The only really interesting question is whether Zohran Mamdani believed his own hype. On the campaign trail, New York’s mayor promised repeatedly that he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli prime minister came to the city. But on Tuesday, Mamdani admitted in a video what everyone else already knew: he has no power to enforce International Criminal Court warrants or any other international law, and he certainly cannot arrest a foreign dignitary.
That this was obvious to most of us does not necessarily mean that it was obvious to the mayor. Mamdani has been an anti-Israel obsessive since he was in college. As mayor, he’s seized every opportunity to take swings at Zionists and Israel, managing to squeeze an attack on them into, for example, his half-hearted denunciation of a violent protest in front of a synagogue. And he seems to fancy himself more of a world leader than an American mayor—evident not just by his incoherent invocations of “international law” but by his subordinate’s efforts to meet with at least one hostile foreign power. Much like the proverbial dog playing basketball, maybe Mamdani really believed that there was a loophole.
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That he couldn’t ultimately produce the international incident he promised is, seemingly, beside the point for many of his followers. Defenders on X—where Mamdani’s video has become his most popular ever—argue that the mayor’s willingness to charge Netanyahu with the crime of genocide is itself an unprecedented victory. (Because, you know, no one has thought to call the Israelis genocidal before now.) That’s par for the course for the participation-trophy mayor, for whom image is usually more important than substance.
But it shows something about the politics of the Israel issue, which has become the idée fixe for large swaths of the Democratic electorate and a tool for ideological discipline of the center by the far Left. As The Argument’s Milan Singh has observed, left-wing voters have become disproportionately focused on Israel and Palestine as electoral issues. That energy has been effectively mobilized by the growing radical insurgency in the Democratic Party: as Singh also notes, left-flank candidates like Graham Platner, Abdul El-Sayed, and Melat Kiros were all substantially more likely to invoke Israel, Palestine, and Gaza in fundraising emails then were more middle-of-the-road Democrats.
For highly activated Democratic voters, Gaza has become a unifying symbol of everything they identify as wrong with America and the world more broadly. For these voters, Gaza is a kind of purity test. If you aren’t willing to mouth the shibboleth “Israel is committing a genocide,” then you must be beholden to the dark forces that control our government. You’re intrinsically untrustworthy.
Mamdani’s denunciation of Netanyahu exemplifies this monocausal genre. While he lacks the formal power to take down the evil Israeli prime minister, he is still obliged to emphasize that Netanyahu is a very bad man. That Mamdani doesn’t do this for any other world leaders more credibly accused of genocide may strike some as hypocrisy. But that’s the whole point—Israel matters, those countries don’t.
Indeed, for a host of other bad actors, Mamdani’s outrage is strangely lacking. The mayor watched some of the World Cup with inmates on Rikers Island, the facility he has repeatedly promised to shutter. It’s hard to understand the ire for Netanyahu against the backdrop of a long-stated commitment to closing a facility that mostly holds rapists, murderers, and other violent offenders—a position consistent with Mamdani’s past prison abolitionism. Maybe the plan is to offer Netanyahu social work and cognitive behavioral therapy after his arraignment.
Of course, the Israel fantasy serves a practical political function. Material realities are creeping up on the mayor: a budget crunch delayed but not resolved, soaring rents worsened by his rent freeze, and the trickle of capital out of the city. In that context, symbolic politics is probably a welcome escape from the actual work of governing.
At the same time, fixation on Gaza as the center of the moral universe has material consequences all its own. For a new generation of domestic extremists, Israel is the justification not merely for peaceful protest but for lawless civil terrorism and violence. To cite one example, as my colleague Tal Fortgang noted the day before Mamdani’s announcement, a Democratic member of Congress appears to have voted to cut government funding to Israel “at least in part because he had been targeted by lawless anti-Israel fanatics.”
That’s not to say that any American who dislikes Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza is a terror sympathizer, or that disagreement on the topic is intolerable. Rather, it's to observe that for some people, Israel has become not merely one among many questions concerning the best approach to American foreign policy, but the question of public policy, the lens through which all other questions might be resolved.
Which is how, perhaps, the mayor convinced himself that it was a good use of his time to indulge the fantasy of arresting Netanyahu. He ultimately stopped short of trying that stunt but got credit for it anyway, because he told the story that these people wanted to hear.
Politics is about words until it isn’t anymore. Mamdani promised a big, splashy gesture. When he couldn’t deliver, he offered a compensatory, less potent one. For now, that feeds a base keen for such gestures. But videos and empty threats won’t satisfy forever; at some point, you have to do more than talk to keep the fantasy alive. What Mamdani will do when that day comes remains to be seen.