On Saturday, the mayor of New York said the prime minister of the Jewish state belongs in a jail cell. Zohran Mamdani told the New York Times that Benjamin Netanyahu "belongs in the Hague," called him "a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court," and confirmed that his administration is working out whether it can arrest the Israeli leader when he comes to New York for the United Nations in September.

Netanyahu's office answered on Sunday. The ICC is "a kangaroo court that has no jurisdiction over Americans or Israelis," it said, and the warrant is "bogus."

A mayor cannot arrest a foreign head of government, and Mamdani knows it. He said so himself in the next breath, promising he "won't be writing our own laws." The warrant he wants to serve comes from a court his own party's president called outrageous, and it was written by a prosecutor the court is voting to remove this week. Of every leader on earth, he reached for the one who runs the world's only Jewish state.

A mayor cannot arrest a prime minister

The United States is not a member of the ICC. Foreign leaders who come to New York for the United Nations are protected by the 1947 treaty that lets the U.N. operate on American soil. A sitting head of government carries immunity. And a city has no power to override the federal government on foreign affairs, which is why the whole idea falls apart the moment anyone reads the law.

Even his own party sees it. Fetterman called the threat a stunt: "He's just a clown to even say that. So he won't try that. Just sit down." The American ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, called it "pure political theater."

Netanyahu will fly into New York for the United Nations and fly out untouched. Mamdani knows that better than anyone. The threat is aimed at the people watching him make it.

Nine of its first ten targets were African

The court Mamdani wants to enforce is a joke, and a dangerous one. Nine of its first ten investigations were in Africa. Every person it has ever convicted has been African, drawn from just three countries. The prosecutor declined to open a case over the million Uyghurs held in Chinese camps. It never touched Bashar al-Assad for gassing Syrian children, because Russia and China blocked it at the United Nations. It has no warrant out for the ayatollahs in Tehran.

This is the same moral universe as the U.N. Human Rights Council, which right now seats China and Cuba as judges of human rights. A body that lets the planet's worst abusers sit in judgment is a costume.

America has understood this for a quarter century, under both parties. Bill Clinton signed the treaty and then refused to send it to the Senate. George W. Bush withdrew the signature. Barack Obama kept his distance. Donald Trump sanctioned the court twice. A superpower uses a body like this when it is convenient and ignores it when it is not. When the court indicted Vladimir Putin, Washington answered on its own terms, with its own sanctions on Russia. That is not lawlessness. Washington refused to pretend a kangaroo court is Nuremberg.

Even Biden called the warrant outrageous

The warrant Mamdani wants to serve is the exact one the leaders of his own party threw out. Joe Biden called it "outrageous," and said flatly that "there is no equivalence, none, between Israel and Hamas." Chuck Schumer said he "condemned and rejected" it. Congressman Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat, called the court's move an "antisemitic double standard."

The only Democrats in Washington who cheered the warrant were Bernie Sanders and Rashida Tlaib. Those are the two members of Congress who have built national brands on hostility to Israel. Mamdani ran to their corner, past his own president, to stake out ground to the left of a man his party's own leader called outrageous.

His prosecutor is being removed in disgrace

The warrant carries one man's fingerprints, and that man is Karim Khan. The Wall Street Journal later reported the timeline: Khan moved to charge Netanyahu on May 20, 2024, about two and a half weeks after he learned he was under investigation for sexual assault. A former aide accused him of coercing her over a period of years. He denies it.

The United Nations opened an investigation. The court suspended him in June. Its member states are scheduled to vote this Friday on removing him from office. The court's own appeals judges have already found that the chamber which issued the warrant "erred in law." The instrument Mamdani wants to pick up is rotten at the exact spot where it was made.

Corbyn said the right words too

Mamdani will tell you he opposes antisemitism. He has said it plainly, that hatred of Jews is "something that we have to tackle." His words are worth nothing.

Jeremy Corbyn spent his whole career calling himself an anti-racist. Then Britain's own equality watchdog found that the Labour Party he led had broken the law over antisemitism. Saying the right words is what a practiced antisemite does.

Mamdani would not condemn "globalize the intifada," a phrase widely understood as a call for violence against Jews, and said instead that a mayor should not "police language," before retreating to the claim that he merely "discourages" it. He has said his support for the movement to boycott Israel is "consistent with the core of my politics." Asked the direct question, whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, he plays word games. He told a Jewish forum that Israel may exist "with equal rights for all," and refuses to back a state with "a hierarchy of citizenship." That is the same careful dodge you hear in the encampments at Columbia, and nobody should pretend the parse means anything. A man who supports the Jewish state does not need a lawyer to say so.

Mamdani praised Siraj Wahhaj as "one of the nation's foremost Muslim leaders." Federal prosecutors named Wahhaj an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, though he was never charged. In June he described the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC as part of a world of "monsters." More than 700 rabbis, across every branch of Judaism, said he had reached for the oldest tropes about Jewish money and Jewish power. The Anti-Defamation League said the same. So did Democratic officials in his own city. Everyone who studies antisemitism for a living keeps pointing at the same man. They are pointing at an antisemite.

The woman he married honored the hijackers

His wife has her own record, and it is worse. Rama Duwaji, now the first lady of New York, is an illustrator, and the Washington Free Beacon documented what she published. She drew the art for an essay in a book by Susan Abulhawa, a writer who called the October 7 massacre "a spectacular moment." That was a paid commission.

The Free Beacon found posts in which Duwaji honored Leila Khaled, the terrorist who hijacked two passenger airliners for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, who built bombs for the same group. One post read, "F*** Tel Aviv. Shouldn't exist in the first place." She liked a post celebrating the Hamas breach of the border on October 7.

She did apologize, months later, for the racial slurs in the old posts. She did not apologize for the terrorists, or take back a word she wrote about Israel. Israel moved to bar her from the country, and its minister for combating antisemitism called her record "an unprecedented moral low." A man who builds his politics on the Palestinian cause and marries a woman who celebrates its bombers found exactly what he was looking for.

Handcuffs were always the message

Mamdani cannot arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, and he knows it. He was never trying to. He was sending a message to every Jewish family in New York. When the leader of the Jewish state lands in their city, their mayor's first instinct is a pair of handcuffs.

The oldest hatred in the world is now running the largest city in America, and lording over the largest Jewish population in the country.