Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party erected a campaign billboard in central Tel Aviv depicting New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Iran's supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, and Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem. The poster reads: "They want Netanyahu to lose … Don't let them win." The message is structurally simple — conflate a progressive American mayor with Israel's actual geopolitical adversaries to make domestic critics feel unpatriotic for opposing the incumbent. The timing is not subtle. The Knesset dissolved in July, elections are set for October, and Netanyahu's far-right coalition is trailing in polls. This is the first Israeli election since the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, and Netanyahu is running the only campaign available to a wartime leader losing support: externalize the threat. Mamdani, who called Netanyahu a "war criminal" who "belonged in The Hague" and urged US authorities to enforce the ICC arrest warrant if Netanyahu attends the UN General Assembly in September, provides useful raw material. Netanyahu accused Mamdani of "fomenting hate" and turning religious groups against each other in New York. He framed the broader threat as progressive Democrats eroding once-bipartisan US support for Israel. But polling tells a different story: recent data shows Mamdani is more popular among American Jews than Netanyahu himself. The billboard's logic — that Mamdani represents an alien threat to Israel — collapses against the preferences of the very diaspora community Netanyahu claims to defend. The billboard arrived days after Netanyahu described the UK as "the Islamic republic of Britain" and "the first Islamic republic to get a nuclear weapon" in an interview for Israel's army radio. The pattern is consistent: provoke Western allies with Islamophobic rhetoric, harvest the resulting outrage as proof of hostile foreign sentiment, then present that sentiment to Israeli voters as evidence that only Netanyahu can protect them. Meanwhile, the Gaza ceasefire talks that actually determine Israeli security are stalling. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and envoy, held a three-hour meeting with Netanyahu on Monday without breakthrough. Israel refuses to withdraw troops until Hamas agrees to disarm first — a precondition Hamas will not accept, ensuring the diplomatic freeze continues. The billboard about Mamdani is louder than the ceasefire impasse, which is precisely the point. Mamdani has not yet responded publicly to his inclusion in the campaign materials. Netanyahu posted the billboard photo and a video of Mamdani's "war criminal" comments on his social media accounts Sunday. The feud is asymmetric: Netanyahu needs Mamdani as a foil far more than Mamdani needs Netanyahu as one. A sitting prime minister trailing in polls, borrowing a foreign city's mayor to populate his campaign posters, is not projecting strength — he is advertising its absence.
