Benjamin Netanyahu’s party has compared the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah on a campaign billboard.
The billboard in central Tel Aviv depicts Mamdani alongside the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, and the chief of the militant group Hezbollah, Naim Qassem.
“They want Netanyahu to lose … Don’t let them win,” says the poster featuring the logo of Netanyahu’s rightwing Likud party.
Netanyahu has entered campaign mode to keep his far-right coalition in power after the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, was dissolved in July before elections in October – the first since the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023.
Mamdani has been a vocal critic of Israel’s war in Gaza since the start of his mayoral campaign but his war of words with Netanyahu intensified last month when he said the Israeli leader was a “war criminal” who “belonged in The Hague”.
The New York mayor also called on US authorities to enforce the international criminal court’s warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest if he attends the UN general assembly in the city in September.
Netanyahu hit back by accusing Mamdani of “fomenting hate” and turning different religious groups against each other in his city.
He also said he was concerned that the once-bipartisan political support for Israel in the US was at risk due to progressive Democrats aligned with Mamdani. However, recent polling in the US has shown that Mamdani is more popular among American Jews than Netanyahu.
The attack on Mamdani comes after the Israeli prime minister described the UK as “the Islamic republic of Britain” in a podcast interview this week.
His comments, made during an interview for Israel’s army radio, played into a common far-right Islamophobic trope about Britain’s Muslim population. He also described the country as the “first Islamic republic to get a nuclear weapon”.
Netanyahu, whose ruling coalition is trailing in opinion polls, posted a photo of the billboard on his social media accounts on Sunday, along with a video featuring Mamdani’s comments calling him a war criminal.
The feud between the two figures comes as US-Israeli talks on the Gaza ceasefire deal are stalling. Donald Trump’s son-in-law and envoy Jared Kushner had a three-hour meeting with Netanyahu on Monday but without any breakthrough, as Israel refuses to withdraw troops from the strip until Hamas agrees to disarm first.
Mamdani is yet to respond publicly to being included in Netanyahu’s election campaign materials.
