New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani needed at least three days to arrive at a conclusion that many legal observers considered obvious: as he acknowledged in a July 21 video posted to X, he does not have the authority to direct the NYPD to arrest Israel’s prime minister on war-crimes allegations.
“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal,” the self-described democratic socialist mayor said at the start of the message.
The video landed about 72 hours after Mamdani told The New York Times that city lawyers were involved in what he called “an active conversation” over whether such an order would be lawful. The question carried political weight because Mamdani had previously made the arrest of Netanyahu a campaign promise.
“My administration has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law,” Mamdani said somberly, before conceding that City Hall “does not have the independent legal authority” to act on the International Criminal Court warrant issued in November 2024, a move critics have characterized as overtly political.
Any lingering hopes Mamdani may have had of seeing Netanyahu taken into custody during a future visit to New York — most likely for the United Nations General Assembly in September, an event the Israeli leader has attended many times — were also undercut by President Trump. A day before Mamdani’s video, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.”
Had the city’s attorneys somehow reached a different answer, it is not hard to imagine the next “active conversation” turning to the extraordinary consequences of any attempted confrontation between the NYPD and Netanyahu’s security team — a detail that would likely include Israeli agents, Diplomatic Security personnel and other federales assigned by the Trump administration.
The legal framework is hardly obscure. Under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which the United States ratified in 1972, visiting heads of state and diplomats are protected from criminal jurisdiction. Separately, America’s agreement with the United Nations requires the U.S., as the organization’s host country, to allow representatives of member states access to UN headquarters.
Why the binding force of host country agreements was unclear to Mamdani and his legal team for even half a minute — let alone several days — remains difficult to explain.
It took New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (above) at least three days to determine that the law does not permit him to order the New York Police Department to arrest Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on war-crimes charges
‘Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal,’ the self-described democratic socialist mayor began of the Israeli leader, who is slated to visit New York in September
President Trump declared in a Truth Social post that ‘Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America’
In August 2011, for example, when the Obama administration sanctioned Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mualem for his role in bloody crackdowns ordered by the regime of Bashar al-Assad – real bad guys – State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland was asked by reporters whether Mualem could still attend the General Assembly. ‘My understanding,’ Nuland replied, ‘is that under our obligations as U.N. host, it would not preclude him from going to the U.N. in the same way that [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is not precluded from going to the U.N.’
Nor did we seek to arrest Nikita Khrushchev when the leader of the Soviet Union, locked in nuclear-superpower confrontation with the US across the globe, came to the U.N. to bang his shoe, in October 1960; nor was the Peasant Premier detained the year before, when he toured five states and the District of Columbia.
Finally, neither Israel nor the United States has ever joined the International Criminal Court. Rather than challenge US officials to arrest Netanyahu under the warrant of an organization whose legitimacy Washington has never recognized, Mamdani’s first project, from his own perspective, should be to rally support for a change to that national policy – only after which, if it ever materialized, would the mayor’s call for the arrest of Netanyahu make even theoretical sense.
So why is the mayor of New York City spending so much time and energy on the disposition of Israel’s prime minister? The New York Times article in which Mamdani dangled the idea of arresting Netanyahu carried the headline, ‘Zohran Mamdani Knows He Has Political Capital. And He Intends to Spend It.’
On this?
In his inaugural address, Mamdani pledged to spend his days fighting ‘to improve New Yorkers’ lives,’ not those of the residents of Gaza or the West Bank; indeed, nowhere in his address – aimed, he said, at all 8.5 million residents of the Big Apple, not just those who elected him – did the mayor even mention Israel.
Assuredly, Mamdani faces more urgent priorities: a report released this month by the Success Academy charter schools network found more than 400,000 public school students in New York City – more than 40 percent of the total – are enrolled in failing schools, where fewer than half the students passed math, reading, or both on state exams last year.
Guess what does mention Israel – a lot: Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the group that powered Mamdani’s rise to City Hall amid similar triumphs elsewhere, with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Queens, one of the first DSA members elected to Congress and, most recently, Melat Kiros and her victory over Congresswoman Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary to represent Denver.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of Queens was one of the first DSA members elected to Congress
The US did not seek to arrest Nikita Khrushchev when the leader of the Soviet Union, locked in nuclear-superpower confrontation with America, came to the U.N. in October 1960
America’s largest socialist group, with 220 chapters and more than 120,000 members across the country, DSA was founded in 1982 as, ironically, a Zionist organization. DSA eventually renounced that heritage and enacted an explicitly anti-Zionist platform last year.
