Mamdani’s Baseless Invocation of International Law

After another demonstration outside a Manhattan synagogue on May 5, Mayor Zohran Mamdani once again tut-tutted the Jews for inviting their own misfortune. Inside Park East Synagogue, an event promoting real estate opportunities in Israel was held. Outside, a group led by the extremist organization Al-Awda yelled and chanted about Intifada, just as they did at a similar event in November 2025, with some notable additions, including a Hezbollah flag.

While promising that attendees would be allowed safe ingress and egress—after the last event included chants that attendees should feel unsafe—Mamdani emphasized that he opposes synagogues hosting events that include information about Israeli towns across the 1949 Armistice Line in territories traditionally called Judea and Samaria. He has repeatedly referred to these events as violations of international law. That makes sense, at least from Mamdani’s perspective. It would be strange and unbecoming of a mayor who promised, “Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you,” to suggest that some New Yorkers deserve less protection because they believe Jews can live in Judea and Samaria. But appealing to the higher authority of “international law” allows the mayor who promised to “never — not for a second — hide from you” to hide behind the fiction that he is compelled to condemn otherwise apparently law-abiding New Yorkers who do not share his anti-Israel views.

It’s a clever trick, and now it’s catching on. It’s no surprise that the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (which organized an anti-Israel demonstration on October 7, 2023) added that “our elected officials must end illegal land sales in NYC.” But the line is entering the mainstream. Democratic Congressional candidate Jack Schlossberg parroted it, too: “I don’t think a land sale for real estate that is in violation of international law should be happening in a house of worship.” New York Times opinion writer Megan Stack indicated that the congregants had it coming because “auctioning off illegally occupied Palestinian land is a red-hot provocative choice, particularly at this moment,” so “some kind of clashes were likely to result.”

Indeed, it seems the entire Democratic-left-wing establishment is completely defenseless against invocations of international law and the vague insinuation that Zionist Jews are doing something wrong. Which is why it’s so important to point out that the argument at work here—that harassing Jews attending synagogue-hosted informational events or even property sales in Judea and Samaria is understandable because they involve “stolen land” or “violations of international law”—is incoherent at every level.

Start with the fact that it is transparently disingenuous. Al-Awda openly agitates for the elimination of the Jewish state of Israel, not its withdrawal from some territories. The demonstrators’ chants, familiar to anyone who follows anti-Israel activism, do the same: “From the river to the sea” and “we don’t want no two states/we want ‘48” explicitly reject the idea that a Palestinian state should be established in anything less than all of Israel. Then there was the Hezbollah flag—a symbol of allegiance to a designated terrorist organization whose founding doctrine calls for Israel’s annihilation. Moreover, it’s almost quaint to pretend the anti-Israel movement is merely concerned with undoing Israel’s 1967 territorial expansions. The decolonialist framework that now saturates this activism makes the same point even more explicitly, and hasn’t bothered to hide for quite some time.

But even if they made those distinctions and were there demonstrating only against “violations of international law,” they would be flat wrong. There is nothing illegal, under any binding legal authority, about selling land in Samaria to a Jewish New Yorker. New York State does not enforce international law. The NYPD does not enforce international law. There is no federal statute, state ordinance, or municipal code that prohibits this transaction. The Trump administration has explicitly stated that Israeli settlements are not illegal, and the Executive Branch holds the leading constitutional role in setting American foreign policy.

Beyond American law, the deeper problem is that “international law” is not law in the sense the word normally implies. It is an umbrella term for a loose assemblage of treaties, UN resolutions, customary norms, and contested conventions—none of which has a court of competent jurisdiction, an enforcement mechanism, or a clear chain of application to a real estate information event in a Manhattan synagogue.

Contrast this with an actual law: if someone believed that a federal law prohibiting harassment of people entering houses of worship had been violated, they could cite the FACE Act, cite relevant case law, and show how it applies to these specific facts. No one invoking “international law” here has done anything like that—because they cannot. Vague appeals to international law, unmoored from any specific provision or enforcement body, are just a way of dressing up a political view in the garb of something more forceful.

