Editor’s Note: This piece is part of my ongoing tech advocacy, systems-change analysis, and reporting for Unembedded, informed by more than 15 years working at the intersection of technology, media, and human rights. I examine complex technical and policy developments through an intersectional, public-interest lens—asking how systems of power translate into real-world consequences, who they protect, who they fail, and what those failures demand of companies, policymakers, and institutions.

“Refugees are welcome here, even if they rape our women, because white people do that too.”

Imagine opening your phone to discover a video of you delivering that exact, venomous statement. Within hours, you are the centerpiece of a viral internet storm, framed by a hyper-realistic, AI-generated clone of your own face giving a vicious speech you never uttered. This was the horrifying reality for Dorothy McHugh, a 77-year-old Scottish Labour councillor in Dundee. The malicious video, posted in November 2025, weaponized her likeness during a highly sensitive local protest over asylum-seeker housing, altering public trust and severely damaging her personal integrity.

Before the shock of that political hit could even settle, a second deepfake launched a parallel attack on a young Muslim woman just across the English Channel. A dedicated health advocate working to de-stigmatize menstrual hygiene for minority girls awoke to find her face stolen. A malicious actor had taken a real television news interview she gave, stolen her likeness, and used generative AI to clone her face and manufacture this viral circus.

Through a series of deepfakes, the young Muslim woman was depicted engaging in bizarre, physically absurd gym exercises, while shouting contradictory health advise to supposedly demonstrate how to "stay in shape”. The impact was swift and devastating. The deeply humiliating videos quietly racked up tens of millions of views across Meta’s social media ecosystem, unleashing a weaponized flood of abusive, xenophobic, and misogynistic harassment that targeted her weight and her hijab.

Both women did what any of us would do in this situation: they immediately reported the content to Meta. Yet, Meta missed both opportunities to recognize and prevent harm, and failed to remove either video.

When the young Muslim advocate tried to report the video for bullying and harassment, Meta’s automated system completely closed her initial reports and subsequent appeals without ever escalating them to a human being for review. The platform maintained the content stayed up because its internal definition of “unwanted manipulated imagery” was too narrow. Because the bad actors fabricated her conduct and actions rather than explicitly altering her physical body, the algorithms let it slide. It ruled in the perpetrator’s favor.

Dorothy McHugh faced the exact same digital brick wall. The automated systems repeatedly refused to prioritize her reports, or reach a human reviewer. As a result, her deepfake remained online for ten agonizing months, undermining her ability to fulfill her public duties as an elected official ahead of her upcoming council election. The constant, looming presence of the video—coupled with vile, violent user comments discovered later during the investigation, including one explicitly stating she "wants [to be] raped"—deeply re-traumatized the 77-year-old councillor. Exhausted by the platform’s automated apathy, Dorothy had to step back entirely while a colleague fought Meta on her behalf.

Imagine reporting that someone has stolen your face, invented your words, and circulated the result to provoke hostility and real-world harm, only to discover that a multi-billion-dollar platform does not consider your safety urgent enough for a real human being to examine.

Worse yet, you quickly realize that the avenues to fight back are not merely unhelpful, they are entirely non-functional.

When you navigate Meta’s safety interface, you enter an administrative void. There is no emergency hotline, no direct support email, and no path to reach a living person during a crisis. Instead, you are forced to deal with an adversarial maze of dead ends. You click a generic “Report” button, only to have a context-blind algorithm send you cold, automated rejection script, before closing your support ticket within seconds.

If you attempt to appeal, you’re met with automated chat tools with broken loops of unhelpful text, support dashboards that freeze, and ticketing systems that quietly close your case without explanation trapping you and any other victim in a labyrinth of automated rejections while the defamatory media continues to accumulate thousands of views and generate active engagement unchecked. It is a hollow facade of corporate compliance designed to absorb your complaints, burn you out, and leave you completely abandoned while the toxic machine continues to profit off your deepfake.

