Mamdani’s Netanyahu Video Was a Calculated Move. Insiders Explain His Strategy to VF.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,” the mayor of New York said in a video this week, referring to the Israeli prime minister. “He is responsible for the killing of more than 73,000 people, for the maiming of tens of thousands of children.”

The video address had the visual trappings of a state-of-the-city speech, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s words went well beyond the city limits. The two-minute video quickly became one of his most viewed posts ever, some feat for a political operator already known for his virality. As of Thursday night, the post had more than 91 million views on X and more than 108 million views on Instagram. He was cheered by his fans across the world and blasted by pro-Israel organizations and members of Netanyahu’s government. The move may have solidified his status as the most influential American mayor on the international stage since Rudy Giuliani.

And it was all for a speech in which Mamdani openly admitted that he was backing off from his own campaign pledge: He could not, as promised, order Netanyahu’s arrest on war crime charges when he came to New York. Yet somehow, he gained renewed admiration from his supporters and got the issue off his desk, all in one maneuver.

However, while it may have looked like Mamdani was forced to react in real time this week after a New York Times interview resurfaced the question of the proposed arrest’s legality, his team had long been planning for how to handle the apparent backpedal—and even how to turn it into an opportunity.

Back in December 2024, less than two months into his candidacy, a no-name state assemblyman barely registering in the polls joined Mehdi Hasan’s show on Zeteo and made his declaration: If elected mayor, he would direct the New York Police Department to arrest Netanyahu if he came to the city, executing a warrant issued 11 days earlier by the International Criminal Court that charged the Israeli leader with war crimes and crimes against humanity for his military campaign in Gaza. The United States is not party to the ICC, but Mamdani went there anyway.

It was not off-the-cuff stuff.

“We knew it was going to be asked, and there was some discussion internally,” says Andrew Bard Epstein, the communications director and later creative director for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. “I certainly was pushing for him to make this arrest declaration.”

Mamdani made the Netanyahu arrest pledge early on, but it wasn’t a fixture of his message on the campaign trail.

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It wasn’t just about the recent news out of the ICC. In the intervening days, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo—then an inevitable but still undeclared Democratic mayoral candidate—had announced that he would join Netanyahu’s legal defense team at The Hague.

So Mamdani weighed in, full force, during the Zeteo interview. Then he was scarcely asked about the issue again—“until the final weeks of the primary,” Epstein says, “when he was finally taken seriously by the political establishment, by people in media and local New York City reporters, who then, I think, resuscitated that question.”

And then it mostly disappeared once more—until last week, when Mamdani sat for an interview with The New York Times. He was again asked whether he would order Netanyahu’s arrest if the prime minister came to New York City in September for the United Nations General Assembly, and Mamdani replied that he was in “an active conversation with our legal department” about whether he had the power to do so.

On Tuesday, he released the video making clear that his administration had concluded he did not have that power. By this point, it was nearly seven months into his term, more than a year after those caustic final days of the Democratic mayoral primary, and 19 months since Mamdani had made his first statement on the issue.

“During the campaign, it was reasonable to assume that if someone was subject to an ICC arrest warrant and they entered New York, local law enforcement might have a role in facilitating or executing that warrant,” a source close to Mamdani tells me. “Given that the NYPD regularly cooperates with federal and international law enforcement, it wasn’t a crazy idea.” (The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment, but spokesperson Delaney Kempner told the Times that the “NYPD’s position is entirely rooted in the law.”) At the time, Mamdani was an assemblyman without much knowledge of the legal particulars, the source says, and he didn’t have the lawyers on hand to assess them, but “he was absolutely interested in what his legal limitations and possibilities were.”

The pledge was never a major feature of Mamdani’s campaign, but it did come up during the transition, when Netanyahu spoke of visiting New York City after Mamdani became mayor. “By that time, I certainly was aware that it was going to be probably impossible to execute” the ICC warrant, Epstein says. “I felt a certain responsibility, having pushed this idea in the campaign.” So he wrote up some ideas for dealing with the problem and circulated them to the team. His core recommendation: conduct a thorough legal analysis, and if and when it finds that the mayor can’t do this, “lay out the moral and legal case against Netanyahu and call in the federal government, which does have that authority.”

The question of what to do if Mamdani did not have the power to act on the ICC warrant was under serious consideration even before he was sworn in as mayor.

