Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday slammed New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s positioning on Jews, warning he will target the mayor’s stance during his upcoming speech at the United Nations General Assembly.
Netanyahu is traveling to New York City to give an address to the U.N. on Thursday, as his country becomes increasingly isolated from the world. The prime minister previewed his speech in a message to social media, revealing he will “tell the truth” about Mamdani and framing him as someone sympathetic to Hamas, the terrorist group that controls Gaza and carried out the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
“Shame on you, Mr. Mandani. Shame on you for supporting the Hamas terrorist monsters who butchered our people,” Netanyahu said. “Shame on you for inciting riots against New York Jews. I’m coming to the U.N. I’m going to tell the truth about our heroic soldiers, and I’m going to tell the truth about you.”
Netanyahu’s warning comes as the city’s first socialist mayor has long come under scrutiny for his position on Israel and Jews, despite his repeated statements that he is not antisemitic.
The debate surged during Mamdani’s mayoral campaign last year when he declined to condemn the antisemitic phrases “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” arguing he interpreted them as “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights.” In March, debate again erupted when Mamdani’s wife, Rama, came under scrutiny for social media posts she liked celebrating Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, including a post that claimed its rape of Jewish women was a “mass hoax.”
Mamdani’s association with fellow socialist Hasan Piker has also stoked controversy, due to concerns that Piker holds openly antisemitic views, including repeated denials or downplaying of sweeping sexual violence against Jews in Hamas’ Oct. 7, attack, saying he “would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” calling Hamas “a thousand times better” than Israel, and saying that “even if there was multiple rapes that took place on Oct. 7, this does not change anything for me.”
During an interview on Channel 4 News’s TrumpWorld last month, Piker reiterated his support for Hamas as a critical part of the “Palestinian resistance.”
Mamdani appeared on Piker’s show during the mayoral primary season last year. Piker made a high-profile appearance at Mamdani’s large campaign kickoff rally in October, before attending the mayor’s victory party in November. The pair attended a private Eid dinner together in New York in March, before Mamdani sat down with Piker again for Zeteo’s We’re Not Kidding podcast in July.
Since assuming the mayorship of the United States’s largest city, which is also home to the largest Jewish population nationwide, Mamdani has more recently provoked debate for publicly calling for Netanyahu’s arrest. The mayor denounced him as a war criminal and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people” in July, stoking fears that such rhetoric stokes hate against Jews.
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In a May protest at Mamdani’s mayoral mansion, demonstrators expressed concern about rising hate crimes against the Jewish community as they condemned the mayor’s decision to revoke New York City’s use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism and scrap his predecessor’s prohibition on city agencies engaging in the “boycott, divest, and sanctions” movement against Israel.
Anti-Jewish incidents rose to represent 57% of New York City’s total reported hate crimes in 2025, despite Jews making up only around 10% of the city’s population, according to the New York Police Department. For the second year in a row, there were more anti-Jewish incidents than other target groups combined.