New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said his administration is in an active internal conversation with the city’s Law Department over whether he could direct police to detain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he travels to New York in September for the United Nations General Assembly. In an interview on the New York Times podcast The Interview, Mamdani said Netanyahu “belongs in the Hague,” calling him a war criminal charged by the International Criminal Court over the Gaza war.
President Donald Trump said Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.” Netanyahu responded on radio host Sid Rosenberg’s program that Mamdani is with “the terror actors.”
Irrespective of how one feels about the Gaza conflict or the current U.S.-Iran conflict, Mamdani’s attacks on Benjamin Netanyahu are part of a consistent position he has held from the beginning. He has maintained an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, and pro-Palestinian stance, and now appears to support the IRGC.
His antisemitism and support for Islamic extremists are ironic given that New York is the most Jewish city in the United States and has nearly as many Jews as Jerusalem, the capital of Israel.
New York City holds the largest Jewish population of any city outside Israel, estimated at roughly 960,000 residents in the five boroughs and 1.4 million across the metropolitan area. Mamdani won the mayoralty without majority Jewish support: a CNN exit poll conducted by SSRS found 63% of Jewish voters backed independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, while 33% backed Mamdani and 3% backed Republican Curtis Sliwa.
Precinct-level results showed the divide ran along religious and ideological lines: Cuomo took up to 90% of the vote in the Hasidic enclave of Williamsburg, while Mamdani won comparable margins in nearby, more secular and gentrified precincts.
A February 2026 poll of 665 Jewish voters commissioned by The Jewish Majority and conducted by Mercury Public Affairs found that 82 percent were concerned about the “rise of antisemitism in New York City,” including two-thirds of those who voted for Mamdani, and 58% linked that rise to the normalization of anti-Zionism. The same poll found 61% believed Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” had emboldened pro-Hamas protesters.
A separate controversy involves a “New York City Immigrant Enclaves” map released by the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and NYC Tourism as part of its promotion for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The map identifies 30 neighborhoods across the five boroughs but omits most white immigrant neighborhoods, including all Italian and Jewish enclaves.
Mamdani condemned the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran and the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as “a catastrophic escalation” in an illegal war of aggression, opposing what he characterized as a war aimed at regime change. His party, the Democratic Socialists of America, issued a statement standing “firmly in agreement” with Mamdani.
Fabien Levy, a Jewish Iranian who served as former Mayor Eric Adams’ deputy mayor, said that when Persians were marching in Iran and were being killed, Mamdani did not proactively offer support. Filmmaker Nim Shapira separately criticized Mamdani for condemning the strikes as “aggression” without acknowledging Israeli civilians hit by Iranian missile fire.
On the second anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack, Mamdani posted a statement on X stating that in its aftermath, Netanyahu and the Israeli government “launched a genocidal war.” The same statement said he mourns Hamas’s victims, prays for the return of hostages, and hopes for “the dismantling of Hamas.” The New York Post reported the statement drew criticism from both Republicans and Democrats for its characterization of the Israeli military campaign as genocidal.
Mamdani was also criticized over his handling of a synagogue protest. Protesters outside Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills, a Queens synagogue, were recorded chanting, “Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here,” during a demonstration against a real estate event being held there.
Mamdani waited roughly a day before publicly addressing the incident. Governor Kathy Hochul, by contrast, had written that Hamas “calls for the genocide of Jews” and that the chants were “disgusting” and “dangerous.”
As a state Assemblyman in 2021, Mamdani led chants of “BDS, BDS,” standing for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, at a pro-Palestinian rally, telling the crowd he would hold every single person who has power in this city, in this state, in this country, accountable.
During a Ramadan event at a Staten Island mosque, he was introduced by Abdullah Akl, co-director of public affairs and civic engagement with the Muslim American Society of New York, who has a documented history of using the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
Mamdani’s political network includes documented financial and organizational links to relatives of Neville “Roy” Singham, a Shanghai-based former software executive who has funded groups promoting Chinese Communist Party messaging.
Jewish Insider reported that Goodwin, Singham’s niece, led the “Jews for Zohran” outreach effort during Mamdani’s campaign, bundled campaign contributions, and collaborated with Mamdani on organizational matters within NYC-DSA. Her parents are both NYC-DSA members who have donated to congressional candidates endorsed by Mamdani.
Separately, Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, liked Instagram posts from The People’s Forum promoting “All Out for Palestine,” a Times Square rally that The People’s Forum co-sponsored on October 8, 2023, one day after the Hamas attack. Attendees at the rally waved Palestinian flags and chanted phrases including “Resistance is justified” and “Globalize the intifada.” Some also chanted “700,” an early casualty count from the attack, while making throat-slitting gestures. Governor Kathy Hochul called the rally “abhorrent and morally repugnant.”
Singham himself is under a federal grand jury investigation in the Southern District of New York. The investigation began over possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and has since expanded into a criminal tax probe examining whether funds were unlawfully funneled through nonprofits he controls, including The People’s Forum.
The People’s Forum, the organization Mamdani’s wife promoted and that Singham’s network has been linked to, was also part of a broader coalition that backed the Global Sumud Flotilla, an attempt to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza that drew backing from socialist and hard-left parties across Europe, including Spain’s Podemos and Sumar, Portugal’s Left Bloc, and France’s La France Insoumise, along with domestic Marxist-Leninist groups such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the ANSWER Coalition.
Israeli forces intercepted the flotilla and detained hundreds of participants. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned four individuals tied to the flotilla in May 2026, stating it was organized by the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad and Samidoun, both of which it says are “clandestinely controlled by, or act on behalf of” Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, with the PCPA “established with funding from Hamas’s International Relations Bureau.”
These sanctions are tied to the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization Mamdani belongs to and identifies with as a democratic socialist, called on all DSA chapters to mobilize in solidarity with the flotilla.
The People’s Forum and Code Pink also organized a parallel effort, the Nuestra América Flotilla, which sailed toward Cuba in March 2026 in what organizers said was solidarity with the island amid a U.S. oil embargo. The People’s Forum is co-directed by Manolo De Los Santos, who has participated in events with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and has been described by Cuban state media as a “friend of the island.”
A March 2026 “Hands Off Iran” national day of action was separately co-endorsed by DSA, The People’s Forum, and Code Pink, the same organizations already tied to Mamdani’s coalition through his DSA membership, the People’s Forum rally his wife promoted, and Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans’s husband, Neville Singham.
At the Times Square version of the protest on February 28, 2026, demonstrators chanted “Hands off Iran now” while a speaker told the crowd the U.S./Israeli strikes were “an aid to advance imperialist Zionist interests,” and signs in the crowd read “For Iran’s right to a nuclear deterrent” and “Free Iran from imperialism, theocracy.” The People’s Forum’s own Times Square protest combined all three causes into one set of demands: “Hands off Iran, impose an arms embargo on Israel, and end the genocide in Gaza.”
CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has been tied to Mamdani’s campaign through the Unity and Justice Fund, a PAC that Mamdani political advisor Linda Sarsour said was the “largest institutional donor to the pro-Zohran super PAC in New York,” with campaign finance records showing it donated roughly $100,000 to New Yorkers for Lower Costs, a PAC supporting Mamdani.
CAIR disputes this characterization and says, as a 501(c)(3), it does not donate to political campaigns; the New York Post corrected an earlier version of its reporting after CAIR objected to being described as a direct campaign backer. CAIR was separately named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007–2008 Holy Land Foundation trial, in which five leaders were convicted of funneling over $12 million to Hamas.
CAIR co-founders Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad were, according to a George Washington University Program on Extremism report, leading members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, the same committee that produced the Holy Land Foundation.
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