NEW YORK — When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani dropped a two-minute video address calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal and the architect of a genocide, he didn’t just create a viral moment. He signaled an irreversible shift in the U.S. political landscape, and how U.S. officials approach global human rights: a transition from defensive moral pleas to actionable accountability.

Clocking more than 30 million views, the address was more than a viral moment. It reflects the collapse of what many have called the Palestinian exception in American politics, the long-standing belief that criticizing Israel was political suicide. Increasingly, elected officials are demonstrating that speaking plainly about Palestinian rights is no longer simply politically survivable; it can be politically advantageous.

Foreign policy is increasingly being understood as a domestic reality inextricably linked to our own communities. Leaders are proving that you can treat Palestinian life as a matter of universal right, say it plainly, and win.

The debate has moved beyond whether Palestinians deserve equal humanity. The challenge now is confronting the political, financial, and institutional systems that have enabled decades of impunity. As those systems come under greater scrutiny, Israeli officials appear increasingly willing to dispense with the language of restraint and old public relations tactics altogether. They no longer feel any need to conceal their genocidal intent or their actions.

And the machinery of influence they have bought and paid for over decades in the U.S. has reached a point where officials from the federal level down to local municipal offices remain firmly in the clutches of pro-Israel lobbying groups.

That is why Mamdani’s clarity matters. He is helping shift the political baseline, but in this video address, he stopped short of maximizing the opportunity.

There are two fundamental flaws with the “just arrest him” framing of his statement. And neither of them is the part the pundits are currently fighting about on cable news, but they are the only parts that actually matter if we want to move from high-minded rhetoric to concrete action.

The warrant is real, but the lever for local action does not exist.

In his address, Mamdani stated the legal truth: Netanyahu belongs in a courtroom, not a motorcade. He acknowledged that New York has no independent authority to execute International Criminal Court (ICC) warrants, and argued that the federal government should step in, join the Rome Statute, and enforce the arrest.

He named the limits of his office, but treating those limits as a mere technicality misses the entire architecture of U.S. foreign policy . The United States is not a neutral bystander waiting to join the court. It has spent decades actively engineering a legal fortress to ensure it never has to answer it.

In 2002, Congress passed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act, contemptuously nicknamed the Hague Invasion Act, which explicitly authorizes the U.S. president to use “all means necessary,” including military force, to liberate any U.S. or allied official detained by the court. The law effectively places the United States outside the ICC’s enforcement framework, making calls for Washington to immediately execute an ICC arrest warrant politically implausible.

That reality was reinforced just twenty-four hours before Mamdani’s video address, when the President declared that Netanyahu “will not be arrested” on American soil.

Demanding that Washington suddenly enforce an ICC warrant is therefore appealing to the one government whose domestic laws were deliberately designed to resist the court’s authority. Nor is doing so necessarily in the United States’ long-term interest, given that successive U.S. administrations have themselves been accused of conduct that could face international legal scrutiny if the same standards were consistently applied.

Even if the United States ratified the Rome Statute tomorrow, history suggests that treaty membership alone is no guarantee of enforcement. The past two years have exposed an uncomfortable reality: many of the ICC’s 120 member states have treated their legal obligations as optional rather than binding.

While countries including Ireland and the Netherlands initially pledged to enforce the warrants “100 percent,” events quickly exposed the gap between legal commitments and political will.

In April 2025, Netanyahu landed in Budapest to a literal red carpet. France pledged to “vigorously apply” the warrant on a Tuesday, only to pivot by Wednesday to claim Netanyahu enjoyed head-of-state immunity. This is the same France that publicly lectured Mongolia months earlier for extending that exact same courtesy to Vladimir Putin, who strolled through an ICC member state in 2024 completely unbothered. Germany “examined the legalities”. Italy declared an arrest “unfeasible.” And the United Kingdom chose its words like an operative defusing a bomb.

This fracture deserves a precise name: the court for thee, immunity for me and mine.

The reality is the ICC has no police force and it cannot prosecute defendants in absentia. Its authority depends almost entirely on member states choosing to execute its warrants. When those governments refuse, accountability shifts away from The Hague and toward jurisdictions that possess both legal authority and the political willingness to act.

But none of this should be read as diminishing Mamdani’s broader record. His proposed Not on Our Dime Act recognized a central strategic reality: meaningful accountability often begins by targeting the financial and institutional infrastructure that enables unlawful conduct. By seeking to prohibit New York–registered charities from funding Israeli settlements, the legislation focused on a lever that actually falls within New York’s jurisdiction. That makes the omission in this particular speech all the more notable, not because the strategy is absent from his politics, but because it was absent from one of his most widely watched public interventions.

