By David Nataf
24 September 2026 — Tel Aviv / New York
Tel Aviv — For Israelis with family in New York, and for expats who still keep a foot in both cities, UN week is not abstract. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at the General Assembly on Thursday, 24 September 2026. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has spent the same week casting the visit as a morality play about an ICC warrant — a warrant New York cannot enforce and that the United States does not recognize.
October 7, 2023 remains the starting point: Hamas murdered Israelis; Iran-backed proxies widened the war. The IDF’s job is to defend. Calling that defense “genocide” from City Hall does not make the word true.
Mamdani told CNN’s Amanpour that Netanyahu is “a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide,” while saying the ICC warrant should be “honored” even after he conceded the city lacks arrest authority (JTA; earlier: The Hill, NPR, NY1). Netanyahu’s video reply, carried by JTA and NY1, accused the mayor of supporting “Hamas terrorist monsters” and of “inciting riots against New York Jews,” and promised to “tell the truth” at the UN about Israel’s soldiers and about Mamdani.
That matters in Tel Aviv because New York is still the largest diaspora hub many Israeli families track. City Council Speaker Julie Menin told NY1 antisemitism is “surging” and asked people to lower the temperature. When a mayor normalizes ICC theater against the Jewish state’s wartime leader during UN week, Israelis hear a signal about Jewish safety in the city that hosts the UN — not a seminar on international law.
Short read: no invented arrest, no Rome Statute magic in Manhattan, and a reminder that diaspora security and Israeli security are linked on the same calendar week.
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