Photo via Reuters
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In 2013, US citizen Edward Snowden exposed the National Security Agency for conducting mass-scale surveillance programs. The NSA had been secretly collecting the digital data of private American citizens, in violation of the civil right to privacy as established under the Fourth Amendment and Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. For his heroic whistleblowing, Snowden was charged with three felonies and faced several decades in prison. He was forced to seek political asylum in Moscow.
Until 2008, civil rights leader and former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, was officially designated a “terrorist” by the United States government for his past affiliation with the African National Congress. Mandela has been frequently compared to Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi for his work to end apartheid, the horrific legal system of segregation that ruled South Africa until 1994. Only 14 years after the end of apartheid was Mandela officially allowed to enter the country without requiring a waiver from the State Department.
When a citizen of one country commits a crime involving another country, they are often surrendered to the second country’s jurisdiction as a part of the process known as “extradition.” There are 195 sovereign countries in the world. There are 193 member states in the United Nations, with the only 2 non-member observer states being Vatican City and Palestine. Murder is illegal and prosecutable in every single one of them.
On Thursday, September 24, 2026, on our phones and newsfeeds, internationally wanted war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walked into the United Nations General Headquarters in New York City. Despite the International Criminal Court having issued a warrant for his arrest in 2024, the US government saw to it that Netanyahu was platformed for a speech, then allowed to return to his comfortable home in Jerusalem. Road closures, motorcades, and helicopters were employed at the expense of American tax dollars and the inconvenience of New Yorkers to ensure his safety. 74,016 Palestinians, that we know of, have been killed since 2024. Half of them were women and children.
It’s been a week of political spectacle in New York. On Monday, as Fordham’s Students For Environmental Action and Justice joined others in protest outside OpenAI’s SoHo headquarters, and Mamdani and Trump met at Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side, I joined several Fordham students, American elected officials, and international diplomats at Riverside Church in Upper Manhattan. The site, as multiple speakers reminded us, is of historic importance; in 1967, MLK Jr. stood behind the pulpit to formally oppose the Vietnam War. In 2026, multiple speakers of note congregated for “WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED,” an event held in honor of the 81st UN General Assembly, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I) and South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Ronald Lamola.
Representative Sanders delivered a foreign policy address that covered several issues topical to the UN assembly: Artificial Intelligence, climate change, and Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Palestine. Solemnity and gravitas, voices echoing and booming through the hall; vaulted ceiling, stained glass, intricate interior of marble and limestone. Officials, both international and domestic, critiqued the accountability of Columbia University, the NYPD, billionaires, Israel, America, and other world governments, to standing ovations.
Everyone in New York City last week faced accountability to someone else. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as a prominent local pro-Palestinian voice and a relatively new major political player, faced scrutiny from both the national press and political rivals on all sides of the aisle; some critics argued that his critique of Israel’s presence at the UN Assembly was weak and insufficient, while Netanyahu himself called Mamdani an antisemitic liar. Netanyahu’s visit stirred civilian protests, which sparked heightened security and a distinct air of paranoia in Manhattan. The protesters themselves faced NYPD monitoring and frivolous arrests. And all of us–every delegate at the UN, every American government official, every citizen of America as our government enables Israel’s genocide–face deserved shame, because we allowed a mass-murderer to walk free, and we let the rest of the world watch us do it.
Mayor Mamdani was never going to be able to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu; his legal authority does not trump that of the President of the United States. But he allowed NYC Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to deploy thousands of officers in response to peaceful protests across the city, an action that students who participated described to me as “overkill.”
Protest medic and Fordham student Quincy Aust attended the demonstration on Thursday afternoon directly outside of UN headquarters. Aust stated that “there were more high-ranking police officers than I [Quincy], or any of the other comrades there, had seen at an event of this scale and volatility. It felt like over-accounting for a non-violent protest to appease the pro-Israel crowd.”
Fordham student Raine Rodriguez, co-chair of the Fordham Young Democratic Socialists of America (a club not officially recognized by Fordham’s administration), attended a separate peaceful protest with student and NYC-YDSA co-chair Matthew Smith. The protest was co-organized by the human rights organization Jewish Voice for Peace and the NYC Democratic Socialists of America; many attendees chose to exercise their right to civil disobedience by staging a sit-in. The protest crowd included celebrities such as singers Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, Saturday Night Live member Sarah Sherman, and actor Eliot Page. Among those willingly arrested were Emmy Award-winning actress Hannah Einbinder, Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon, New York politician Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Smith himself, who shared a jail cell with NYC City Council member Chi Osse and comedian Caleb Hearon.
When asked for a quote, Rodriguez offered that “although we blocked traffic going to the UN… our protest was entirely peaceful. Within minutes of beginning… calls to stop the genocide in Palestine and stop the war in Lebanon and Iran, we were swarmed with NYPD on every side.” She followed that, “It was obvious that to [the NYPD] we are the enemy and we posed a threat, simply for standing up against a war criminal entering our city. It is unfathomable that the NYPD would arrest my comrades for refusing to be complicit… rather than arresting a war criminal who walked MY streets of NYC freely [and] without consequence. The UN should not have allowed him to get up there… The UN is complicit in genocide.”
The UN Charter purports that the UN exists “to maintain international peace and security… [remove] threats to the peace… and to bring about… in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes… which… breach [the] peace.”
The ICC’s arrest warrant lists that Netanyahu is “responsible for… starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts…”
The UN Charter furthers that it exists “[t]o develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples…” and “to achieve international co-operation in… respect for human rights.” It claims that “[t]he [o]rganization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” But the purpose of a system is a product of what it manages to accomplish. And what the UN has done is openly platform an international war criminal that has no desire to strengthen friendly relations with other nations. Benjamin Netanyahu has no respect for the human rights of Palestinians. Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government at large do not see Palestinians as human. In 2023, Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip with the words “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Since 2023, crimes the state of Israel has been accused of, but are not limited to, include: intentionally killing journalists, intentionally bombing medical, religious, cultural, educational, and humanitarian aid locations, disguising explosives as mundane objects such as pagers and radios, and violating ceasefire agreements over 4,000 times since 2025. The Israeli Defense Forces killed the aunt, uncle, and four cousins of five-year-old Hind Rajab as they fled Gaza City, killed the Red Cross paramedics sent to rescue Rajab from the car, and then, after hours of her pleading for rescue over the phone, the IDF killed her too.
The Vatican is not a member of the UN because it has opted to maintain international political neutrality. Palestine is not a member of the UN because the United States says so. The UN has failed, but at the very least, dozens of delegates walked out in protest when Netanyahu spoke. U.S. delegates did not. America cannot in good faith call itself “the land of the free” when we not only allow a man responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians to walk freely through our streets, but also allow our representatives to clap for him.
The genocide in Palestine is not a TV show just because you see it on your TV screens. Failure on every level–international, federal, local–to intervene in Israel’s genocide of Palestine does not make it any less of a genocide. It is only that we have become desensitized to the fact that our government is an accomplice. Rodriguez’s words at the last Fordham YDSA meeting have haunted me for the last week.
“To [the UN], he is a spectacle instead of a mass murderer. Benjamin Netanyahu should not have been here in New York City. He should have been in the Hague.”
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This article was edited by Jackie Gonzalez and Brianna Leathem Brazzini.
Madelyn Marcisz 
Dominic Razzano 
Daniel Ukandu