New York City’s ties to Israel go much deeper than just one man, and Mamdani can take concrete steps to sever those ties.
(Zohran Mamdani / X) As a Palestinian American who grew up in New York, it’s hard to describe how uplifting — and, honestly, surreal — it is to see the mayor of my hometown talk about Palestinians as if our lives have intrinsic value.
The bar is certainly extremely low. For decades, New York politicians have treated Palestinians as an inconvenience, at best, as they shamelessly competed to demonstrate ever-greater loyalty to Israel. In this context, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s refusal to abandon Palestine represents real progress.
That’s why it was important to see Mamdani looking directly into a camera this week and to announce Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a genocidal war criminal who is not welcome in New York – even though those words were followed by an acknowledgment that, despite Mamdani’s wishes, he does not have the independent authority as mayor to arrest Netanyahu for these crimes if Netanyahu ever sets foot in the city.
Of course, it has always been questionable whether a New York mayor would have the authority to order the arrest of a sitting foreign leader, especially one whose impunity is so thoroughly guaranteed by Washington. Even before Mamdani took office, legal experts warned that his campaign promise to arrest Netanyahu would run afoul of constitutional limits on municipal power.
This is not to say that the commitment was worthless. He presented international law as a standard to follow and helped force Netanyahu’s criminality and his prospects for broader accountability into the mainstream political debate. This stood in stark contrast to Mamdani’s main rival, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who joined Netanyahu’s legal team after the International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant for the prime minister. And it demonstrated that ritual deference to Israel is no longer a non-negotiable principle of American policy. Here is the mayor of New York, the most institutionally and demographically Zionist city outside of Tel Aviv, openly describing the Israeli prime minister in the same terms that Palestinians, human rights organizations, international legal institutions and much of the world have used for years.
Judging by the reactions to Mamdani’s video this week, there is a hunger for this type of moral clarity: at the time of writing, Mamdani’s video had garnered more than 90 million views on Twitter and 9 million likes on Instagram.
Current number
And yet, as praise for the video flooded social media, the initial elation gave way to a familiar unease as once again, rhetoric eclipsed material action. Because for Palestinians, there has always been a cruel chasm between recognition and consequences – a chasm that has only widened during the Gaza genocide. For almost three years, we have observed a growing number of governments recognize our suffering while continuing to facilitate; journalists document our deaths while whitewashing the justifications and excuses provided by those who kill us; and politicians condemn the right people and say the right things without fundamentally calling into question the system that maintains the massacre.
Mamdani’s sincerity and courage when it comes to defending Palestine are not in question. He also does not want to hold Israel accountable. But now that he has confirmed that Netanyahu’s arrest is no longer an option, he must show what concrete steps he is willing to take to end New York City’s entanglement with the political, financial and police infrastructure that sustains Israel’s impunity. And make no mistake: there are concrete steps that Mamdani can take.
New York’s complicity in Israeli crimes is not abstract. It is integrated In bond portfoliosprocurement files, surveillance contracts, police partnershipsand the tax privileges granted to organizations helping to dispossess Palestinians. These relationships are much more within Mamdani’s actual mandate than the arrest of a foreign leader ever was.
Upon taking office, Mamdani canceled Eric Adams’ executive orders prohibit municipal institutions from disengaging from Israel and impose on municipal agencies the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which wrongly conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. This reversal reopened a political space that Adams had deliberately tried to close.
But rescinding an anti-BDS order is not the same as actively pursuing divestment.
New York City pension funds hold hundreds of millions of dollars in Israeli assets, and Comptroller Mark Levine has promised to resume investing in Israeli bonds (his predecessor, Brad Lander, had let these investments expire). City officials have previously used pension governance to pursue divestment from industries and governments they deem irrelevant. There is no reason in principle why Israel should remain particularly immune from the same scrutiny.
Mamdani cannot liquidate investments by executive order: the city’s pension systems are governed by separate boards and the comptroller exercises substantial authority over their investments. But the mayor is not powerless. Mamdani can make divestment from Israeli government bonds and companies involved in occupation, apartheid, settlement expansion, surveillance and genocide an explicit policy goal of his administration. He can push his pension board members to propose divestment, appoint trustees who support Palestinian rights, and work with unions and pension beneficiaries to get the votes needed to advance his agenda.
Mamdani could also order a full public audit of New York City’s contracts and institutional relationships with Israeli military and security companies. The New York Police Department, for example, continued contracts with Israeli intelligence companies and maintained a liaison presence in Israel. Mamdani should determine which of these relationships remain active, disclose them to the public, and end those that link the city to the architecture of Israeli occupation and genocide. He could also publicly call on New York State Attorney General Letitia James to open an independent investigation into how Netanyahu and other Israeli officials may have harmed New Yorkers.
