crimes -but I think he enjoys that last one. The reality is that he never wanted to run the City. He has no idea what a real job is. He was elected simply because he is a Jew-hating pig.
Performative theatre 🎭. Really gross pandering