Netanyahu singles out Mamdani at UN ahead of Israeli elections

Likud billboard paired NYC mayor with Iran, Turkey, Hezbollah leaders

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used his Sept. 24 address to the United Nations General Assembly to single out New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — what Guardian US columnist Mohamad Bazzi called “an unusual target” for the Israeli leader’s attacks.

In what Bazzi described as a “boastful and defiant” speech, Netanyahu accused Mamdani of promoting antisemitism and falsely claimed that he supports Hamas, according to the column. Netanyahu also argued that since Mamdani became mayor, “many Jews no longer feel safe in New York,” and criticized Mamdani’s wife for liking social media posts supporting the Palestinian cause soon after the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, Bazzi reported.

Netanyahu devoted more time in his nearly 40-minute speech to attacking Mamdani than to any other political leader, including the leaders of Hamas, Iran, Qatar and Turkey, Bazzi wrote. From the UN podium, Netanyahu said: “Mr Mamdani, you tried to stop me from coming here, you tried to silence me.” He added: “You can’t silence me. You can’t silence the truth.”

Mamdani pushed back. He said Netanyahu had used his UN platform to “repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians … Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an international criminal court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

The attacks reflected more than personal animosity, Bazzi wrote. The democratic socialist mayor has become popular among Democrats across the US who are increasingly critical of Israel, Bazzi reported, making Mamdani “a useful foil” for Netanyahu, who is in the midst of “one of the toughest re-election campaigns of his career.” Israel’s parliamentary elections are scheduled for next month, with Netanyahu’s right-wing governing coalition at risk of losing, according to Bazzi.

During last year’s mayoral campaign, Mamdani pledged to execute an ICC arrest warrant against Netanyahu issued in 2024 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, according to the column. In July, Mamdani released a video on X in which he backed away from that pledge, acknowledging that the New York Police Department does not have the legal authority to carry out the ICC’s arrest warrant, Bazzi reported. Mamdani called Netanyahu a “war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,” and urged the federal government to arrest him on his next visit to the US.

The UN speech was not Netanyahu’s first attack on Mamdani. Bazzi reported that the Israeli leader has repeatedly targeted the mayor to “curry favor with a domestic Israeli audience that views the young Muslim, pro-Palestinian mayor of New York as a villain.” Israel’s Likud party has whipped up an election frenzy against Mamdani since the summer, when it placed his photo on a campaign billboard in central Tel Aviv, according to Bazzi. The poster features Mamdani alongside Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei; Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; and Naim Qassem, the leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia. “They want Netanyahu to lose,” the poster reads, displaying the logo of the right-wing Likud party that Netanyahu has dominated for decades. “Don’t let them win.”

Earlier this month, Netanyahu posted an AI-generated video on his personal X account that showed Mamdani celebrating at the prospect of Netanyahu’s defeat in the upcoming elections, Bazzi reported. In the video, an AI version of Mamdani asks: “Erdoğan, bro, are you coming to the party of the fall of Netanyahu elections?” in a supposed phone call with the Turkish leader. The video also features Khamenei and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas celebrating at the prospect of Netanyahu’s downfall, according to Bazzi. The video then shows Netanyahu defeating his political opponents in Israel, forcing Mamdani and the others to cancel their celebration. A narrator says in Hebrew in the closing message: “They want Netanyahu to fall. Don’t let them win.”

Bazzi, who is director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University, wrote that Netanyahu has decades of experience demonizing his opponents and focusing Israelis on external enemies. Since October 2023, Netanyahu has prolonged what Bazzi called “Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza,” and a wider regional war, to avoid early elections and to block an independent commission into his government’s security failures that preceded the Hamas attack, according to the column. Netanyahu is also “clinging to power to save himself from a years-long corruption trial,” in which he has been accused of providing political favors to wealthy supporters in exchange for gifts or positive media coverage, Bazzi wrote.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump have both rejected the ICC’s accusations against Netanyahu — “in keeping with their unwavering support for Israel and the billions of dollars in US weapons sent by both of their administrations to enable Israel to carry out its genocide in Gaza,” Bazzi wrote. Trump has threatened to impose crippling sanctions against the court to pressure it to revoke the warrant against “his friend and ally Netanyahu,” according to Bazzi. In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged to lead a US campaign to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick, if necessary.”