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The following analysis was authored by Tablet Magazine columnist and CAM editorial advisor Lee Smith:
The mayor of America’s greatest city says the prime minister of America’s greatest ally is a “war criminal.”
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a video to social media this week claiming he wanted as much as anything to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “crimes against humanity” articulated in a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2024. But, explained the first-term mayor from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), after reviewing “every avenue available,” there was nothing the city can do about it.
And yet, as Mamdani explained in his video, the federal government could enforce the ICC warrant. So, can Mamdani and other full-throated anti-Israel activists count on the Donald Trump administration to put Bibi in handcuffs next time he visits the city with the second-largest Jewish population in the world?
Not a chance, says the president. “Benjamin Netanyahu,” as Trump declared on social media this week, “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.”
We’re a long way from 1995, when Trump’s friend and then-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ejected Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) chair Yasser Arafat from a Lincoln Center concert. And what separates us from that moment is much more than time, for Mamdani’s attempt to paint Israel’s elected leader as a war criminal represents an inversion of reality. According to a growing cohort of left-wing activists who populate American universities, the media, and now municipal governments, Israel’s problem is not the terror masters who plot its destruction but rather Israel’s own leaders elected to protect it against states and factions led by Muslim fanatics.
The purpose of the anti-Bibi campaign is to give moderate Democrats cover to join the far left in denouncing Israel without drawing criticism that they share the same rejectionist worldview as Mamdani and his radical pro-Palestinian cadres.
The moderate camp can’t go as far the Hamas-inspired mobs that flooded capital cities around the world to celebrate the slaughter, rape, torture, and kidnapping of thousands of Israelis on October 7th. But nor do the moderates want to be seen standing on the wrong side of history by leaving the impression they’re queasy about rallying for Palestinian death squads. So, the anti-Netanyahu campaign carves out a position for them as the reasonable, even judicious, center. We’re not anti-Zionist, claim the moderates, we just oppose the policies of Israel’s leadership and surely we can criticize Israel’s policies without being called antisemites.
A recent Pew poll showing that 76% of Democratic voters have no trust in Netanyahu suggests the tactic is working. And why wouldn’t it? Netanyahu has been a bogeyman for Democrats for decades, with presidents from Bill Clinton on, through Barack Obama and up to Joe Biden, openly expressing their disdain for him. But what does it mean that Americans distrust a foreign leader whose policies have no effect on their daily lives?
It means Democrat voters are receptive to the anti-Netanyahu campaign launched by the global left with instruments such as the ICC’s warrant. The first charge, for instance, alleges that Netanyahu is guilty of the crime of “starvation as a method of warfare.” That sure sounds bad, like something a ghoulish African despot would do to a rival tribe. Except it’s not true.
Israel never starved Gazans, and despite the multiple media reports and NGO studies that kicked off almost immediately after October 7th warning that Gaza was under threat of future famine if conditions worsened, there was never any famine. The evidence is that hard as they tried, Israel’s accusers never produced a single starvation victim.
Famine and starvation, like genocide, were just talking points in an information operation designed to generate enough international outrage to force the Biden White House to halt Israel’s military offensive against Hamas. Like The New York Times‘ infamous front-page photo of a Gazan infant with cerebral palsy but falsely alleged to be suffering from starvation to frame Israel as the culprit, the ICC’s warrant is a blood libel. In this context, it was weaponized to advance a campaign to make Israel lose and ensure the terror group’s survival.
The post-10/7 anti-Israel push would have looked just the same no matter who sat in the Prime Minister’s Pffice, whether it was Netanyahu, or his predecessors Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, or anyone else. And Israel’s war would have looked largely the same, too, no matter who was calling the shots. There would have been lots of civilian casualties in Gaza because Hamas hides behind civilians.
Netanyahu is singled out because, as Mamdani understands, focusing attacks on him has much broader appeal than vowing to “globalize the intifada.” But it’s hardly a sophisticated ploy. Heaping all of Israel’s supposed misdeeds on one man, the ICC warrant at the heart of the anti-Bibi campaign is just an update of antisemitic caricatures dating back many hundreds of years with the universal Jew cast as every Jew and thus embodying all the sins all Jews are accused of.
Regardless of the original design of the anti-Netanyahu campaign, which was to make it easier for the center to join the far left in condemning Israel, in reality it’s a sweeping antisemitic conspiracy theory centered around a blood libel falsely accusing all Jews of murder.
