New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani attends a press conference at the Unisphere in the Queens borough of New York City, US, Nov. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s July 21 video urging the federal government to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a masterclass in demagogic propaganda and, at the same time, a striking instance of a politician far out of his depth. Bereft of good-faith analysis, the mayor’s libels omit inconvenient facts, tout unreliable sources, and attribute malice to the Jewish State as it fights for its survival against several Iran-backed terrorist militias committed to its destruction. A reminder of key truths regarding the false charges leveled is a step toward redressing the harm done to public understanding.  

Mamdani rests his case on tarring the Israeli prime minister as an “architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.” But from the moment of Hamas’s brutal act of genocide in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Netanyahu clearly stated that his intention was to destroy Hamas, not the Palestinian people as such. This is crucial – the UN’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide specifies that genocide constitutes acts “[intended] to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such“ (emphasis added). If pledges to destroy or defeat an enemy force indicated “genocide,” then democratic leaders from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama would be guilty – a premise that no serious person indulges.

Israel’s conduct similarly disproves the genocide lie. As John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, has observed, Israel has warned civilians before impending attacks, implemented evacuation routes, and facilitated vaccination campaigns and millions of tons of food and aid shipments to Gaza.

Ignoring these facts, the mayor then attempts to bolster his case by pointing to a death toll in Gaza of 73,000, a Hamas-supplied figure that does not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths and does not even specify causes of death. According to Israeli figures, the IDF killed roughly 23,600 combatants between Oct. 7 and the Oct. 10, 2025, ceasefire. That’s a combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio of roughly 1:2. For comparison, the US-led effort to liberate Mosul from ISIS in 2016-2017 resulted in a combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio of 1:2.5. Urban warfare is nonetheless horrific, and the moral burden of the destruction in Gaza lies with Hamas, whose fighters elected to slaughter civilians in Israel before retreating to Gaza’s dense cities.

Next, Mamdani accused the Israeli prime minister and the IDF of deliberate child murder, claiming that “the UN confirmed” this inhuman behavior. However, even a perfunctory read-through of the UN report Mamdani is likely referencing reveals absurdities, including its use of an IDF quote about “dismantling Hamas’s capabilities” as evidence for Israel’s supposed murderous intent toward civilians. The authors also bemoan the “occupied psyche” that Israel has created among Palestinian children, which ostensibly erodes nothing less than their “freedom to play, imagine, hope, and develop an identity,” as if Israelis possess supernatural mind-control abilities.

In other words, the mayor draws on profoundly unserious work to level profoundly serious accusations – ones rooted in a long antisemitic history. 

Mamdani’s accusations that Netanyahu purposely starved “countless people” similarly do not withstand scrutiny. In August 2025, when Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared a famine in Gaza Governorate, researchers noted that IPC inferred a much higher malnutrition death toll than the one Hamas’s own health ministry reported, which on its face would have been much lower than the figure necessary for famine per IPC’s own criteria. Furthermore, within the past month, UNICEF data suggests lower acute child malnutrition rates in large swaths of Gaza than in the developed countries of Finland and Portugal, according to the most recently available data – conditions that would obviously not exist in an environment condemned to purposeful starvation.

The mayor’s accusations are easily debunked, yet he urges the US federal government to arrest the democratically elected leader of a close US partner based on the edicts of the International Criminal Court (ICC) – an institution of which the United States is not a part. Needless to say, the further implications of pursuing such a course for a democracy that values national sovereignty and its own rule of law would be dire. All in all, Mamdani’s ICC charade was seemingly one more instance of his determination to defame Israel and inflame communal relations.

Regrettably, 10 million people “liked” Mamdani’s propaganda video on Instagram. Antisemitic demagoguery is, indeed, powerful and while it endangers the Jewish community, it also augurs ill for the wider society, pointing to the corruption of institutions and spread of extremism. Hate-filled, baseless narratives about the Jewish state emanating from City Hall should be a warning to all that something is wrong.

Zac Schildcrout is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Truth About Israel.