Throughout his mayoral campaign last year, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised on multiple occasions that he would use his powers to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should the latter ever set foot in New York.
Just last week, Mamdani told the New York Times that his administration was discussing the arrest.
Now, the mayor has backtracked on the decision, announcing in a video on Tuesday that his administration does not have the “independent legal authority to enforce this [International Criminal Court] warrant” despite reviewing “every avenue available under applicable law.”
His discovery that the arrest is not legally possible should not come as a surprise; legal experts have consistently cast doubt on the legality of Mamdani’s promise, predominantly because the US is not a party to the ICC.
This leads to an important question: did Mamdani make the arrest promise a central part of his election campaign without checking if it was in fact possible? Or did he know it was not feasible all along and just used the promise to gain votes?
Doubts of competence, doubts of reliability
The first would shed doubt on his competence, and the second, on his reliability.
If he did in fact know this all along, then his dogged and irretractable anti-Bibi campaign can only be described as polemical virtue-signaling and as a way of currying favor with his progressive pro-Palestinian voter base.
His statements suggest either a failure to examine the legal basis of the promise or a willingness to make a promise that was unlikely to be fulfilled.
As the Simon Wiesenthal Center noted, Mamdani has chosen to transform that legal reality into a televised political spectacle.
Not only does Mamdani’s posturing undermine the authority and reputability of the office which he helms, but it also directly undermines American democracy. It stands in stark antithesis to the concept of separation of powers.
It also shows that his focus is not on the issues that actually fall within his remit – such as housing, crime, and transport – but instead on the leader of a country in a different context, across several oceans.
Mamdani is not responsible for foreign policy. He does not have a state department. He is, however, the mayor of a city with the largest population of Jews outside of Israel.
Negative effects on Jewish New Yorkers
While he does not have the power to arrest Netanyahu, he does have the power to protect his city’s Jews.
This video, which singles out the one Jewish state, could have tangibly negative effects on Jewish New Yorkers at a time they are already experiencing astronomical levels of antisemitism.
Other elements of the video do not stand up to scrutiny.
After calling Netanyahu the “architect of genocide” who is “denying newborns the chance to live,” Mamdani says, “I agree with the ICC that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested and tried for his crimes, as I do for anyone else charged by the ICC.”
Netanyahu was never charged with genocide by the ICC.
Mamdani also speaks of the 73,000 death toll in Gaza – a number known to be peddled by the Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between the death of its own terrorist fighters and the death of civilians.
In some ways, Mamdani is acting in a similar manner to Arab leaders in the Middle East. Figures like Ayatollah Khamenei, Mahmoud Abbas, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi all thrust the focus onto Israel so as to shift people’s attention away from problems on the home front.
Mamdani’s obsession with Israel is time-old and time-worn.
But having made the promise a defining feature of his campaign, Mamdani now faces a political dilemma.
Abandoning it risks disappointing supporters who took him at his word; continuing to defend it means doubling down on a position his own administration now acknowledges it lacks the authority to carry out.
Source:
www.jpost.com
