Netanyahu's Party Puts NYC Mayor on Election Billboard Next to Iran's Supreme Leader and Hezbollah's Chief

Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party has put up a campaign billboard in central Tel Aviv that places New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in the company of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Iran's supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, and Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem.

The billboard reads: "They want Netanyahu to lose … Don't let them win," stamped with the Likud logo. Netanyahu posted a photo of it to his own social media accounts on Sunday, alongside a video clip of Mamdani's past remarks calling him a "war criminal."

This is not a fringe attack ad. It is the sitting prime minister of Israel, using his party's official campaign machinery, to cast an elected American mayor as an enemy alongside the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah.

An escalating personal feud

The billboard is the latest turn in a public war of words that began during Mamdani's mayoral campaign, when he became one of the most prominent American officials to criticize Israel's conduct of the Gaza war. Last month Mamdani said Netanyahu "belonged in The Hague" and called on US authorities to enforce the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant against him should he travel to New York for the UN General Assembly in September.

Netanyahu responded by accusing Mamdani of "fomenting hate" and pitting religious communities against one another in his city. He also said he feared that bipartisan US support for Israel is eroding because of progressive Democrats aligned with Mamdani. The Guardian reports that recent polling shows Mamdani is in fact more popular among American Jews than Netanyahu himself, though the underlying poll has not been independently reviewed.

Mamdani has not yet responded publicly to being featured in a foreign leader's re-election materials.

Context: an election, a stalled ceasefire, and a widening pattern

The billboard lands as Netanyahu campaigns to save his far-right coalition ahead of October elections, called after the Knesset was dissolved in July, the first vote since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. His coalition is reported to be trailing in the polls.

It also follows Netanyahu's description this week, in an interview on Israeli army radio, of the United Kingdom as "the Islamic republic of Britain" and "the first Islamic republic to get a nuclear weapon," language that echoes far-right Islamophobic tropes about Britain's Muslim population.

Meanwhile, ceasefire negotiations over Gaza remain stalled. Jared Kushner reportedly spent three hours with Netanyahu on Monday without a breakthrough, with Israel maintaining it will not withdraw troops from the strip until Hamas agrees to disarm first, according to the Guardian's reporting.

Why it matters

An Israeli ruling party using an American elected official as a campaign prop, grouping him with adversary state and militant leaders, is a striking example of a foreign government's domestic political apparatus reaching directly into US politics. It underscores how central the US relationship, and the behavior of American officials critical of Israel, has become to Israeli domestic campaigning itself.