Which raises the obvious question: if not The Hague, then where?

The Real Lever: The New York Money Trail

This brings us to the opening Mamdani missed, and what many experts, advocates, and activists, like Mohammed El-Kurd, pointed out immediately after the video went viral. The real lever isn’t sitting in a courtroom in the Netherlands. It is bolted directly to the floor of New York City.

New York is not only the world’s financial capital. It is also home to dozens of tax-exempt organizations that raise and transfer tens of millions of U.S. dollars to support Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Those organizations are incorporated under New York law, regulated by New York authorities, and fall within the jurisdiction of the New York State Attorney General.

This is the difference between symbolic politics and structural power. One strategy demands action from institutions with little intention of acting. The other targets the financial infrastructure operating under New York’s own jurisdiction.

The Danger of the Netanyahu Single-Villain Myth

The second opportunity Mamdani left on the table is more subtle, but ultimately more consequential.

Mamdani’s argument was rooted in universality, not exception. He framed his remarks around the principle that international law should apply equally to everyone, repeatedly arguing that any individual subject to an ICC arrest warrant should be held accountable regardless of nationality or political office. That consistency has been a defining feature of his public advocacy and is one of the speech’s greatest strengths. Yet, in practice, Netanyahu remained its unmistakable focal point.

That is understandable. Netanyahu is the country’s longest-serving prime minister and the most recognizable face of the war.

But centering the critique on Benjamin Netanyahu risks reinforcing one of the most effective enduring narratives in modern political communication: reducing systems to a single villain.

There is comfort in believing that history turns on one person. It suggests that if the individual is removed, the crisis ends with them. But states do not function that way. Policies are conceived, refined, funded, defended, and carried forward by institutions that survive elections and outlast the politicians who temporarily lead them.

That is precisely why so much of Israel’s political and public relations machinery benefits from making Netanyahu the face of everything. If the world’s attention remains fixed on one man, it becomes easier to overlook the broader architecture that produced, legitimized, and sustained these policies across successive governments.

The historical record makes that difficult to defend. The displacement of Palestinians, settlement expansion, territorial fragmentation, and the systematic denial of Palestinian self-determination did not begin with Netanyahu, nor are they likely to end with his departure. These are the product of decades of legislation, military policy, court decisions, bureaucratic practice, and political consensus. And we have decades of evidence proving this.

None of this absolves Netanyahu. He bears responsibility for decisions made under his leadership and for the coalition he assembled, in which figures such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have exercised extraordinary influence. But that coalition is better understood as the latest expression of a much longer trajectory than as a sharp break from it.

That is the distinction worth preserving. Holding individuals accountable is essential. Mistaking the individual for the system is not. When the focus narrows to a single leader, the machinery that enabled him too often escapes the scrutiny it deserves.

The coalition itself illustrates the point.

Unlike most democracies, Israel operates without a single written constitution, relying instead on Basic Laws that have become increasingly vulnerable to political manipulation. Netanyahu governs through a coalition in which far-right partners exercise enormous leverage over both government policy and the state’s future direction.

Smotrich, as Finance Minister, controls both the national purse strings and the settlement portfolio. He has openly advocated annexing the West Bank under a doctrine of “maximum land, minimum Arab population,” while his ministry has prepared plans for future settlements in Gaza. Ben-Gvir, as National Security Minister, oversees the national police, has championed expanding arms to radical settlers, and repeatedly promotes what he calls the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians. Both have made clear that they are willing to collapse the government if military operations are significantly curtailed and their military aggression is challenged.

The clearest evidence, however, lies not in campaign speeches but in legislation.

Recent laws and legislative proposals demonstrate how political rhetoric is translated into state policy. Consider the proposed Death Penalty for Terrorists Law. The bill establishes an expedited system of capital punishment for offenses defined through broad nationalist language. Critics argue that, in practice, its design overwhelmingly targets Palestinians while embedding discriminatory enforcement into the legal framework itself. The state has essentially built a legal assembly line for execution, a structural tool for state-sponsored persecution, mass elimination, and genocidal violence under the guise of the law.

Nor does the machinery stop there.

International attention understandably remains centered on Gaza. Yet that focus often obscures the simultaneous acceleration of systematic abuses and atrocities—mass killing, settlement expansion, land seizures, home demolitions, forced displacement and disappearances, and military violence across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem

Widen the frame further and another reality comes into focus: the machinery extends well beyond Israel’s borders.

It relies on American military assistance, diplomatic protection, repeated U.N. Security Council vetoes, and a domestic lobbying infrastructure built to raise the political cost of dissent.