These are not isolated glitches in an otherwise functional matrix; they are part of an industrialized crisis of protracted systemic platform neglect. For over a decade, platforms’ automated systems have systematically prioritized rigid policy blocks over human nuance—a pattern that became glaringly visible following the Arab Spring and the Syrian conflict. As platforms became vital repositories for human rights monitoring, automated tools operating under blanket policy triggers routinely censored and erased critical evidence, civilian testimony, and war-crimes documentation. Yet, while the algorithms scrubbed history, they simultaneously failed to catch actual weaponized hate speech, targeted disinformation, and coordinated mass-reporting campaigns.

It is the same systemic disfunction that led to the suppression of vital documentation during Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S., where automated algorithms repeatedly flagged street journalism and anti-racism activism as graphic violence, erasing the record of real-world events, allowing harmful narratives about the movement to flourish. It mirrors the digital censorship faced by the LGBTQ+ community, whose essential mental health resources, community organizing, and educational spaces are routinely mislabeled, shadowbanned, and blocked as “adult content” by context-blind filters.

This crisis has escalated with synthetic media, and its collidision with virtually non-existent defense mechanisms. Global monitoring shows the total volume of deepfakes circulating online has exploded to over 8 million unique files—a staggering 16-fold increase in just two years. Yet, when these fakes hit the internet, Meta and its peers collapse under the weight of their own automated apathy.

According to a Reporters Without Borders (RSF) analysis of targeted deepfakes, a vast majority of malicious creators operate with absolute impunity. This lawlessness is directly fueled by a total lack of cooperation from social media platforms, which routinely leave the offending content active long after it has been flagged. The fallout from these unaddressed deepfakes is devastating, inflicting severe harms that range from financial fraud and character defamation to direct, terrifying threats to victims’ physical safety.

Crucially, this is not a gender-neutral crisis; this is an engine of gender-based violence. Women accounted for a disproportionate 74 percent of the cases studied by RSF, proving that bad actors have successfully turned generative AI into a specialized tool for silencing and terrorizing women online.

It is the exact same dynamic that played out across the two deepfake cases with the Chancellor and Health Advocate in the UK and Europe.

Eventually, on September 17, Meta’s Oversight Board stepped in, forcing Meta to take down the videos of the women. But the significance of their investigation and rulings extends beyond these two bad moderation decisions and failures. It confirmed that the platform’s reporting channels are structurally broken, relying on automated triage scripts that shift the burden (including the burden of proof) onto the victim. It is a system built not to resolve harm, but to automate corporate indifference.

Furthermore, it reveals that Meta and other platforms remain trapped in outdated, checklist-driven frameworks that treat synthetic media merely as an issue of transparency: whether a piece of content fake. But they are missing the bigger picture.

By reducing complex human threats to simple binary equations—asking only “is this AI-generated?” rather than “how is this being weaponized?”—they remain fundamentally blind to localized intent. And they act like putting a label on an AI-generated video solves the problem. But it’s not just about labeling, this is about power.

The real problem isn’t just asking “is this AI-generated?” The real questions are: Who is being targeted? What is the deeper intent? How does the content spread, and how does it tap into real-world inequalities to yield real world consequences?

These videos were never merely lies. They hijacked and appropriated women’s identities and weaponized them as delivery systems to pump out political hate, humiliation, and threats and intimidation. In both cases, the synthetic media was not the harm’s endpoint. Deepfakes like these don’t just invent new problems—they supercharge existing ones, making the attacks more real, easily distributable, and harder to stop. And it leaves the target with nowhere to escape.

Yet, the tech industry’s current defense strategy completely ignores this human toll, opting instead for superficial fixes.

Meta’s fix: Adding warning labels and AI disclosure tags for transparency.

The Reality: A label merely provides technical metadata—it tells the viewer if and how a piece of content was created or altered. It does absolutely nothing to disrupt the behavioral violence of the attack itself.

Much of the tech industry’s emerging response to synthetic media relies on provenance, detection, and disclosure. Think of provenance as a digital watermark baked into a file when it is made, tracking its birth certificate and history to prove how it was created. Detection acts like a security scanner, using automated software to hunt for hidden AI pattern glitches in uploaded content. Finally, disclosure is the warning label slapped on the post, shifting the burden onto everyday viewers to figure out what is real and what is fake.

