Mamdani and Netanyahu

It’s worth having a discussion over Mamdani not dropping his attacks on Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal, saying he would like to arrest Netanyahu upon his entrance to New York, and admitting that while he does not in fact have that power, the U.S. should arrest Netanyahu upon entry to the United States and send him to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Now, this description of Netanyahu is absolutely true, whether you want to dicker about whether what has happened in Gaza is a “genocide” or not. Personally, I think the academic definitions of this term are pretty lame–as a friend of mine who is a scholar of fascism notes, most of the people particularly concerned about this are Holocaust scholars defining everything that was not the Holocaust as not genocide. Fundamentally, genocide is a political term and within that context, the mass deaths of Palestinians in Gaza and the open calls to take over much of that land is ethnic cleansing or genocide or whatever, but it’s deeply evil and should be unacceptable for any nation. A decent country, were we one, would absolutely arrest that war criminal and deliver him over to the same process that Slobodan Milosevic went through, dying in prison.

To me, somewhat more interesting is how uncompromising Mamdani is on this because he knows he has the politics behind him. It’s things like this, as well as the war he’s declared on the Democratic establishment in New York, that has the New York Times conducting interviews with him with barely disguised hostility (the best part of this interview is him asking the interviewer what her favorite park is in the city, she replaying “Central Park of course” and him laughing in her face as a symbol of how out of touch Times people are). Like, he could not say these things at this point and his life would probably be easier. But that’s not what he is going to do. He believes in justice. He can’t run for president because he’s not born in the U.S., but he can be a huge mouthpiece for the left. As of this time, he’s been enormously successful. He clearly sees no personal downside in demanding justice in Gaza, something that no major American politician has been able to articulate for decades. And so far, he’s been right about everything important, at least from a political sense. It’ll be interesting to see how this sort of thing evolves.