Mayor Zohran Mamdani said his administration was still discussing whether to arrest the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, if he comes to New York City as expected for the U.N. General Assembly in September.
“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in the Hague,” Mr. Mamdani told Lulu Garcia-Navarro this week on “The Interview,” a New York Times show, referring to the home of the United Nations’ International Court of Justice.
“He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” Mr. Mamdani added. “And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years.”
The mayor said he was unclear on whether he has the legal authority to order the New York Police Department, which he oversees, to detain a foreign leader like Mr. Netanyahu. He said he was in “an active conversation” with the city’s Law Department over the matter.
“Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” Mr. Mamdani added.
During his mayoral campaign last year, Mr. Mamdani said in an interview with The Times that he would order the Police Department to arrest Mr. Netanyahu, who is locked in his own re-election bid in Israel.
At the time, he said he would be honoring a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court after Mr. Netanyahu’s role in the war in Gaza, which Mr. Mamdani and a United Nations commission have called a genocide.
Mr. Netanyahu addressed Mr. Mamdani’s threat to arrest him during a recent radio appearance, saying he is not concerned, and he accused the mayor of supporting Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls a significant portion of Gaza. Hamas was responsible for the deadly attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which precipitated Israel’s deadly war in Gaza.
“I think he should look at who he’s condemning, who he’s praising,” the prime minister said during an interview this week with Sid Rosenberg, a local radio personality and a frequent critic of Mr. Mamdani. “He’s condemning Israel, the one democracy that stands shoulder to shoulder with American values.”
“Who does he champion? Hamas, that calls openly to massacre every Jew on earth, that conducted that horrible massacre, the worst massacre on Jews since the Holocaust,” Mr. Netanyahu added.
He also said Mr. Mamdani “doesn’t care” that “those who hate the Jews and Israel ultimately hate America.”
“And in fact I think secretly, he hates America,” Mr. Netanyahu added.
Mr. Mamdani does not speak positively about Hamas when he criticizes Mr. Netanyahu and has condemned the Oct. 7 attacks. He has made his extensive concerns about Israel a focal point of his political identity, raising the issue frequently. Several people who know him well have said he considers Palestinian liberation one of the most pressing moral issues of his time.
Mr. Mamdani’s views about Israel are no longer on the fringe of the Democratic Party. Nearly half of House Democrats voted this week to end U.S. aid to Israel, which was not enough for the measure to pass, but enough to demonstrate a shift in the party’s posture toward one of the country’s stalwart allies in the Middle East.
Asked by Ms. Garcia-Navarro about the political weight he places on Israel, Mr. Mamdani said the war was motivating voters throughout the country, including in House races in New York last month, when his endorsed candidates emerged victorious.
“It is hard to find a more bankrupt policy approach than what our country has done to Gaza and to Palestine,” Mr. Mamdani added.
He also talked about national politics, speaking positively about the prospect that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a fellow democratic socialist, may run for president in 2028.
“I think she’d make a good anything,” he said.
He denounced President Trump’s immigration tactics, saying border security is important and that he is “willing to work with the federal government” when immigrants are convicted of serious crimes.
“What we are unwilling to do is to participate in civil immigration enforcement with a federal government that has said openly it wants to deport a vast majority of people for crimes that we will never even know,” he added.
Mr. Mamdani defended his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, amid criticisms of her from some of his fellow democratic socialists, reiterating that she has been successful at driving down crime in New York City. (Some of his supporters disagree with the frequency of the agency’s low-level arrests carried out under Ms. Tisch.)
He also lamented the coverage of his wife, Rama Duwaji, an artist who has largely avoided the spotlight during his mayoralty. Ms. Duwaji has come under fire for some of her past social media behavior, including liking a post that celebrated Hamas’s attack on Israel.
“She is her own person,” Mr. Mamdani said. “She’s an incredible artist, and yet so much of how she engages with the world today is framed through her being my wife.”
The mayor shed some light on how he views an issue that is central to his political rise: the economic struggles of New Yorkers who fall into income thresholds higher than what was traditionally considered poor or working-class.
Asked whether he would consider someone making $250,000 a year working class, he replied: “I haven’t asked myself where it starts and stops. What I would say is those who are working to try and afford the basic dignities of life and aren’t able to do so, I think that that is also working class.”
Ms. Garcia-Navarro followed up, asking about a janitor being lumped into the same category as a lawyer, to which Mr. Mamdani bemoaned “a fixation on a definition of something.”
“It’s not that everyone is making the same amount of money or facing the same amount of struggle, but that they just want to know, is there any way for them to actually be able to work this hard and afford a good life in the city?” he replied.
And he offered a window into how he views his new role as one of the country’s best-known politicians, saying, “I think there is some level of absurdity that you have to have as a part of yourself to believe that it should be you.”
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