DayofPal—New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor and a long-time critic of Israel, boycotted the Israel Day parade in the city, becoming the first mayor in the event’s history not to attend.
Mamdani has accused Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip and said he would seek to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited New York City.
The boycott comes as public attitudes towards Israel in the United States continue to shift sharply amid Washington’s ongoing long-standing backing for Israel, which has received billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic support from successive US administrations.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in April found that six in 10 Americans now hold an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 53 percent last year and nearly 20 percentage points higher than in 2022.
Meanwhile, Israeli ministers who have advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip took part on Sunday in the annual pro-Israel parade.
Among them was far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has previously called for starving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and forcibly expelling them from the enclave.
Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu and 13 members of the Knesset also took part in the parade.
Addressing attendees, Smotrich said the parade “reminds me of the Jerusalem Flag March”, an ultra-nationalist procession through Jerusalem’s Old City and Muslim Quarter on Jerusalem Day where participants have often chanted “Death to Arabs” and “May your villages burn” while attacking Palestinian and Christian residents and journalists.
Smotrich has called to depopulate the Gaza Strip, destroy the besieged enclave and starve its population.
Last month, it was reported that the office of the prosecutor of the ICC filed a secret arrest warrant application for Smotrich over war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
The charges against Smotrich include forced displacement as a crime against humanity and war crime, the transfer of Israel’s own population as a war crime, and persecution and apartheid as crimes against humanity.
If approved by the ICC’s pre-trial chamber, the warrant for Smotrich would be the first ever issued by an international court for the crime of apartheid.
Smotrich has also called for the permanent occupation of the Gaza Strip, the re-establishment of illegal settlements there and the forced displacement of Palestinians.
Eliyahu, another member of the delegation, has previously called for nuclear weapons to be used against Gaza’s pre-genocide population of 2.1 million Palestinians. He has also advocated starving Palestinians in the besieged enclave, declaring that “there is no problem bombing their food and fuel reserves. They should starve.”
Israeli minister Yitzhak Wasserlauf, who called soldiers to smash Palestinian babies on rocks, led the Israel Day Parade in New York.
The Israel Day Parade has long been a fixture of New York’s political calendar and is often viewed as a test of political loyalty to Israel among elected officials.
This year, however, the event took place against a backdrop of mounting criticism of Israel’s assault in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
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