During the 2024 election cycle, AIPAC and affiliated super PACs spent more than $100 million backing candidates while targeting members of Congress, including Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who dared to challenge the longstanding bipartisan consensus on Israel, and to say what Mamdani just said.

It also depends on a media ecosystem that has spent decades softening the language of occupation and violence, reporting that Palestinians simply “die” rather than are killed, and presenting a profound asymmetry of power as though it were a conflict between equals.

The shift is not confined to political elites and no longer fringe. It is increasingly reflected in public opinion.

A March 2025 poll of Israeli Jews published in Haaretz revealed that 82 percent favored the total expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, and 47 percent agreed that the military should treat captured cities by killing everyone in them. A separate survey showed a clear majority opposed to allowing any food or medicine to enter the strip at all.

Arrest Netanyahu tomorrow, put him in a jail cell, and Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, the lobby, the weapons contracts, the vetoes, and the polling data all remain exactly where they stand.

Arrest Netanyahu tomorrow and place him in a jail cell, and Smotrich remains. Ben-Gvir remains. The settlement movement remains. The lobbying infrastructure remains. The weapons contracts remain. The diplomatic cover remains. The political incentives remain.

That is why accountability cannot stop with Netanyahu. Nor should it end with Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, or the current coalition. They are not an aberration detached from history; they are the latest custodians of a political project that predates them by decades. Limiting accountability to today’s leaders risks obscuring the institutions, legal frameworks, financial networks, and international support that made both the occupation and its successive policies possible long before they entered office. And it risks producing its own form of historical revisionism.

Beyond Condemnation

The next phase is not about speaking more loudly. It is about speaking more precisely.

We do not need less clarity about Netanyahu; we need more—but we need to place him where he belongs: inside a much larger political, legal, financial, and institutional system. Name the individual, but name the machinery in the same breath. Connect Netanyahu to Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Connect the coalition to the settlement movement. Connect state policy to the tax-exempt financial pipelines operating in New York, the lobbying infrastructure in Washington, and the international alliances that have protected the project for decades.

The same principle applies inside Israel itself. We must confront the systematic radicalization of the electorate and public that put those men in power. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are not an accidental glitch or temporary extremists. Their rise is inseparable from the political climate that made it possible.

They are the products of a profound rightward consensus that now anchors mainstream Israeli politics. What was once considered extreme is now the baseline logic of the state. They did not emerge in a vacuum; they were elected, empowered, and sustained by a broader rightward shift within Israeli politics and significant public support for many of the policies they now pursue— apartheid, displacement, and mass elimination.

Nor should we pretend these dynamics stop at Israel’s borders. The technologies, surveillance practices, and security doctrines refined through decades of occupation and field-tested on occupied Palestinians , increasingly circulate internationally. Facial-recognition systems, predictive policing tools, and crowd-control tactics developed or tested in that context have found their way into police departments and security agencies far beyond the region, including in the United States. The logic travels with them. So do the legal arguments used to frame dissent as a security threat.

The heavy-handed domestic framework that labels peaceful protest a “national security threat,” and targets dissidents and journalists as “terrorists” there, is the exact same mechanism used to clear student encampments by force and deport students over political op-eds right here in New York.

We need narrative strategy.

To hit the machine where it matters, our communication strategy must pivot. We did not spend years building momentum, enduring censorship, and successfully shifting public opinion just to retreat into defensive caution or softened language now. The current moment demands an absolute refusal to compromise on the core narrative.

For too long, the establishment has forced a baseline of acceptable dissent. You can criticize Netanyahu, but that freedom to speak stops as soon as you start criticizing Israel. Our strategy must reject the single-villain myth entirely and enforce an unapologetic, historically accurate framework.

When we speak of the state’s actions, we must explicitly name the current and decades-old apartheid architecture, the structural drive for total displacement, and the normalization of mass elimination. Diluting this message to appease centrist sensibilities or to sound more palatable only retroactively validates the propaganda machine.

True narrative power does not come from playing within the safe boundaries set by political lobbies; it comes from establishing an uncompromising baseline of truth that forces the establishment to respond to our terms. We have shifted the dial because we were honest about the structural nature of this violence. Moving forward, the narrative must remain sharp, relentless, and completely unyielding.

We need an accountability strategy.

This isn’t just a change in rhetoric, it’s a change in accountability strategy. The movement has evolved from defending Palestinian rights and moral arguments, to building concrete mechanisms for accountability.

Campaigns such as Not on Our Dime, which seeks to prevent New York tax-exempt dollars from supporting illegal settlements, point toward that next phase. So do efforts focused on financial transparency, municipal oversight, strategic litigation, universal jurisdiction, shareholder activism, and regulatory accountability.