Finally, Mamdani can use the political power of City Hall to confront the New York-based nonprofit infrastructure which helps finance Israel’s settlement project. As mayor, he cannot order the state attorney general or unilaterally revoke an organization’s tax-exempt status. But it can require investigations into whether New York-registered organizations that fund settlement expansion or settler violence have violated charitable purpose requirements, disclosure rules, sanctions, anti-fraud laws or other existing legal obligations. Mamdani can also do more to prevent stolen land auctions across the city and, at the very least, protect New Yorkers’ right to protest.
And when Netanyahu finally visits New York, as he is expected to do for the United Nations General Assembly in September, Mamdani can ensure that his visit will be devoid of the red carpet welcome he is accustomed to. The mayor may have drawn inspiration from then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1995, who had Yasser Arafat, president of the Palestine Liberation Organization, kicked out of a U.N. concert at Lincoln Center while he was in town for the U.N. General Assembly. He could order the New York police not to assist Netanyahu’s motorcade. And when protesters take to the streets, Mamdani should make sure the NYPD doesn’t brutalize them.
None of these measures promise the theatrical aura of a Netanyahu arrest on the tarmac. They’re more bureaucratic, more difficult, and much less likely to produce a viral video (although Mamdani’s social media team has proven it can make content on even the most procedural issues go viral). But these measures can have a direct impact on the lives of Palestinians who face Israel’s genocidal attack every day.
Moreover, they will accomplish something that Mamdani’s focus on Netanyahu cannot: reinforce the truth that Israel’s genocidal nature concerns much more than a single individual.
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Democratic lawmakers have spent years evading demands for real accountability by calling the destruction of Gaza “Netanyahu’s war” — a sleight of hand that isolates a particularly loathsome perpetrator while obscuring the vast political, military and social apparatus needed to carry out genocide. In doing so, they portray Israel’s genocide, occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing as mere deviations from an otherwise redeemable system, rather than as expressions of that system. If only Israelis could get rid of Netanyahu, a more reasonable and liberal Israel could emerge. But Netanyahu was not alive in 1948 when Zionist militias forced more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes at gunpoint during the Nakba. He did not invent the siege of Gaza. Nor has it given rise to an Israeli society in which 82% of Israeli Jews support the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. If Netanyahu were arrested tomorrow, the Israeli genocide would continue under the leadership of another Israeli leader.
Reducing Israel’s crimes to one man offers the broader system that cultivated it an escape route. This allows Americans to imagine that accountability can be satisfied with a single arrest, rather than by dismantling the arms pipelines, financial investments, diplomatic protections, policing partnerships, and political alliances that sustain genocide. This is why the focus must shift from the spectacle of Netanyahu’s arrest to the less cinematic but more consequential work of confronting complicity at its roots.
I want to be clear once again: I do not doubt Mamdani’s solidarity with the Palestinians. I think he would like to be able to do a lot more and act without being constrained by the tortuous realities of government, of coalition building and electoral politics. Like so many people across the country, I am deeply inspired by Mamdani’s vision for New York City. He has already made the lives of many New Yorkers significantly better, which is his greatest prerogative. At the same time, he has significantly pushed the boundaries of what Democratic politics can look like at this pivotal moment in American history.
But I’m also old enough to remember another leader who rose to the highest office in the land on a seductive message of hope, only to leave us without the material change he promised. Mamdani has an opportunity to break with this legacy – to prove that hope need not remain a rhetorical posture and that moral clarity can translate into the patient, difficult work of dismantling the financial, political and institutional architecture that binds his city to a genocidal apartheid state.
Palestine supporters fought extraordinary odds to change public opinion and enter the institutions of American power. Mamdani’s victory and the plan he unveiled to potential leaders across the country are among the most promising results of this struggle. But a transformation of cultural hegemony will not be enough to stop a bomb, rebuild a hospital, or bring a displaced Palestinian family home. Simply reaching the places of power against all odds will do nothing to keep Palestinians killed, starved and expelled every day, unless this new power is converted into bold material pressure on the individuals and institutions that enable genocide.
Mamdani may not have the skill to stop Netanyahu, but he also does not lack the power to begin disengaging New York City from the system that Netanyahu represents. For the sake of all New Yorkers and all Palestinians, he should get started immediately.
Tariq Kenney Shawa Tariq Kenney-Shawa is an American political researcher at the Palestinian think tank and political network Al-Shabaka and a producer at AJ+.
