NYC Mayor Mamdani says Netanyahu's UN callout was 'strange' after arrest pledge

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was in the middle of a meeting with the Dutch prime minister at an LGBTQ center in lower Manhattan when word reached him that Benjamin Netanyahu had just called him out by name at the United Nations. The Israeli leader's speech, delivered in late September, singled out Mamdani directly, accusing him of spreading falsehoods about Israel and attempting to block Netanyahu from speaking in the city. "So to all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers, whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the antisemitic mayor of New York, I say this: Shame on you," Netanyahu said from the podium, his words directed at Mamdani with unmistakable precision.

When Mamdani recounted the moment to podcaster Theo Von on Thursday, he described the experience as strange rather than frightening. The timing caught him off guard—learning about a direct rebuke from a world leader while stepping out of a diplomatic meeting created an odd dissonance, the kind of surreal collision that happens when international politics suddenly becomes personal. Von pressed him on whether it felt scary or weird. Mamdani's answer was measured: it was strange, he said. The peculiarity lay not in any threat but in the sheer oddness of being named from the UN podium.

The backdrop to Netanyahu's remarks was Mamdani's own long-standing position on the Israeli leader. During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani had promised to have Netanyahu arrested if he visited New York. Later, he called on the federal government to enforce an International Criminal Court warrant issued in November 2024, which charged Netanyahu with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Israeli government and Netanyahu himself have rejected these allegations and disputed the court's authority. Mamdani's stance was unambiguous: if the U.S. had joined the ICC and honored its warrants, Netanyahu would have faced arrest upon arrival in American territory.

When Von asked whether Mamdani would have gone through with an arrest if he had the power, the mayor doubled down on his position. He said he would have wanted the U.S. government to join the ICC and enforce every warrant it issued. The question of whether Netanyahu's public callout felt personal hung in the air. Mamdani rejected the framing. He characterized the Israeli leader's remarks as a distraction tactic, an attempt to shift focus away from accountability by naming names and turning the exchange into a personal back-and-forth. The real issue, Mamdani insisted, was not the two of them or their dispute. It was Netanyahu's role in what Mamdani described as genocide. If someone were responsible for such crimes, Mamdani suggested, they too would probably prefer to talk about almost anything else.

The exchange illustrated the collision between municipal politics and international law, between a local official's moral stance and a world leader's defense against criminal allegations. Netanyahu's decision to name Mamdani from the UN stage was itself a statement—a way of signaling that the Israeli government was aware of and willing to confront its critics, even those in positions of civic authority in allied nations. For Mamdani, the moment was less about personal offense and more about what he saw as a transparent attempt to muddy the waters. The substance of the charges, he argued, should remain the center of gravity. Everything else was noise.