The objective is no longer simply to persuade. It is by aggressively shifting to legislation, financial transparency, oversight, and other pressure points that can interrupt the systems enabling the abuses and egregious atrocities that have forever changed society.

Key Actionable Takeaways

• Enforce the Structural Narrative: Strip Netanyahu of his shield by centering every conversation on the historical continuity of the state’s apartheid framework. Refuse to frame the crisis around single timelines or individual politicians; force public officials to address the continuous, decades-long institutional machinery of displacement.

• Shut Down Local Settlement Funding: Map, expose, and legally challenge the specific 501(c)(3) tax-exempt U.S. charities and local foundations funneling American dollars directly into West Bank land theft. Pivot from generalized fundraising boycotts to targeted legal and regulatory campaigns against these domestic financial pipelines. Demand this of your local elected officials.

• Weapons-test the Legalized Execution Law: Use Israel’s newly finalized Death Penalty for Terrorists Law as concrete, undeniable evidence of an un-checked legislative assembly line for mass elimination. Mobilize local communities and legal advocacy networks to expose how this fast-tracked hanging regime codifies state-sanctioned racial violence under the guise of security.

• Leverage Municipal Power: Pivot from demanding abstract international sanctions to forcing hyper-local legislative action. Pressure city and state representatives to introduce targeted divestment bills, legally mandate the cancellation of police-surveillance technology sharing agreements, and codify ironclad protections for domestic student and community dissent.

Resources and Organizations to Follow

To translate an uncompromising structural narrative into direct, localized pressure, readers can look to, support, and coordinate with these front-line organizations:

1. Shutting Down Local Settlement Funding

• Not On Our Dime! Coalition: This campaign focuses on stopping the flow of New York taxpayer-subsidized funds to organizations executing West Bank land theft. They push for the passing of the state’s Not On Our Dime! Act (Bills A11289/S606), which would empower the state Attorney General to dissolve the nonprofit status of entities funding settler violence and allow victims to sue them directly.

• Good Shepherd Collective: This grassroots organization tracks, maps, and exposes the exact operations of U.S.-registered 501(c)(3) charities funding the displacement and colonization of Palestinian land. They advocate against the weaponization of tax-exempt structures to fund illegal settlements.

• Defund Racism: A coalition of Palestinian and international organizations dedicated to halting the flow of millions of dollars from New York-registered charities to far-right Israeli settler organizations.

2. Enforcing the Structural Narrative & Documenting Violations

• Al-Haq: An independent Palestinian non-governmental human rights organization based in Ramallah. Al-Haq specializes in strict legal analyses, documenting international law violations, and tracking state-sanctioned legislative acts used to institutionalize displacement.

• B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. They provide essential legal reporting and local documentation that directly refutes the “single-villain” myth by exposing the omnipresent, baseline reality of the state’s apartheid framework.

• Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. They actively monitor, analyze, and challenge discriminatory laws passed within the Knesset, specializing in tracking the systematic weaponization of the Israeli judicial and execution systems against Palestinians.

• Hind Rajab Foundation: A Brussels-based legal advocacy organization and the legal arm of the March 30 Movement. The Hind Rajab Foundation specializes in leveraging international law, open-source intelligence, and universal jurisdiction to hold Israeli military and political figures individually accountable for war crimes and violations in Palestine.

CRITICAL SECURITY NOTE ON SANCTIONED ENTITIES: Organizations like Al-Haq provide unparalleled, ground-level legal analysis tracking the state-sanctioned legislative acts used to institutionalize displacement. However, the U.S. Treasury Department has placed Al-Haq on its Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List. While it is perfectly legal to read their research, share their findings, and cite their data in your journalism, U.S. persons are legally prohibited from donating money, providing material support, or conducting financial transactions with them. Stick to amplifying their documentation, and channel your financial support into domestic legal shields like Palestine Legal.

3. Leveraging Municipal Power & Domestic Defiance

• New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA): This political chapter actively collaborates with legislative allies to advance local divestment bills and state-level accountability mechanisms like the Not On Our Dime! legislation.

• Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) – Local Chapters: Grassroots organizers running continuous advocacy campaigns to sever municipal ties, cancel local law enforcement exchanges, and expose local tax-exempt money pipelines.

• Palestine Legal: An essential legal shield protecting student encampments, journalists, and local dissidents from heavy-handed, state-sponsored crackdowns and targeted censorship right here in the U.S.

If you found this analysis useful, you can read the rest of our ongoing field notes and investigative dispatches at rajaalthaibani.com.

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

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