Sure, it is useful to let people know when a photograph, recording or video has been altered. But provenance and disclosure alone, as an approach, is based on a dangerously narrow theory of harm.

Their thinking goes: If you tell the viewer, “Hey, this is fake,” then you’ve solved the problem; This framework assumes the main threat is simply a confused viewer mistaking a fabrication for reality. It implies that once a warning label pops up to fix the misunderstanding, the system has supposedly done its job, and the platform’s responsibility ends. The viewer can now make a better judgment. But in reality, it leaves the victim completely unprotected from the ongoing attack.

It might address a fleeting moment of deception, but it completely fails to stop networked abuse. A labeled deepfake can still reach millions of people. It can provoke racist and misogynistic harassment, contaminate search results, jump between platforms and circulate in private groups where the original warning label and tag disappears entirely. Copies can survive long after the target has issued a denial, and short clips can be stripped of context and repackaged as viral memes, reaction videos or alleged “evidence.”

Virality does not wait for verification.

Furthermore, a passive label cannot restore a victim’s control over their own face or voice, undo the emotional humiliation, expose the perpetrators coordinating the campaign, or stop algorithmic recommendation systems from extending its reach. Crucially, it fails to neutralize the implicit threat delivered to everyone watching: speak publicly, and this will happen to you too.

This creates a devastating chilling effect, forcing women and marginalized communities to think twice before appearing online simply because their identities are being weaponized against them. Frequent targets of online abuse already carry a disproportionate cost for participating in public debate, and synthetic media dramatically raises that cost by allowing harassers to manufacture incriminating material faster than any target or fact-checker can possibly rebut it.

Therefore, the baseline technical question cannot simply be: Is this AI-generated? Platforms must force their systems to address structural product questions:

• Was this identity used without consent?

• Is the manipulation exploiting and inciting hatred against a vulnerable community?

• Is the content being amplified by coordinated networks?

• Has the content created a credible, irreversible safety risk for the target—and others?

• Did the platform’s own recommendation algorithm, and lack of intervention, accelerate its spread?

• Can the victim immediately reach a qualified human reviewer before the damage spreads, in a timely and effective way?

These are not media-literacy questions about whether users know how to spot a deepfake. They are fundamental questions about product design, corporate responsibility, and platform power.

Meta’s Fix: Meta claims to safeguard political expression and legitimate criticism of powerful officials through their public figure moderation exemption.

The Reality: Meta weaponizes the public figure rule to sidestep corporate responsibility, transforming a legacy free-speech protection into an active, dangerous vector for identity theft and AI abuse.

Meta initially concluded that the deepfake video of a Scottish local councillor didn't violate its bullying and harassment rules simply because she is a politician, and therefore categorized her as a public figure under the exemption. This policy distinction originally made sense when platforms wanted to separate legitimate criticism of powerful officials from personal bullying. But in the age of generative AI, it functions as a glaring loophole, effectively creating a permission structure for wholesale impersonation and AI abuse.

Politicians, journalists, and human rights defenders are still human beings. They do not forfeit the right to control their own bodies, faces, and voices the moment they enter the public eye. Completely fabricating someone's words out of thin air isn't criticism—it is an assault.

This loophole becomes downright lethal in conflict zones and crisis environments, where the consequences of synthetic media collapse instantly from reputational harm into physical danger. Imagine a synthetic video depicting a journalist praising an armed group, an human-rights defender confessing to foreign espionage, or a humanitarian worker making a fabricated sectarian statement. This content is routinely weaponized to undermine independent reporting, mobilize digital lynch mobs, justify arbitrary state detention, or poison the credibility of authentic documentation. In many environments, it can also result in direct physical harm and even death.

A weaponized deepfake does not need to convince a global audience or survive a month-long fact-check or investigation. It only needs to deceive a single armed checkpoint or reach a hostile actor before the correction catches up. By the time a tech company in Silicon Valley figures out what happened, debates whether to slap a passive label on it, the real-world physical damage is already done.

