Benjamin Netanyahu Blasts Zohran Mamdani as Antisemite, Says ‘Shame on You’

NEW YORK – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel used a portion of his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday not to talk about the United Nations, or even primarily about Gaza, but to attack the mayor of the city he was standing in.

“Since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York,” Netanyahu said, addressing Mayor Zohran Mamdani directly from the podium. “The lies you and other antisemites spread about the Jews and the Jewish state have real consequences,” he said, according to a network transcript.

Benjamin Netanyahu punctuated the moment by turning on the chamber itself. Dozens of delegates had already walked out before he reached Mamdani’s name, part of a mass exodus that emptied much of the hall as he opened his remarks, and he told those still seated, “shame on you” if they would not condemn what he called antisemitism in New York’s city government.

The attack was not new, but the setting gave it weight. Netanyahu is in the middle of a difficult re-election campaign at home, and Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor and an outspoken critic of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, has become a useful foil for him: a foreign official Netanyahu can cast as proof that criticism of Israel curdles into hatred of Jews, delivered from the world’s largest diplomatic stage rather than a campaign rally.

As evidence, Netanyahu pointed to Mamdani’s rapport with the streamer Hasan Piker, his hosting of a Palestinian journalist at Gracie Mansion, and social media posts that the mayor’s wife, Rama Duwaji, had liked in the days after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. None of it amounts to an act of antisemitism under any standard definition of the term, and it stood in for the harder claim Netanyahu spent the rest of the speech defending: that accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza is “the greatest lie of the century,” a formulation that sits uneasily against the finding of a United Nations commission of inquiry, along with Israeli and international human rights groups, that Israel did commit genocide there.

Mamdani did not attend the speech. He was scheduled to join the Dutch prime minister for a discussion with LGBTQ+ youth while it happened. In a statement afterward, he said Netanyahu had used the UN podium “to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians,” adding that “no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

The record Netanyahu did not mention cuts against his framing. Mamdani has repeatedly condemned Hamas as a terrorist organization and called the Oct. 7 attacks “a horrific war crime.” Antisemitic hate crimes have risen in New York in recent years, as they have nationally, and anti-Israel protests in the city have at times turned chaotic, but there have been no riots targeting Jews during Mamdani’s time in office, a claim Netanyahu’s own campaign has made in earlier videos without evidence. In the first week of his term, Mamdani revoked two of his predecessor Eric Adams’s executive orders that had barred city agencies from boycotting Israel and defined some criticism of the country as antisemitic, drawing immediate condemnation from the Israeli government; Mamdani said at the time that “protecting Jewish New Yorkers is going to be a focus of my administration.”

The feud has by now become a fixture of Netanyahu’s re-election campaign. His Likud party has put Mamdani’s face on billboards in Israel alongside images of the leaders of Iran, Turkey and Hezbollah, and this month Netanyahu posted an AI-generated video showing the mayor celebrating his own defeat on a phone call with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Iran’s Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei and Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, before the call is abruptly cancelled and the group scatters, a Jerusalem newspaper reported.

Brad Lander, a Mamdani ally and the Democratic nominee for a Brooklyn and Manhattan House seat, called Netanyahu’s attacks “appalling.” Lander, who is Jewish, said antisemitism “is genuinely on the rise, and a real strategy is needed to do something about it,” adding that “it makes Israelis and American Jews less safe for Netanyahu to weaponize charges of antisemitism so cynically instead of facing accountability for his own crimes.”

Mamdani’s own response to the speech was wordless. Hours before Netanyahu took the podium, the mayor’s office posted a one-minute video of him planting an olive tree at Gracie Mansion and eating dinner with Palestinian families from Gaza, captioned only “Last night I planted an olive tree at Gracie Mansion with Palestinian families from Gaza. May peace be our future.”

He had all but invited protests against Netanyahu after conceding in July that City Hall has no legal power to enforce the ICC warrant, but he did not appear at any of Thursday’s demonstrations himself. Whether the accusation does Netanyahu more good in an Israeli election than it does damage to Mamdani in a city he already governs is not something Thursday’s speech settled, and it is not clear either man expects it to be.