Just days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a major U.S. policy to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court because it threatened American sovereignty, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani mused about the possibility of arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the basis of an ICC warrant.
This has become an ongoing theme for Mamdani—making vague claims about international law as an excuse to ignore domestic laws. When protesters gathered outside Park East Synagogue in New York in May, he condemned the Jews inside, not the violent mob outside. The synagogue was hosting a real-estate fair for properties in Israel.
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“Mayor Mamdani is deeply opposed to the real estate expo this evening that includes the promotion of the sale of land in settlements in the Occupied West Bank,” his office said. “These settlements are illegal under international law.”
That made the second time in a week that the mayor had opined on a public international law issue. On social media, he had denounced as “a brazen violation of international law” Israel’s boarding of a flotilla of vessels seeking to run a blockade to resupply Hamas-controlled Gaza.
Mamdani gets international law wrong as often as he invokes it. Blockading an enemy is a basic part of naval warfare, and even neutral ships that attempt to break the blockade may not only be boarded but also sometimes even sunk. The United Nations–backed governing authority for Gaza, the Board of Peace, confirmed that there was no humanitarian need to resupply the Hamas-controlled part of Gaza, putting Israel well within its rights. Indeed, even as Mamdani opined on the actions of a foreign power, his own country, the United States, was enforcing a blockade of Iran and boarding and seizing vessels.
Similarly, Israeli real-estate fairs do not violate international law, even if they market properties in the “settlements”—that is, the areas forcibly occupied by Jordan during 1948–67. Even in the mistaken view that Israel became an occupying power after ending Jordan’s occupation, the Geneva Convention prohibits only the transfer of that power’s own civilian population into the territory. New Yorkers are obviously not part of Israel’s civilian population, nor is the real-estate fair deporting or transferring them. In real occupied territories like Northern Cyprus, properties are regularly sold to foreigners, and doing so has never been treated as an international crime. Indeed, Forbes recently recommended Northern Cyprus as one of the best affordable places to live abroad. Its editors have not been hauled away by the International Criminal Court.
Foreign policy is an exclusively federal domain, but Mamdani regularly invoked international law even when he was only an assemblyman. As a mayoral candidate, he expressed support for boycotts and sanctions against Israel as a way of “creating compliance in international law.” As mayor-elect, he made his first threats to arrest Netanyahu because of ICC warrants against him. This was needed, he said, to make New York a “city of international law.” Of course, the United States is not a member of the ICC, having refused to join under both Republican and Democratic administrations because of the institution’s clear bias. ICC warrants are thus meaningless in America, and arresting Netanyahu would be a naked violation of a foreign head of state’s immunity. In short, Mamdani’s threats would be breaking international law, not enforcing it.
Ironically, there are some ICC crimes that New York could prosecute—but they are alleged offenses by the organization’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. His unprecedented charges against Israeli officials were issued just as allegations surfaced that he had been accused by an employee of repeated sexual assaults. While Khan used the existence of his Israel investigation to sideline the charges against him, one of the alleged incidents took place in the Millenium Hotel near the United Nations. Yet New York authorities have not sought to charge Khan as they did Harvey Weinstein, nor is Mamdani threatening to arrest Khan.
Mamdani’s numerous invocations of international law against other countries have an obvious pattern—all have been directed at Israel. He has briefly referred the ICC warrant against Vladimir Putin over the invasion of Ukraine, but only in the context of discussing his threat to arrest Netanyahu.International law, by definition, means a set of rules that apply across countries. If it applies to just one country, it is neither international, nor is it law, but rather a judgment (and likely a highly biased one) about a particular dispute.
Mamdani’s repeated comments reveal how accusations of international law violations have become a special way of speaking about the Jews, much as terms like “global elites” or “cosmopolitans” have been used before. What makes international law so powerful as a tool to talk about Jews is its esoteric nature. Most people are not lawyers, and among those who are, a tiny number practice international law. International criminal law or the law of war is a niche within a niche. Most people have no way to evaluate such claims and usually must rely on experts, a serious liability given the well-documented ideological homogeneity of the legal academy.
Consider what any member of polite society might think of the following propositions. While Jews have lived in the Old City of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria for millennia, once Jordan had completely ethnically cleansed them from these regions during the 1948 War of Independence, those areas must remain permanently judenrein. Even if the land should ever come under Israeli authority, as it did during the Six-Day War of 1967, the Jewish state must nonetheless enforce the Jordanian ban on Jewish settlement within the zone of Jordanian ethnic cleansing. Israel is obligated to ensure that no Jews establish residence in this zone and must root out any Jews who somehow establish residence there, denying them protection and services. Finally, Arabs are banned from selling property to Jews, and any such transfers should be deemed illegal.
This set of propositions represent highly illiberal views that would make even the old WASPs of Gentlemen’s Agreement uncomfortable. But that is exactly what Mamdani is saying when he claims that Israeli settlements are “illegal,” and that American Jews—but presumably not Arab Americans—should not be allowed to buy homes in the West Bank. In short, Mamdani uses “international law” as a euphemistic expression for things that he knows can’t be said in polite society. The ideas that Jews should not be allowed to own property, or that their exile from Jerusalem is permanent and irreversible, are not products of the Enlightenment. But by mouthing the words “international law,” such sentiments can be subtly expressed by the leader of America’s greatest city.
