Mamdanis pledge to arrest Netanyahu was meant to satisfy Third Worldists and delegitimize the West

Zohran Mamdani spent 18 months promising New Yorkers that he would arrest a foreign head of government.On Tuesday night, he admitted that he cannot.But it is hard to believe Mamdani did not know all along the promise was legally untenable.He made it anyway because its real purpose was not enforcement but delegitimization — to put Israel and the U.S.-led international order on the docket.His administration reviewed every avenue available under applicable law and found no independent authority to enforce the International Criminal Court’s warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.The concession came by video, days after President Donald Trump had already foreclosed the question.

Trump said Netanyahu would not be arrested in the United States “in any way, shape, or form” and argued that the men who led Iran into its present catastrophe are the ones who belong in custody.The episode exposes more than a failed political promise.It reveals the worldview beneath Mamdani’s anti-Israel campaign: Third Worldism.Emerging in the late 1950s, Third Worldism argues that poverty across Asia, Africa, and Latin America resulted primarily from an international order dominated by the industrialized West, not from the domestic policies or institutions of developing states.

Beyond weakening the West, Third Worldism elevates terrorist organizations into liberation movements — forces for good precisely because they defy the U.S.-led global order.Israel occupies a central place within this worldview.The Jewish state is portrayed as a settler-colonial project sustained by American power, making the conflict a struggle between colonizer and colonized.

Under that logic, Israel’s legitimacy is the primary target.By the late 1990s — and decisively after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 — Third Worldist regimes and revolutionary movements had lost much of their military and diplomatic momentum.International institutions then assumed greater importance to th...