Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he will travel to New York for the UN General Assembly in September, brushing aside Mayor Zohran Mamdani's repeated, and legally toothless, calls for his arrest.
Netanyahu made the announcement during an interview on Fox News's "Hannity" after meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday. The Israeli leader did not hedge. He went straight at Mamdani, accusing the mayor of dividing New York along ethnic lines and endangering the city's Jewish residents.
"I'm going to speak the truth in front of this hate-spewing elected official who's pitting one group of New Yorkers against the others. He's turning them against New York Jews."
He added, bluntly: "What are we in the 1930s? What is this? So much hate, so many lies."
Mamdani has called Netanyahu a "war criminal" and "the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people." He posted a video declaring Netanyahu unwelcome in New York City, a clip that, according to the Washington Free Beacon, racked up more than 58 million views on X, 8.5 million on Facebook, and nearly 2 million on YouTube within 24 hours of its July 21 posting.
But Mamdani himself has conceded a basic legal reality: his city has no authority to arrest a visiting head of state. Heads of state attending the United Nations operate under absolute diplomatic immunity guaranteed by federal law. Mamdani's own legal team confirmed as much, making his viral video largely symbolic political theater.
Unable to act himself, Mamdani has urged federal officials to enforce the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant against Netanyahu. The ICC issued that warrant in November 2024, alleging war crimes in Gaza. But the United States has never joined the ICC, and Netanyahu is not accused of committing any crime on American soil.
Eugene Kontorovich, writing in National Review, put the legal question plainly: "This would be lawless, since the United States has refused to join the tribunal, and Netanyahu is not accused of committing any crimes here."
President Trump removed any remaining ambiguity. He publicly stated that Netanyahu "will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America," as Newsmax reported.
Netanyahu described his White House sit-down as "one of the best meetings" he has had with the president. He pushed back on suggestions of any rift between Washington and Jerusalem.
"I always hate to disappoint our would-be critics who are trying to find cracks in our alliance. And what they find, like today, is a wall of granite."
Trump had earlier criticized Israel's continued strikes in Lebanon, saying "too many people are being killed." Netanyahu did not directly address that remark during the Hannity interview but framed the broader conflict in terms of a shared American and Israeli interest in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
"We don't want to see this fanatic regime in Tehran have nuclear weapons to threaten every American and to threaten the peace of the world, and to threaten the existence of Israel. So we have a common goal, and it's gonna be achieved, either through diplomatic means or other means."
Netanyahu reserved some of his sharpest language for the ICC itself. He dismissed the court's charges as baseless and politically motivated, noting that the tribunal has not pursued Hezbollah and only nominally charged a Hamas figure he said is already dead.
"They don't charge Hezbollah... Supposedly, they charged Hamas, but a guy who's already dead. So no, it's fake. It's one big fake."
He also warned that the ICC's logic could be turned against the United States. "They could say that the president of the United States is a war criminal, that American soldiers, valiantly fighting next to us, shoulder to shoulder, against the tyranny in Tehran, that they're war criminals," Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu's office has separately linked the warrant to disgraced former ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan, who temporarily stepped down amid sexual assault allegations, some of which, National Review noted, allegedly occurred in Manhattan. Netanyahu's office called the ICC a "kangaroo court" and accused Mamdani of using the controversy to distract from his own policy failures.
Mamdani's rhetoric has drawn backlash far beyond the American right. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a political rival of Netanyahu, addressed Mamdani directly: "Mayor Mamdani, your antisemitic libels against Israel's prime minister, its commanders, and its soldiers place you on the wrong side of history."
Benny Gantz, another Netanyahu opponent in Israeli politics, was equally blunt. "Parroting Hamas lies on starvation...libellously claiming IDF targeted journalists and aid workers, and deceitfully repeating calls of genocide are not only blatant lies, but a moral stain on yourself and the office you hold," Gantz said. Former Prime Minister Gadi Eisenkot also joined the condemnation.
That cross-partisan rejection from Israel underscored a point Netanyahu has been making: that Mamdani's campaign is not a principled critique of one leader's wartime decisions but a broader attack on the Jewish state itself. The backlash Mamdani received from survivors of the October 7 Nova festival massacre reinforced the same argument.
American Jewish leaders have raised similar concerns. Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, said: "We want the mayor to stop demonizing the only Jewish state using the most vilifying language that inflames and terrorizes." The Trump administration has pointed to Mamdani's refusal to disavow "globalize the intifada" chants and his support for the BDS movement as evidence that his posture goes beyond policy disagreement, the Washington Examiner reported.
The arrest push has not stayed confined to City Hall. Rep. Ro Khanna called on Trump to arrest both Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin under international law, a demand that faces the same legal wall Mamdani ran into. The United States is not party to the ICC, and no federal mechanism exists to enforce its warrants against visiting heads of state.
Mamdani has tried to frame his stance as rooted in facts rather than animus. "When it comes to my comments about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they are critiques not based on my personal analysis but rather on objective facts," he said. He has also stated publicly that he believes Netanyahu "belongs in The Hague."
But the gap between Mamdani's rhetoric and his authority grows wider with each statement. He publicly said he was researching whether his administration could arrest Netanyahu, only to have his own legal team confirm what anyone familiar with diplomatic immunity already knew: he cannot. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio has joined Mamdani's calls, but the legal reality remains unchanged.
Netanyahu, for his part, drew a contrast between Mamdani's posturing and the mayor's actual responsibilities. "He's supposed to be the mayor of all New Yorkers, Jews, Christians, Muslims, everyone. But he's trying to turn one group against the other," Netanyahu said.
Mamdani responded with his own declaration: "I want to be equally clear, Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large."
Netanyahu is scheduled to appear on the next episode of "Hang Out with Sean Hannity" this Thursday, available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. His planned September visit to the UN General Assembly will test whether Mamdani's arrest talk amounts to anything more than a social media campaign aimed at an audience that already agrees with him.
A mayor who can't enforce his own threats isn't standing on principle. He's standing on a soapbox, and the people who actually have to live in his city deserve better than performance art dressed up as law enforcement.
