Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS

In a recent Fox News interview, New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani refused to say whether Hamas should lay down its arms. When pressed to elaborate, he replied:

I don’t really have opinions about the future of Hamas and Israel beyond the question of justice and safety and the fact that anything has to abide by international law, and that applies to Hamas, that applies to the Israeli military, and that applies to anyone you could ask me about.

There is something appealing about his answer. Why do we need to take sides in disputes far away? After all, we just have to insist that international law be followed, and then problems will be resolved in a fair and peaceful way.

But in practice, what does this mean? Who holds the power to establish international law, and who has the power to enforce it.

International law is based in part on treaties signed by governments, and the cornerstone treaty on international relations is the UN Charter. So does Mamdani believe that the Israel-Palestine conflict should be resolved by the UN Security Council, whose main job is to maintain international peace and security?

Does Mamdani accept that his political foe, Donald Trump, has veto power over the Middle East? Should the Ukraine war be resolved by a body in which Russia has a veto? There’s always the General Assembly. But how can Israel be asked to accept a forum in which the dozens of Muslim countries each have their own vote and can gang up against it? And does it make sense that tiny Tuvalu and Grenada have equal say on European and Middle Eastern affairs as the countries there? Both the General Assembly and Security Council failed to condemn the Oct. 7 attacks in a timely manner. Did that abide by international law?

The reality is that a reasonable and effective form of world government has not yet been invented.

More plausibly, Mamdani might be referring to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the judicial arm of the United Nations. It is currently hearing the complaint that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. In July of 2024, the ICJ also produced an advisory opinion in which it determined that Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank is illegal and should end immediately. Israel is not complying with this ruling, and even if it wanted to it’s hard to see how it could. But perhaps in turning to international law Mamdani means that this ruling of the ICJ, and others like it, should be followed.

But aside from criticizing this particular opinion as both biased and impractical — and indeed, even putting aside the strong questions about the ICJ as a whole — there is a bigger problem. The ICJ’s role is only to provide legal background and advice, whereas it is for the General Assembly or Security Council to decide on implementation (Advisory opinion par. 281), bringing us back to the issues above.

Furthermore, baked into the ICJ is a fundamental unfairness. In the genocide case, the ICJ only has jurisdiction over countries, not non-state armed groups. This means that while the ICJ will pore over thousands of pages of evidence against Israel, carefully scrutinizing every statement made by Israeli leaders and every action taken by the IDF, it will pay Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, indiscriminate rocket fire, and hostage taking limited or no attention at all.

In its advisory opinion, the General Assembly requested that the ICJ examine only, “The legal consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel.” What about the legal consequences of decades of Palestinian terrorism, rejection of peace offers, and threats to wipe Israel off the map? The ICJ was told to ignore all of that. How can a system whose scrutiny is so blatantly one-sided produce a just result?

Of course there are other relevant areas of international law. We can try to insist that both sides in conflicts respect human rights, such as by not using conflict as an excuse to discriminate, arbitrarily detain, or collectively punish members of the opposing group. We can also advocate for adherence to the laws of armed combat, so even when conflicts turn violent civilians are spared unnecessary harm.

But these are just behavioral norms to manage disputes, not solve them. This is the truth Mamdani misses — international law is unable to offer a fair or reasonable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Negotiation between the parties, based on compromise and looking to produce a better future while letting go of grievances from the past, is the only way forward.

So not only should Mamdani condemn Hamas for the atrocities it has committed and insist it comply with the ceasefire by laying down its arms, but both he and all of us should also have an opinion about its future.

Hamas preaches armed resistance and espouses impossible-to-meet, maximalist demands, both of which are incompatible with negotiation. If we want to avoid a future of endless war and suffering, that means we must want a future without Hamas, too.

Shlomo Levin is the author of the Human Rights Haggadah, and he uses short fiction and questions to explore human rights at https://shalzed.com/