For targets operating outside the Western hemisphere, the danger is multiplied exponentially. If you work in a language or culture Meta doesn’t prioritize, reports are routinely missed, misclassified, or ignored. For those in Arabic-language environments, this risk is deeply compounded by platforms’ systemic failures in dialect recognition, context-aware moderation, and access to rapid human escalation channels. A global policy written in English offers zero protection when an Arabic-language report is processed by automated filters that completely lack the political and cultural literacy required to recognize a threat to someone’s life. The corporate policy may exist on paper, but the actual protection does not.

Meta’s Fix: Meta evaluates content through isolated checklists—treating hate speech, bullying, and privacy issues as independent technical violations—to process millions of posts objectively and at a massive scale.

The Reality: Platforms treat interconnected harms as separate violations of their policies, which abusers easily exploit by combining multiple tactics into a single assault that slips through the platform’s structural blind spots.

Social media networks love corporate organization. If a piece of content is uploaded, their systems evaluate it through isolated lenses: hate speech lives in one department, bullying in another, privacy violations down the hall, and misinformation across the street.

But real-world abusers do not respect corporate organizational charts or policy thresholds.

A malicious deepfake is a multi-pronged weapon of convergence. It doesn’t just do one thing; it simultaneously combines identity theft, gendered harassment, political disinformation, and coordinated bot amplification. It permeates different ideologies, weaponizes historical social fractures, and crosses digital borders to hit a target from every angle at once.

Yet, because Meta assesses each rule in absolute isolation, its automated systems frequently conclude that no single rule has been breached severely enough to justify a takedown. Nothing ever seems bad enough on its own to trigger action. Abusers understand this structural blind spot perfectly, exploiting it to orchestrate attacks that fly entirely under the safety radar.

The Oversight Board, at least, recognized this systemic failure. By evaluating the content within its real-world context, they saw that the deepfake targeting the politician was not merely inaccurate political commentary—it was a coordinated strike that hijacked her likeness to incite hatred against refugees. Similarly, the video targeting the Muslim activist was not just an unwanted digital manipulation; it was a compounded attack drawing power from the toxic intersection of sexism and Islamophobia.

Perhaps the most disturbing fact in these cases is not that Meta’s automated systems missed the videos. Automated systems will always make mistakes. It is that the reporting and review infrastructure did not reliably correct those mistakes. This is where platform accountability becomes measurable.

To counter this, platforms must adopt a cumulative-harm standard for synthetic media. When digital manipulation intersects with identity-based abuse, structural intimidation, or coordinated harassment, safety responses must immediately escalate rather than vanish between corporate policy silos. The burden of proof cannot remain on the victims whose identities have been stolen.

A meaningful remedy system would give people whose likenesses have been manipulated a dedicated reporting route, rapid human review, preservation of relevant data and a way to identify duplicates and coordinated reposts. It would address reach as well as removal: limiting recommendations, preventing monetization and reducing recirculation while a credible impersonation report is investigated.

It would also preserve evidence of the campaign. Removal is necessary, but deletion without documentation can erase information needed by researchers, courts, journalists or the target herself to establish patterns of abuse.

For human-rights defenders and organizations documenting conflict, the preservation question is critical. Platforms must be capable of restricting harmful circulation while retaining authenticated records, associated metadata and enforcement histories through rights-respecting processes. Safety and accountability should not be forced into a false choice between leaving abusive material online and making the evidence disappear.

In summary

The Oversight Board’s recommendations point in the right direction: stronger labeling, warning screens, and distribution limits for high-risk AI content, alongside broader protection against unwanted manipulated imagery. But Meta must go further.

It should immediately implement a six-point upgrade to its architecture:

1. Expedite impersonation channels. Create an expedited reporting route and impersonation channel accessible to public figures, journalists, activists and ordinary users alike whose likeness has been stolen.

2. Institute cumulative evaluation. Evaluate synthetic content cumulatively across the intersections of harassment, hate, privacy, authenticity and coordinated-harm policies.

3. Automate networked takedowns. Proactively detect and act on duplicate and near-duplicate versions across Facebook, Instagram and Threads simultaneously.

