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Page A2From§Eachthe milkman edition — 3 October 2026

Netanyahu brands mayor a terrorist's buddy, is branded too soft on the Palestinians by his own side.

By SalStaff Writer

“Israeli Opposition Accuses Netanyahu Of Being Too Pro-Palestine”, 3 October 2026 (Photo via Daily Caller — the original report)

As it ran on the front

Start with the sequence, because the sequence is the whole story. On September 17th, Israel's ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, said it was Zohran Mamdani who should be arrested, not his own prime minister. Five days later, on the 22nd, Mamdani answered the only way he'd been answering for weeks, by repeating that Netanyahu should face arrest over Gaza when he landed in New York. Two days after that, Netanyahu took the UN podium himself and did what ambassadors do for a living: he named Mamdani by name, called Hamas his "buddies," and did it in a chamber that delegates from scores of countries had already walked out of to protest his presence. Mamdani hit back the same day, calling it a sanitizing of a death toll now past 73,000 Palestinians.

On September 28th, the Guardian filed the beat that explains all of the above without needing a single new fact: Netanyahu wasn't improvising. He was campaigning. A mayor six time zones away makes a cleaner villain than the coalition partners sitting next to you.…

…(cont) Fair word for it. Then on Saturday, the Daily Caller ran a story that answers the "strange" better than Mamdani could: Netanyahu's own political opposition in Israel is accusing him of being too soft on the Palestinians. Not too hard. Too soft.

Sit with the order of operations. The same man who stood at the UN and branded a sitting American mayor a terrorist's friend is, according to the people who share his country and his ballot, not tough enough on the terrorists. The charge against Mamdani and the charge from Netanyahu's own flank are aimed at the same spot, and they point in opposite directions, and both can't be about Gaza. One of them is about an election.

Mamdani didn't need to defend himself from any of it. He just needed to wait for Netanyahu's own side to do it for him, on a Saturday, under a headline that reads like it wrote itself.

“You get called a terrorist's buddy by a guy whose own party thinks he's going easy on terrorists — that's not foreign policy, that's a campaign ad shot on two continents. Mamdani's just the extra nobody paid who happened to be standing in the shot. Follow the arrest threats long enough and you stop finding a war crimes case and start finding a primary.”
Sal
“Look, the Prime Minister has every right to name names when American officials are calling for his arrest on foreign soil, that's just — okay, the "too soft" thing, that's an internal Israeli political dispute, it has nothing to do with — did I just say it has nothing to do with it? That's not what I meant to say.”
Chip

Earlier in this story

The receipts

· Netanyahu is using Mamdani as a foil in his re-election campaign from the morgue, 28 Sep 2026

· 'Baseless Lies Meant to Sanitize His Genocide': Mamdani Hits Back After Netanyahu's Attacks During UN Speech from the morgue, 25 Sep 2026

· Israeli UN ambassador says Mamdani should be arrested instead of Netanyahu from the morgue, 17 Sep 2026

This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.