A resolution adopted at the group’s 2025 convention denounced ‘Zionist lobby groups’ and set as grounds for expulsion any stated disagreement with DSA’s commitment to the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state.
Expulsion also awaits any member caught maintaining that Israel ‘has a right to defend itself.’ A candidate-endorsement survey circulated by DSA’s New York chapter demanded various anti-Israel pledges, even as the group recognized that ‘foreign policy falls outside the purview of municipal government.’
Mamdani’s blasts at Prime Minister Netanyahu were, then, straight out of the DSA playbook, which requires frequent restoration of attacks on Israel – and by only modest extension, the Jews – to the center of public discourse, regardless of how many, or how few, of New York’s students can read or write.
Of course, DSA and its programmed politicians should not require appeals to antisemitism to preach redistributionist gospel; but bankrupt ideologies always require scapegoats, as exemplified in the rise, nearly a century ago, of Germany’s National Socialists.
That Mamdani should have been ignorant of host country agreements should not surprise. Since at least the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the socialist-communist enterprise has been predicated on willful ahistoricism: the conscious turning of a blind eye to the irrefutable results of the workers-paradise experiment everywhere it has been tried, most notably its estimated death toll of 100 million.
Perhaps future historians will also tally among the movement’s victims one of the two men stabbed on the Upper East Side on Thursday – bloodletting that unfolded about 48 hours after the mayor’s office uploaded his video.
Suspect Raul Morales, 51, allegedly yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he attacked the men. One of them is Jewish: identifiable as such from the yarmulke he was wearing as he left The Jewish Center on East 86th Street. Both victims are reported in stable condition.
Raul Morales, 51, allegedly yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he attacked two men in New York on Thursday, one of whom wore a yarmulke
Perhaps future historians will also tally among the movement’s victims one of the two men stabbed on the Upper East Side on Thursday – bloodletting that unfolded about 48 hours after the mayor’s office uploaded his video
‘These hateful and despicable attacks have no place in our city,’ Mamdani said in a statement Thursday.
Jewish activists have more expansive ideas about what has no place in the city. ‘When the mayor of New York repeatedly uses his platform to relentlessly single out and demonize Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, and calls those who support it monsters,’ said UJA-Federation of New York CEO Eric Goldstein, standing at the crime scene on Friday, ‘he contributes to a climate in which Jewish New Yorkers are increasingly targeted and unsafe.’
A previous generation of movement leaders styled themselves champions of ‘socialism with a happy face.’ In pressing his preoccupation with Israel, risking more attacks on his Jewish constituents, Mayor Mamdani effectively removes the happy-face mask.
Those least inclined to accept the distinctions made between ‘democratic socialism’ and communism are those who lived under the latter when its stamp on government was nowhere in doubt: in the Soviet empire, China, Cuba, Venezuela. A gathering of just such individuals, convened by House Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain (R-MI) at the Capitol on the same day Mamdani posted his video, alternated between retellings of personal histories, the horrors of socialist rule and dire warnings about its growing popularity here in the United States.
Among those present were Reps. Carlos Giménez (R-FL), whose first seven years were spent living under Fidel Castro, and Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN), who emigrated from Soviet-occupied Ukraine after completing graduate school in 2000. Additionally, Reps. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) and Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) recounted the struggles of their Cuban-exile parents.
None spoke more authoritatively than Jose Daniel Ferrer García, the opposition leader who spent a total of fifteen years incarcerated in Cuban prisons, where his rejection of ahistoricism earned repeated beatings, torture and starvation. With translation from Manhattan Institute scholar Daniel Di Martino, a Venezuela native, Ferrer asserted a firm link between past and present.
‘The best evidence that the communists who try to get to power in democratic nations are scam artists is that Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Mamdani always deny being communists,’ he said. ‘And when they achieve what they want, they claim they were communists from birth.’
James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent for Newsmax and the author, most recently, of Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986-2001.
