We Are Shocked--Shocked--to Find War Criminals at the Israel Day Parade

[Celerity]

A brief history of New York liberals’ efforts to downplay, ignore, and censor the terrifying ideology of Israel’s radical right

https://prospect.org/2026/06/03/war-criminals-israel-day-parade-bezalel-smotrich-meir-kahane/


Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich Credit: Israeli Press Office

Two weeks ago, Bezalel Smotrich, the avowedly ethno-supremacist Israeli finance minister who has spent most of his life trying to eradicate the non-Jewish population of the area he calls “Eretz Israel,” announced that he would be imminently hit with an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. The ICC has thus far said no warrant has been issued, but it is reported to concern the regime of government welfare programs, kickbacks, and bribes that subsidize the relocation costs of diaspora settlers and pay off the juvenile delinquents who terrorize Palestinians into fleeing their ancestral homes/makeshift refugee camps to make way for the next crop of settlers.

Upon learning of his warrant, Smotrich ordered the immediate expulsion of some 4,000 Palestinians living east of Jerusalem. Then he began to make arrangements for a cameo appearance at New York’s Israel Day Parade, an annual lib-owning ritual that drew extra attention this year due to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s preannounced refusal to attend. The decision of an alleged war criminal to attend Sunday’s parade was a “last minute” one, according to two representatives of the Israeli consulate the Prospect contacted following a graf buried deep in a New York Times article about Mamdani’s decision to skip the parade, which claimed that the finance minister’s name “was not on the official list of attendees that the Israeli consulate sent to The New York Times before the parade.”

That may be true—and technically was, consulate officials say, but only because the press release specifically named only the Knesset members in attendance at the parade—but surely the Israeli government planned on sending one of its war criminals to Manhattan, one of these days, if only for the purpose of trolling Mamdani, who during the campaign repeatedly promised to exhaust every legal option available to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and anyone else with an ICC arrest warrant, a fairly impossible task given the likelihood of federal preemption and the U.S. failure to recognize the ICC at all.

Instead, however, it was the pillars of New York’s liberal establishment who got trolled. For some reason, high-profile Democrats from Chuck Schumer to Kathy Hochul to Tish James had felt compelled to attend a parade to honor a country whose gratuitous warmongering is rapidly imploding the American empire. And on Monday, they were suddenly forced to issue statements apologizing for marching alongside Smotrich and fellow surprise attendees, including nuking Gaza advocate Amichai Eliyahu and mass infant-smashing proponent Yitzhak Wasserlauf, respectively the Netanyahu government’s ministers of heritage and development of the periphery. Hochul and James issued strong condemnations of Smotrich; Schumer’s staff did not respond to a request for comment. And the Times, which did not mention Smotrich until the 14th paragraph of its original parade coverage, published a predicable follow-up on the predictable “backlash” libs were facing for attending the same event everyone had spent the last two weeks shaming Mamdani for skipping. The icing on the cake: Smotrich stayed in town long enough to speak at the same synagogue “respectable” Zionists were scolding anti-genocide activists for protesting outside last month during a Jewish-only auction of illegally annexed West Bank real estate.

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