One reason you will never hear specific treaty provisions cited is that even if something were amiss with Israel’s activities in Judea and Samaria, it would be irrelevant to the Park East event. International law provisions governing occupied territories apply to nations, not people. Unless the state of Israel was calling the shots at Park East, no one could have violated international law. Invoking international law in this context is a giant category error.  

That makes sense, because it would be extremely weird if there were a rule in international customary law that said someone from Country A can’t move to occupied or disputed territory B of his own accord—especially if it would be allowed if the person belonged to a different ethnicity or religion. There is a rule in Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, sometimes erroneously cited as proof that Israelis moving to the disputed territories is illegal, that an occupying power may not transfer its population to an occupied territory. But if Israelis want to move there of their own accord, international law has nothing to say about it. In this case, we aren’t even talking about Israelis, but American Jews who might want to move from a different country entirely.

Even if you wanted to gloss over the difference between state action and individual action, the truth is that there is no occupying power implicated in land sales in Judea and Samaria. Under longstanding definitions in customary and treaty-based international law, Israel is not an occupier in the legal sense. You can make the case that informally, philosophically, or in some other sense, Israel is “occupying” territory not rightfully theirs. But occupation in international law has a specific definition: a country that seizes the sovereign territory of a previous “legitimate power.”

From whom did Israel take Judea and Samaria in 1967? The country that controlled the territories from 1949 to 1967 was not Palestine but Jordan—which did not annex them—and ethnically cleansed ancient Jewish communities from cities like Hebron and areas like Gush Etzion. Jordan does not claim that its territory is being occupied by Israel. What the demonstrators and their unwitting backers are arguing, rather, is that the legal definition of occupation needs to be rewritten to inculpate Israel and invalidate its sovereign claims to Judea and Samaria after the fact. Whatever your beliefs about international law, surely such ex post facto criminalization violates basic principles of the rules of law.

As law professor Eugene Kontorovich has shown over and over, the idea that Israel’s claims to the territories are invalid under international law rests only on the consensus, formed by twisting or ignoring longstanding definitions, of institutions that have shown repeated mendacity towards the Jewish state.

At this point, there is nothing left of the supposed international law case against the Park East event, and those taking the Mamdani line advert to a broader accusation: What’s being sold is stolen land. Bold claims require serious evidence. Usually, making a claim of theft (against someone currently in possession) requires showing a specific title. You have to show that a particular parcel belongs to some entity with a solid claim to it. What doesn’t pass muster is arguing that a particular parcel of land must be “stolen” by a kind of ethnosupremacist res ipsa loquitur: the unstated premise is that a whole swathe of land rightfully belongs to people of one ethnicity, to the complete exclusion of another. Without anything more specific, this simply amounts to saying that Jews cannot possibly be the rightful owners of any land in Judea and Samaria—a preposterous claim considering that Jews have maintained a presence in the area since the times of Joshua.

Which brings us to the final point: we take for granted the obsession with Jews moving to parts of their ancestral homeland that fell on the “wrong” side of an arbitrary armistice line. But for those who still believe in a two-state solution, why shouldn’t Jews live wherever they want? They can be a minority in a future Palestinian state, just as Arabs currently live as a minority with full legal rights in the Jewish state. One must either admit that they will accept only a judenrein Palestinian state, or that they know the Palestinian majority would subjugate, oppress, or even massacre any Jews living under their sovereignty.

But nobody really argues that anymore, not least Mamdani, his DSA, and their ascendant portion of the left. They claim they want a “secular binational state from the river to the sea.” Very well, then: Why on earth would Jews living in Karnei Shomron, rather than Tel Aviv, make any difference, if the ultimate goal is for Jews and Arabs to live wherever they want in a state that treats them equally?

Something does not add up. That something is that this whole line is a charade and a farce: It has nothing to do with settlements, the territories, or even Israel per se. It has everything to do with signaling to New Yorkers who gets the full protection of the law—those who toe the DSA party line as it spreads through a Democratic Party unable to contain it—and who will be deemed unworthy of that protection because they are not quite on board with the revolution.  

Tal Fortgang is a contributing editor to Civitas Outlook and Legal Policy Fellow and Advisor to the President at the Manhattan Institute. He is also a Contributing Writer at the Dispatch, columnist at Princetonians for Free Speech, and Associate Dean of the Tikvah Legal Fellowship.