The prime minister of Israel spent part of Tuesday making a video about the mayor of New York. He posted it, and he said he is bringing the subject to the United Nations on Thursday.
The video
Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Zohran Mamdani directly and did not soften it.
Shame on you, Mr. Mamdani.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, September 22
In the same message he accused Mamdani of supporting, in his words, the Hamas terrorist monsters who butchered our people, and of inciting riots against New York Jews. He said he intends to tell the truth about Mamdani when he speaks at the General Assembly.
Netanyahu lands in New York Thursday morning and is scheduled to address the assembly at 2 p.m. He is expected to fly home shortly after.
What Mamdani said first
This did not start Tuesday. Mamdani sat with CNN on Monday and used the same language he used as a candidate.
A war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Benjamin Netanyahu, CNN, September 21
He also walked back one specific thing. During the campaign he said Netanyahu would be arrested if he set foot in New York. On Monday he acknowledged a mayor does not have that power, and instead called on the International Criminal Court to enforce its own arrest warrant.
The response Tuesday
Mamdani was asked about the video at a press conference on an unrelated subject. He gave it one line.
We all know that what the prime minister has said in that video is not true.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, September 22
He has not backed off the war criminal description. He has not repeated the arrest threat either.
Why a mayor is in this at all
New York is not a normal city on this question, and both men know it.
It holds the largest Jewish population of any city outside Israel, a large and growing Muslim and Arab population, and the United Nations headquarters sits in Turtle Bay. Every September the General Assembly turns midtown into a security zone and puts world leaders on New York streets.
It is also the reason the fight is useful to both sides. A prime minister facing an ICC warrant gets to argue with a critic instead of about the warrant. A new mayor gets to be the person a head of state took the time to attack.
The pressure on Israel from friendly governments has been real this year. The UK banned imports from West Bank settlements, with France and Canada following. Talks have continued anyway, including Kushner meeting Netanyahu after rare direct contact with Hamas in Egypt.
The BeezLoop Take
Start with the part that is actually checkable. Netanyahu accused the mayor of inciting riots against New York Jews. That is a specific charge about events in a specific city, and it comes with no incident, no date and no police complaint attached. A head of government making an accusation that serious owes the public the underlying facts, and until those arrive it should be read as an attack, not a finding.
Mamdani does not get a pass either. He spent a campaign telling New Yorkers he would have Netanyahu arrested, and this week explained that the job does not come with that power. That was true the whole time. Every lawyer in the city could have told him so, and plenty did. Saying it anyway was not a legal position, it was an applause line, and walking it back after the votes are counted is a cost his voters should get to weigh.
What he has not done is retreat from the substance, and that distinction matters. War criminal is a description a mayor is allowed to use about a foreign leader under an ICC warrant. Promising an arrest he cannot make is a different thing. He was wrong about the second and has not been shown wrong about the first.
The larger point is that neither man is really talking to the other. Netanyahu is talking to an Israeli electorate and to Washington. Mamdani is talking to a coalition that put him in Gracie Mansion partly on this issue. Thursday at 2 p.m. is a speech, not a negotiation, and nothing said in that hall will change a single thing in Gaza or on a New York block.
Meanwhile the mayor has a city to run. He went to the White House to pitch Trump on 12,000 homes and came out with a vague answer about federal money. That is the file New Yorkers will judge him on in four years, and it does not get easier while he is running a long-distance argument with a prime minister.
The question
Does a New York mayor have any business in a fight with a foreign head of state, or is that part of the job in the city that hosts the UN? And if Netanyahu has evidence that the mayor incited riots against Jewish New Yorkers, why has none of it been produced?
Sources: CNN · NBC New York · Jerusalem Post · Jewish Telegraphic Agency
