New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s insistence that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be arrested while traveling to New York for the United Nations General Assembly has ignited a firestorm with Jewish groups accusing the mayor of having crossed the line into antisemitism.Mamdani this week reiterated his desire to execute an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in 2024 regarding allegations that Netanyahu committed war crimes in Gaza. While Mamadani admitted that he lacked the legal authority to execute such a move, the mayor released a video accusing Netanyahu and Israel of targeting “neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers,” starving “countless people,” and “gunning down” aid workers.Critics accused Mamdani of mischaracterizing and lying about Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, while ignoring the conduct of Hamas, the terrorist organization responsible for the death of countless American and Israeli citizens.
“This is no longer simply about Prime Minister Netanyahu,” the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based pro-Israel organization, wrote in a statement. “It reflects a broader pattern in which Mayor Mamdani repeatedly singles out Israel while using the prestige of his office to legitimize rhetoric that further isolates the Jewish state and deepens division here at home. At a time when Jewish New Yorkers are experiencing alarming levels of antisemitism, harassment and intimidation, they deserve a mayor who refrains from fomenting hatred against the world’s only Jewish country while maintaining the fiction that this is not anti-Jewish.”Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said that Mamdani “remains relentlessly obsessed with the world’s only Jewish state—even as Jewish New Yorkers face record levels of antisemitism and the city confronts urgent problems that demand his attention.”“That obsession reveals two things,” Greenblatt wrote on X. “First, an antisemitic worldview that doesn’t merely distort his judgment—it drives it. Second, the play-acting instincts of a perpetual student activist who’s never actually run anything, learning on the job at our expense.”Mamdani has long pledged to attempt to arrest Netanyahu if the Israeli leader chooses to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, where the confab occurs in September of each year.Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., told a U.S. TV network this week that it is Mamdani who ought to be arrested for supporting terrorists, not only Hamas, but also Iran.“A few days ago, he sent his commissioner to the U.N. to meet with the Iranian representative,” Danon told News Nation. “While the U.S. soldiers are fighting the regime in Tehran, the mayor wanted to have a dialogue with this regime. And a few weeks ago, he actually called a terrorist that we eliminated a journalist, an innocent journalist. The mayor is instigating, is promoting antisemitism.”On X, Danon condemned Mamdani for “blood libels,” contending he was “elected to serve New Yorkers, not Hamas’ propaganda.”
