Every neighborhood has one. The man who gets into an argument outside the bar, discovers that his opponent is larger and calmer than he anticipated, and immediately begins lunging theatrically against the arms of his friends. Hold me back. I’m serious, hold me back. He is not straining to get free. He is straining to be seen straining, and he is careful to keep his weight tilted backward so that the arms holding him never have to work very hard. The performance depends entirely on the restraint being real. Remove the friends and the whole thing collapses into a man who has to actually do something.
Zohran Mamdani - as poseur par excellence - has built a mayoralty on this posture. In a recent New York Times interview, the mayor of New York City reaffirmed that Benjamin Netanyahu “belongs in The Hague," that he is a war criminal charged by the International Criminal Court, and that his administration is in “active conversation" with the city’s Law Department about what might be possible should the prime minister arrive for the UN General Assembly in September. Whatever the law allows him to do, he said, that is what he will do. As the poster child of an entitled and fragile generation that loves to always be “in conversation", Mamdani has found another sweet spot.
He knows precisely what the law allows him to do, which is nothing. The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute. The ICC has no jurisdiction on American soil and never has. Federal law affirmatively bars local officials from cooperating with the ersatz court, and a separate federal statute criminalizes the detention and obstruction of foreign heads of state. Governor Hochul stated flatly, more than a year ago, that a New York City mayor has no such power. Jerry Nadler, who is not exactly a Likud spokesman, called the proposal simply unrealistic and noted that the city has no jurisdiction whatsoever. Even the mayor’s own allies, according to the Times, were confused by the fixation and told reporters it was not a priority for them.
So the mayor is not exploring a legal question. He is commissioning a study whose conclusion he already possesses, so that he can spend the summer being seen commissioning it. The Law Department is not a legal resource here. It is the arm around his chest. It is the leash.
Consider the dog tied to the tree, which is the more honest image. He barks himself hoarse at everything that passes. He lunges to the end of the rope, gags himself on his own collar, and lunges again, and the passersby are meant to understand that only the rope stands between him and glory. But the dog has taken the measure of that rope with great precision. He knows exactly how many feet of theater he owns. He never tests the knot. Untie him and he sits down.
It is worth understanding where this reflex comes from, because it did not arrive by accident. Mamdani is the first mayor of New York produced entirely by the attention economy, and he governs the way he campaigned, which is to say he governs in vertical video. He is the son of a Columbia professor and a celebrated filmmaker, he spent his twenties recording rap tracks under a stage name, and the only job on his record before he entered the State Assembly was a stint as a foreclosure prevention counselor.
He has never run an institution, never met a payroll, and never been responsible for an outcome that could be measured by anyone other than himself. What he possesses instead is an exquisite feel for the frame. He knows where the camera is, and he knows that thirty seconds of a handsome, chest-thumping young man vowing to confront a war criminal will travel further than a decade of competent sanitation policy, because the promise inside the clip can never be tested.
Posturing is not something he fell into under the pressures of office. It is his profession, the only one he has ever practiced, and in fairness he practices it brilliantly. The tragedy for the city is that the single skill which made him mayor is the one skill useless in the job, and so he keeps returning to the thing he is good at, the way a man who can only juggle will keep juggling at a funeral.
A conviction that cannot be acted upon costs its holder nothing, which is exactly why he selected it. Arresting a visiting head of state would require him to defy federal law, to break with his own police commissioner, to invite immediate confrontation with a White House that has already promised to intervene, and to answer for it in court within hours. He has no intention of doing any of these things. What he intends is to harvest the applause of people who wish he would, while the federal system he denounces quietly guarantees he will never have to.
Meanwhile the city he was actually elected to run has a housing crisis, a transit system in decay, and a public safety picture his own coalition cannot agree on, and there is no version of this in which a single New Yorker’s rent falls or a single subway car runs on time because the mayor has loudly retained counsel to investigate arresting Benjamin Netanyahu. As Israeli minister Ofir Akunis put it, he might try running New York City and only New York City. The constituency being served here is not New York. It is the segment of his base for whom hating the Jewish state is the organizing obsession of political life.
Now hold that same mayor against the standard he has invented for everyone else, because this is where the performance stops being embarrassing and starts being obscene. Asked repeatedly during his campaign about the phrase “globalize the intifada", Mamdani declined to condemn it, explaining that it captured a desperate desire for Palestinian human rights and that policing language was not the mayor’s business. Presented with a slogan whose plain meaning is the export of murder to Jewish civilians in the diaspora he now governs, this connoisseur of international law suddenly discovered the virtues of free expression and the modest limits of a mayor’s authority.
The same selective muteness governs the rest of it. "From the river to the sea" describes a territory in which no Jewish state exists anymore and is the stated program of the organization that carried out October 7. He has an answer prepared, of course, about equal rights, which is the polite formulation for the same map. He built his political identity on BDS and on the language of genocide applied to a war Hamas began and could end tomorrow by laying down its arms, and he has produced no comparable vocabulary for Hamas or Hezbollah, no warrant, no conversation with the Law Department, no willingness to say the word terrorist without a qualifier attached.
What he offers instead is a framework in which the murderers are a "resistance" responding to conditions set by the Jews - while the state that buries their victims is the criminal in the dock. His framework launders the killers, isolates their victims, and supplies the moral permission structure within which a Jewish New Yorker gets to feel a little less safe every year.
So here is a modest proposal, offered in the spirit of the mayor’s own jurisprudence:
If New York is a city of international law, and if the mayor intends to exhaust every legal possibility against anyone whose words and deeds have contributed to the mass killing of civilians, then he need not wait for September and he need not wait for a visitor. The suspect is available immediately, is already within city limits, and has been photographed extensively. Let him instruct the NYPD to detain the man who could not bring himself to condemn the globalization of the intifada while Jews were being shot outside museums and burned in Boulder. Let him convene the Law Department and ask what New York can do about an official who spent years lending his voice to the erasure of a member state of the United Nations.
He will not do it, obviously. The whole architecture of the man depends on the accusation pointing outward, at a target safely on another continent, protected by a legal system he can denounce and rely upon in the same breath. So let Netanyahu come in September. Let him address the General Assembly and walk the streets of the city that holds the largest Jewish population outside Israel, and let him do it without incident, because there will be no incident. The mayor will issue a statement. The Law Department will conclude what everyone including the mayor already knows.
The rope will hold, as it was always meant to.
And the barking will continue, because the barking is always the point of a career poseur in chief.
Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli marriage therapist, trainer of therapists, lecturer and author. He volunteers in the IDF reserves, as an MDA medic, in Zaka, and in the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team. His articles have appeared in Jewish News Syndicate, Israel National News, The Jerusalem Post, Breitbart and elsewhere.
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