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Epstein did not join Mamdani’s administration and says he wasn’t privy to internal deliberations at City Hall, but in the end, his suggested plan was exactly the course Mamdani and his team pursued. The Times now reports that Mamdani had already learned from his lawyers that the arrest wasn’t possible before he was asked about it last week, but, according to sources who spoke with the paper, he wanted to tell his supporters “on his own terms.”

“Believe me, he knew before the question was asked that he didn’t have the power,” says Paul Begala, a longtime Democratic political adviser, when I ask for his read on things as an outside observer. “I think the guy has enormous talent,” he adds. “I question his judgment, but golly, is he gifted.”

That’s because it appears the mayor turned a sour moment—admitting publicly that he’d made a campaign promise he could not keep—into a victory, or at least something with its own political momentum. Mamdani’s message on Netanyahu has been cheered by commenters everywhere from Ireland to Egypt and blasted by opponents like Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, who has accused the mayor of spreading “blood libel”—an apparent reference to medieval antisemitic rhetoric that was later harnessed by the Nazis.

But for Begala, a longtime critic of Netanyahu himself, the problem is that the speech was primarily a spectacle. “I think he understands the lessons of [Donald] Trump’s success, in that diversion is a superpower. And look, enrolling every child in New York City in childcare, I bet you that’s hard,” the former Bill Clinton strategist says. “Delivering is hard. It’s really hard. And it seems to me like he’s saying, ‘Okay, I can’t really deliver on that, at least as quickly as people want, but I can do this.’” (The mayor has launched new free childcare programs for two- and three-year-olds in some neighborhoods.)

“It’s like your 15-year-old comes down for breakfast and says, ‘Guys, I tried weed yesterday. It was great.’ All of a sudden, you’re not so pissed about the geometry exam.”

For folks in Mamdani’s camp, however, this misses the point. So do interpretations that focus on how this maneuver got the issue off Mamdani’s desk and onto that of President Trump, who’s already ruled out acting on the ICC warrant. For Mamdani, they say, the directness of his message is the message—at least in part—and the strategy.

“I think that New Yorkers want two things,” the source close to the mayor says. “They want somebody who has conviction, and they want somebody who will give them the truth. And I think that it was really important for him to say flat out, ‘New York is not a place that welcomes war criminals.’”

As they did during the campaign, Mamdani insiders consider his directness to be a serious political weapon.

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“It is probably also refreshing for people to hear a political figure speak plainly about what he can’t do,” Epstein says. “Certainly with President Trump, but I think generally with politicians, they’re loath to admit the limits of their own power and influence…. He levels with constituents about what we are all collectively witnessing in Palestine, and he levels with his constituents about what he is and is not able to do about it.”

So far, it’s not clear how much it will change the calculus for other Democrats, including a New York congressional delegation led by Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries. “I haven’t talked to him about this issue. He’s been very vocal on the issue,” Jeffries said when asked by a reporter Thursday whether he agreed with Mamdani. “I continue to maintain the position that, one, we’ve got to figure out how to move things in a better direction in the Middle East. And for me, that means a safe and secure Israel as a Jewish and democratic state living side by side in peace and prosperity with an independent Palestinian state that provides dignity, self-determination, and respect for the Palestinian people.”

“I don’t advise them,” Begala says of Schumer and Jeffries, “but if I did, I’d say all good people loathe Netanyahu. And I know it’s not really any of our business, but there’s nothing wrong with pointing out that he’s done enormous damage to a country we love and to an alliance we need.”

If the Democratic center is moving on this issue—an April Pew poll found that 52% of Democrats said they had no confidence at all in Netanyahu to do the right thing in world affairs, up from 37% in 2025—there’s little evidence so far that party leaders are moving with it.

“Look, the hope is that if you do something that’s morally right, that other people will join you,” says the source close to Mamdani. “I don’t know if the assumption is that courage is gonna magically be extended to Kirsten Gillibrand or Chuck Schumer, right? It would in fact be unwise to assume that they’re gonna go out there and be bolder and braver about this than ever before.” (Both senators’ representatives did not respond to VF’s request for comment on Mamdani’s speech.)

No matter how things go domestically, Mamdani has a victory for now. He’s huge in Dublin.

This story has been updated.