Mamdani’s threat to arrest Netanyahu isn’t the real danger

Zohran Mamdani says Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested if he comes to New York for the United Nations General Assembly in September. Most people immediately asked whether the mayor even has the authority to do that. Mamdani himself conceded that he did not know, and said he was consulting the city’s Law Department to clarify the limits of his power.

But the question of authority is the smaller one. The more revealing question is why he thought this belonged to his office at all. And the answer has less to do with municipal power than with a particular way of thinking about politics, one Karl Popper spent much of his life warning against. He called it historicism: the conviction that history has already decided who is right.

The idea runs through The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies: history unfolds according to an inner logic, and those who grasp that logic believe they know not only what happened, but who is right, who is wrong, and where the world is headed. Historicism, Popper argued, replaces inquiry with certainty and political judgment with historical inevitability.

That way of thinking helps explain Mamdani’s rhetoric. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with all its historical, religious, national, and security dimensions, is compressed into a single template: South Africa. If Israel is an apartheid state, then opposition to it naturally becomes the continuation of Nelson Mandela’s struggle.

Mamdani reinforced that analogy when he delivered the keynote address at the inaugural Nelson Mandela Global Leadership Forum and presented Mandela’s legacy as a model for today’s political struggles. In doing so, he did more than place Israel inside the South African story. He placed himself there as well, not merely as the mayor of New York expressing an opinion about a distant conflict, but as someone participating in a larger historical mission.

The analogy itself is open to debate. Reasonable people can disagree about whether it is persuasive. The difficulty begins when it is presented not as an interpretation but as a verdict. Once that happens, the debate changes. The question is no longer whether Israel resembles apartheid South Africa. The question becomes whether anyone who rejects that analogy is simply refusing to acknowledge what history has already established. That shift does not stop with Israel. It also reshapes the terms on which New York’s Jews are expected to speak about Israel.

This is precisely where Popper believed the danger begins. Historicism is not simply a way of interpreting history. It creates the conviction that history has already spoken. Once that conviction takes hold, facts become secondary. There is little reason to ask whether South Africa and Israel differ in important respects, whether Hamas changes the equation, or whether Zionism is better understood as colonialism or as a movement of national liberation. Such questions no longer matter because the story has already been written.

The problem, then, is not that Mamdani criticizes Israel. Criticism of Israel is, and should remain, a legitimate part of democratic debate. The problem is that his framework leaves little room for any debate outside a single moral narrative in which the roles have already been assigned: oppressors and oppressed, apartheid and Mandela.

That certainty is politically powerful. It offers moral clarity in a complicated world and relieves people of having to wrestle with uncomfortable facts. It also elevates Mamdani beyond the ordinary responsibilities of municipal office, casting him as someone acting on behalf of history.

But that comes at a price. One can believe that Netanyahu’s government deserves severe criticism, that its policies are ruinous, and that its actions should be investigated, and still reject Mamdani’s framework. The objection is not a defense of Netanyahu. It is the confidence with which he speaks as though there were nothing left to examine, as though the place of New York’s Jews in that story had already been settled along with everything else.

Israel will continue arguing with itself. It will replace governments, investigate failures, and determine its future through democratic politics. Mamdani will not decide that future.

Those who may feel the consequences of his worldview most directly are New York’s two million Jews. For them, the issue is not simply criticism of Netanyahu’s government. When Israel is framed as the apartheid state of our time and Zionism as a colonial enterprise, support for the Jewish state increasingly ceases to appear as a legitimate political position and comes to be viewed as a moral failure. Mamdani is not telling New York’s Jews to sever their ties with Israel. He is attempting something more consequential: to change the moral meaning of that relationship.

This is a struggle over identity, not policy.

He is not asking how Israel should be criticized. He is asking Jews to choose between membership in the progressive camp and identification with the Jewish nation-state. Not because those commitments cannot coexist, but because historicism leaves no room for that possibility. Once history has already rendered its verdict, there is little space left for liberal Zionism, or for genuine disagreement.

Popper warned against historicism because it tempts political leaders to believe they are no longer judging history but representing it. The moment they become convinced that history has already spoken, they stop listening to the people still living within it.

That is why the problem with Mamdani is not simply his position on Israel. It is the confidence with which he speaks as though there were nothing left to examine – as though the questions of whether Israel is an apartheid state, whether Zionism is colonialism, and even the place of New York’s Jews in that story had already been settled. He is not merely presenting an argument. He presents it as one that history itself has already resolved.

And precisely in a city built on competing identities, disagreement, and freedom of thought, that is a far greater cause for concern than any single statement about arresting Benjamin Netanyahu.