4. Audit global performance disparities. Audit safety response quality by language, dialect, gender and region—and publicly publish the disparities.

5. Establish secure data archives. Preserve removed synthetic media and relevant metadata when it may document coordinated abuse or other rights violations. The deepfake can be used as evidence itself, so treat it as such when collecting and archiving the content and its data.

6. Provide target transparency reports. Provide victims with a clear record of what action was taken, what viral or targeted reach the content obtained and whether copies remain active on the network.

Most importantly, Meta must stop treating virality as something that happens around harmful content rather than something its own systems actively produce and incentivize.

Deepfakes are governance tests. The next generation of synthetic-media policy will fail if it focuses only on whether a piece of content carries an “AI-generated” label.

Deepfakes are becoming highly efficient instruments for redistributing power: taking control of a person’s face, voice, and credibility and handing that control over to anonymous strangers, political actors, or hostile networks. The people most exposed will always be those already forced to fight for equal visibility, safety and credibility online—women, Muslims, migrants, racialized communities, journalists, and human rights defenders.

The ultimate measure of a platform’s response is therefore not whether its software can identify an artificial file. It is whether it can recognize, intercept, and dismantle the real system of harm built around it.

Meta did not initially do that in either of these cases. The Oversight Board corrected the individual decisions. Now the question is whether Meta will correct the broken architecture that produced them. A digital label may tell us that a video is fake. It cannot, by itself, stop the power power behind the lie.

If you want to make sense of what you’re seeing online , or understand why your feeds are flooded with misleading footage, you need to look at where this material actually originates.

Because of severe media restrictions and internet blackouts on the ground, breaking content from Yemen— whether it is authentic citizen video, official media, or staged propaganda—almost always drops on private and hyper localized chat loops on Telegram and WhatsApp.

To make sense of the content you’re seeing on different platforms, here is a top line explanation of what the common visual distribution pipeline looks like. It follows a specific rapid chain :

1 . Ground zero - Telegram: officialmilitary media offices, local militias, low level combatants, political activists, and hyper-local neighborhood groups use encrypted Telegram channels to dump first-look videos, combat footage, official claims and updates, and other types of documentation and content. These channels are often dedicated to specific districts, networks, localized military units, or city wide emergency updates and coordination .

2.The domestic echo - WhatsApp: Inside Yemen, low-bandwidth WhatsApp groups act as a massive incubator where unverified voice notes and grainy video forwards spread like wildfire between families, community and activist networks, and tribes.

3. The global launchpad- X (Twitter) , most unreliable : Within minutes of appearing on Telegram (and WhatsApp) , this media is pulled by international commentators, state-backed bot networks, as well as clout-chasing accounts and dropped onto X for wider distribution.

By the time a video reaches your timeline on X, TikTok, or Facebook, Instagram it has been stripped of its original context, repackaged for maximum engagement, and weaponized to drive a narrative.

If you are tracing breaking events, remember: the speed of a post on X and these other platforms does not equal its accuracy. In fact, speed usually means it’s unreliable and recycled.

Rule of thumb: the rawest content rarely appears on platforms with public URLs . It originates in closed-loop, invite-only chat groups.

Tips on How to Detect Inauthentic or Unreliable Content

When evaluating visual media coming out of this pipeline, watch for these specific red flags to spot manipulation:

• The clear sky archive rehash: be suspicious of crisp, high-def daytime footage claiming to show sudden active strike from citizen networks. Disinfo networks frequently repurpose old military parade footage, past airstrikes from early years of the conflict, or completely unrelated explosions from other conflicts and industrial accidents, particularly from similar looking Middle East contexts, and claim they are happening right now.

• Mismatched audio tracks : Watch closely for dubbed or detached audio. This is common practice used by many propagandists who routinely take genuine, quiet phone footage filmed by civilians and layer loud, artificial explosions, frantic shouting , or military chants and sounds over the top to inflate the scale of an incident and manipule context .

• Low-Resolution proof: If a breaking video is heavily pixelated, compressed, or cropped into an awkward and unusual vertical format , it is likely a video of a video. This lowering of quality is deliberately used to defeat automated reverse-image search tools and obscure visual signs that would prove the clip is old or from a different country or source .

