Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, signaled on Wednesday that he would have no hesitation about visiting New York City, even after Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani vowed to honor an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for the Israeli leader related to the war in Gaza.
“I’ll come to New York,” Netanyahu said during the Dealbook Summit at Lincoln Center, as he addressed the room virtually from Israel. “Yes, of course I will.”
🚨BREAKING: Netanyahu declares in an interview with the New York Times: "I will come to New York despite Mayor Mamadani's promise to arrest me, wait and see." pic.twitter.com/wTXyTKKt8B
— Eli Afriat 🇮🇱🎗 (@EliAfriatISR) December 3, 2025
Israel's Prime Minister also said that he wouldn’t meet with the newly elected Democratic mayor unless Mamdani supported Israel’s fundamental right to exist.
“If [Mamdani] changes his mind and says that we have the right to exist, that’ll be a good opening for a conversation,” Netanyahu said.
Mamdani has said that New York City should comply with international law, and that means arresting the leaders of foreign nations with warrants out for their arrest by the ICC, a body the United States does not belong to. The democratic socialist said his compliance would lead him to arrest Vladimir Putin the same as it would Benjamin Netanyahu.
On Sunday evening, @zohrankmamdani also affirmed his insane plan to honor an arrest warrant for Israel's democratically-elected prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
— Whitney Tilson (@WhitneyTilson) June 9, 2025
Mamdani cited the warrant issued by the ICC -- a body to which the United States is not even a party.
Worse still,… pic.twitter.com/hECWOh1B23
To conservatives, and to many Americans, the notion that a U.S. mayor would attempt to enforce an ICC warrant is both legally baseless and reckless. The United States has repeatedly rejected the idea that international bodies like the ICC should have jurisdiction over its citizens or its allies, and for good reason: they are unaccountable, politicized, and limited in their ability to do anything beyond issuing statements. Mamdani’s threat plays well on social media, but in the real world, it is little more than ideological theater, one that some critics say veers disturbingly close to singling out the world’s only Jewish state for punitive treatment.