Every September, the motorcades roll into Turtle Bay.
For one week, Manhattan hosts the largest annual gathering of accused war criminals on Earth. They arrive on diplomatic passports, sweep past the barricades on First Avenue, address the world from the green marble rostrum, and fly home.
New York has watched this procession for decades without a single mayor proposing to interrupt it. Until now.
Zohran Mamdani told The New York Times this past week that Benjamin Netanyahu “belongs in the Hague,” and said his administration is in “active conversation” with the city’s law department about ordering the NYPD to arrest the prime minister of Israel when he arrives for the UN General Assembly.
Fine. Let’s take the mayor at his word. If his principle is that New York City should enforce international criminal law against visiting heads of state, he owes the public the rest of his list. Right now it has one name on it.
Mamdani’s selective approach to ICC arrest warrants
Where was this principle in September 2023, when the late Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi addressed the General Assembly? Raisi sat on the death commission that sent thousands of Iranian political prisoners to the gallows in 1988. He was under US sanctions for it. He got his visa, gave his speech, and flew home. I do not remember any New York politician suggesting the NYPD meet him at the airport.
Where is it for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who comes to New York every autumn while human rights groups document what his forces and their proxies have done to Kurds in northern Syria? Where was it for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
Raisi’s predecessor as Iran’s president, who used the UN podium year after year to deny the Holocaust while his regime armed the murderers of Israelis and Americans?
And where is Russian President Vladimir Putin on the mayor’s list? Putin carries an arrest warrant from the same court Mamdani invokes, over the abduction of Ukrainian children.
Sudan’s longtime president Omar al-Bashir spent a decade under ICC warrants that included genocide, a charge Netanyahu does not face, and in 2013 he requested a visa to attend the General Assembly. New York’s political class did not demand his arrest. It barely noticed him.
There is, as it happens, one wanted head of state sitting in a New York jail cell right now. Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela until January, is in federal custody in the city, awaiting trial on narco-terrorism charges, after American forces removed him from Caracas.
Whatever one thinks of that operation, look at the mechanism: a federal indictment, written by American prosecutors under American law, enforced by the American government. When the United States decides a foreign leader belongs in a courtroom, it has tools. The mayor’s office of New York City is not among them.
Which brings us to the law. The 1947 Headquarters Agreement obligates the United States to admit world leaders traveling to the UN. Neither the United States nor New York City is a party to the Rome Statute. And no state in history, sovereign or otherwise, has executed an international arrest warrant against a sitting head of government. Not once.
Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic and Bashir faced judges only after losing power. When Putin visited Mongolia, an ICC member legally bound to arrest him, he got a red carpet. South Africa and Jordan, both members, let Bashir come and go.
Mamdani believes his police commissioner will succeed where sovereign states, bound by treaty, declined to try.
Mamdani’s arrest threat is political theater
He knows this, of course. He conceded to the Times that he is not sure he has the authority, and promised that “we won’t be writing our own laws.”
That concession is the tell. What remains, once the legal impossibility is admitted, is a piece of theater staged for a domestic audience, and the script calls for one specific image: the elected leader of the world’s only Jewish state in handcuffs on a New York street, while the men who gassed Syrians and buried the Rohingya in mass graves ride to Turtle Bay in motorcades.
A word to the diplomats and intellectuals tempted to shrug this off as municipal noise. International law survives on the belief that it applies to everyone, or it protects no one.
Every time its vocabulary is borrowed for a selective performance, it gets a little cheaper, and the people who eventually pay for that are the victims who will need it to mean something. A war crimes regime that operates against one state, and only one, is something much older than international law. It has simply put on the robes.
So here is a challenge, offered in good faith. Publish the list, Mr. Mayor.
Name every leader under indictment or credible accusation whom the NYPD will detain at the city line, and commit to it before September.
Put Putin’s name next to Netanyahu’s, and we can have a serious argument about principle. Add Erdogan while you are at it; he will be in town.
I suspect the list will stay at one name. New Yorkers, home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel, can draw their own conclusions about why.