Politics & Diplomacy
Netanyahu's Likud puts New York's mayor on its election enemies billboard
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud has raised a campaign billboard in Tel Aviv that places Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, alongside Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Iran's supreme leader and Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem — under the Hebrew slogan "They want Netanyahu to lose. Don't let them win."
Netanyahu amplified the image himself this week, Democracy Now reported, and his campaign released a 50-second video casting Mamdani as the face of a worldwide surge of antisemitism, cutting between pro-Palestinian demonstrations and the mayor's condemnations of Israel's conduct in Gaza.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist born in Kampala to a family of Indian origin, is New York's first Muslim mayor and one of America's most prominent critics of the Gaza war. He is not Palestinian, and he holds no seat in any legislature.
Those facts deserve plain statement here because a wire brief previously published on this page misidentified him as a Palestinian-American legislator. That brief has been withdrawn, and this report replaces it.
What the mayor of New York does on an Israeli billboard#
The answer is the 27 October election. With the Knesset campaign underway, Likud's message casts Netanyahu as the man the world's hostile forces want gone — and a Muslim mayor governing the largest Jewish city outside Israel makes a serviceable villain for it.
Mamdani has said he would honor the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant against Netanyahu if the Israeli leader set foot in New York. Asked by Fox News whether the prospect of arrest worries him, Netanyahu turned the exchange into a campaign line of its own.
The election the billboard serves is nine weeks away, and the mayor it conscripts never entered it.
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