• Unnatural weather and topology: Verify the geography. Check if the terrain, vegetation, architecture, or weather in the video aligns with the specific region of Yemen it claims to represent. It is incredibly common for footage from Iraq, Syria, or Ukraine to be mislabeled as Yemen.

• Aggressive watermarking: Look closely at logos in the corner of the frame. Media pulled from Telegram is often hastily cropped to hide the digital watermark of the original creator, or slapped with a new, authoritative-looking faction logo to claim false ownership.

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 a significant shift in the U.S. political landscape, and in how American officials can publicly approach Palestinian rights and accountability.

With more than 30 million views, the address reflected something larger: the erosion of what many have called the Palestinian exception in American politics, the longstanding assumption that criticizing Israel was politically fatal. Increasingly, elected officials are demonstrating that speaking plainly about Palestinian rights can be politically survivable, and potentially 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, statements and policies once treated as politically disqualifying have increasingly moved into the open, including explicit calls for displacement and collective punishment.

At the same time, decades of U.S. political, financial and lobbying infrastructure continue to impose substantial costs on officials who challenge longstanding U.S. policy toward Israel.

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.

Mamdani’s intervention exposes two different problems. The first is jurisdictional: the institution he invokes offers New York almost no practical leverage. The second is narrative: concentrating accountability on Netanyahu risks mistaking the most visible actor for the system that produced him.

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 reflects how aggressively Washington has sought to insulate U.S. personnel and certain allies from the court, making the prospect of the federal government voluntarily executing an ICC warrant politically remote.

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

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.

The distinction is jurisdiction. Washington has spent decades resisting the ICC; New York already has authority over organizations incorporated and operating under its laws. That is where rhetoric encounters an actual lever.

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.

But 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 but mistaking the individual for the system is not.

The coalition itself illustrates the point.

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 only in campaign speeches but in legislation.

Recent laws and legislative proposals demonstrate how political rhetoric becomes 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. The significance extends beyond the death penalty itself. The proposal would further embed unequal treatment of Palestinians into the machinery of criminal law, creating an exceptional punishment regime widely expected to fall disproportionately on Palestinians.

What might otherwise be dismissed as extremist rhetoric is being codified into legislation, giving discriminatory state power the legitimacy and permanence of law. The danger is not only what the law permits, but what its passage would reveal: policies once associated with Israel’s far right can migrate into the legal architecture of the state itself.

And that shift is not confined to political elites. 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.

These attitudes matter because Ben-Gvir and Smotrich did not emerge in a vacuum. Their political power rests within a broader rightward shift in Israeli politics and a constituency increasingly receptive to policies once associated with its far right.

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 across the 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 U.S. 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.

Put Netanyahu in a jail cell tomorrow and the infrastructure that made his government possible does not disappear with him. Neither does the political constituency that empowered his coalition. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir remain. So do the settlement movement, the weapons contracts, the lobbying apparatus, the diplomatic cover and the political incentives sustaining them.

That wider reality also changes the communications challenge. Years of Palestinian documentation, organizing, journalism and public pressure have pushed criticism of Israeli state violence further into mainstream political discourse. The harder task is preventing a newly acceptable critique of Netanyahu from becoming the boundary of acceptable criticism itself. If he becomes the safe target—the man everyone can condemn without interrogating the system and larger cast of actors around him—an apparent breakthrough can instead narrow scrutiny of those who enabled, sustained and benefited from that system, limiting where accountability can reach.

The test, then, is whether the frame actually widens. Accountability has to follow responsibility outward: from Netanyahu to the policies governing Palestinian life; to the institutions that implement them; and to the money and political relationships that enable them in our very own jurisdictions.

That broader frame also reveals where accountability can become material. Some of the available pressure points sit inside tax law, municipal government, financial regulation, litigation and corporate governance—the systems through which distant abuses acquire local infrastructure.

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.

Persuasion created the political opening. The question now is what can be done with it: which laws can be changed, which financial flows exposed, which institutions challenged, and which local authorities already possess powers they have chosen not to use.

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.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin