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Over the weekend, the New York Times published a wide-ranging interview with Mayor Zohran Mamdani about socialism in the Democratic Party, his runaway popularity as a politician, and his relationship with his wife. But the question that's gripped the nation is the one in which journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Mamdani whether he would honor a campaign promise and arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he travels to New York this September for the UN General Assembly.
After reiterating that he believes Netanyahu "belongs in the Hague" and citing the International Criminal Court's warrant for Netanyahu's arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity over his tactics against civilians in Gaza, Mamdani explained that he "will follow the laws that we have here in New York City because I believe that there is an importance in following the law as a leader who presides over our city," adding that "we won't be writing laws to that end."
What is he allowed to do? "That's an active conversation with our legal department," Mamdani stated. "However, what we've seen at the national level is a desire sometimes to write your own laws, to go outside of the bounds of legality. That's not something we have an interest in."
Presumably this "active conversation" is a relatively short one, because the law does not allow the mayor of New York City—or any U.S. city, for that matter—to arrest a foreign prime minister under an ICC warrant.