ZOHRAN MAMDANI HIT WITH MAJOR SETBACK — SUPPORTERS CALL IT A LASTING POLITICAL VICTORY
Uganda Unveils Yoni Netanyahu Monument—But Turning It Into a Rebuke of Mamdani Goes Beyond the Evidence
Uganda has commemorated one of the most famous Israeli soldiers ever killed on its soil.
And because the country is also the birthplace of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the ceremony quickly became political ammunition thousands of miles away.
On August 1, Uganda unveiled a monument to Lt. Col. Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu at the Old Entebbe Terminal, the site of the 1976 Israeli hostage-rescue operation in which Netanyahu was killed.
The monument marks the 50th anniversary of Operation Entebbe and honors the commander of the Israeli assault force that rescued more than 100 hostages from a hijacked Air France flight.
Yoni Netanyahu was the older brother of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
He was also the only Israeli commando killed during the raid.
That combination has made the new monument symbolically powerful.
But the symbolism has now been pulled into a completely separate political confrontation involving Mamdani and Benjamin Netanyahu.
The connection is obvious enough to generate headlines.
It is not evidence that Uganda erected the monument because of Mamdani.
Uganda’s own military gives a very different explanation.
Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, chief of Uganda’s armed forces, presided over the unveiling and described the monument as a tribute to Yoni Netanyahu’s courage and sacrifice and as a symbol of renewed Uganda-Israel friendship.
The official Ugandan account framed the ceremony around security cooperation, diplomatic reconciliation and remembrance of the events of July 1976.
Mamdani is not mentioned in that official explanation.
That distinction matters.
A monument can create an awkward political contrast without having been built to create that contrast.
And in this case, the contrast is unusually sharp.
Zohran Mamdani was born in Uganda and retains Ugandan citizenship alongside his U.S. citizenship. He moved to the United States as a child and became an American citizen in 2018. He is now mayor of New York City.
Mamdani has also become one of the most prominent American elected officials openly confronting Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
He has called the Israeli prime minister a “war criminal.”
During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani said he would seek Netanyahu’s arrest if Netanyahu came to New York pursuant to an International Criminal Court warrant.
His position has since changed in one important legal respect.
In July, Mamdani acknowledged that New York City does not independently have legal authority to execute the ICC warrant against Netanyahu.
Instead, he called on the federal government to join the ICC and enforce its warrants.
That clarification is important because earlier descriptions of Mamdani’s position can now be misleading.
He still considers Netanyahu a war criminal and supports enforcement of the ICC warrant.
But he no longer claims that, as mayor, he can simply direct the NYPD to arrest the Israeli prime minister.
The United States is not a party to the ICC, and the Trump administration has said Netanyahu will not be arrested while visiting the United States.
That ongoing dispute explains why a monument in Uganda to Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother suddenly attracted attention in New York politics.
The monument itself, however, commemorates a very different period of Israeli history.
On June 27, 1976, Air France Flight 139 was hijacked after leaving Athens on a journey from Tel Aviv to Paris.
The hijackers included Palestinian militants and members of the German Revolutionary Cells.
They diverted the aircraft first to Libya and then to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where they received support from forces loyal to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
Over the following days, many non-Israeli passengers were released.
A group of 106 hostages remained at Entebbe.
Most were Israeli or Jewish, although the Air France crew also remained with them.
Israel initially considered negotiations.
Recently declassified Israeli documents show that the decision-making was more complicated than the popular version of the story in which Israel immediately rejected diplomacy and chose force.
Israeli leaders pursued negotiations even while secretly preparing the rescue operation.
When those negotiations failed to produce a resolution, Israeli commandos flew thousands of miles to Uganda.
On July 4, they stormed Entebbe Airport.
The operation rescued 102 of the 106 hostages who remained in the crisis. Three hostages were killed during the raid, while another hostage, Dora Bloch, who had been taken to a Ugandan hospital before the operation, was later killed by Ugandan authorities.
Yoni Netanyahu commanded the elite Israeli assault element.
He was killed during the fighting.
No other Israeli commando died in the operation.
That is the history Uganda chose to commemorate 50 years later.
And the setting is particularly striking.
The monument stands at the Old Entebbe Terminal itself.
Uganda’s military said Kainerugaba deliberately wanted Netanyahu honored at the location where he died.
The memorial is also evidence of how dramatically Uganda-Israel relations have changed.
Under Idi Amin, Ugandan forces supported the hijackers at Entebbe and fought the Israeli commandos during the rescue operation.
At this year’s memorial ceremony, Uganda’s current military leadership explicitly distanced the country from Amin.
Kainerugaba called Amin’s government a “brutal dictatorship” that did not represent the Ugandan people.
He also acknowledged something that could easily have been omitted from an Israeli-focused commemoration.
Ugandan soldiers died during the raid too.
Kainerugaba paid tribute to them while maintaining that they were serving a dictatorship whose policies modern Uganda rejects.
He also named four civilian hostages who died during the broader Entebbe crisis.
That made the ceremony more than a simple celebration of the Israeli military operation.
Uganda attempted to frame it as an act of historical reconciliation.
Kainerugaba then moved from history to present-day geopolitics.
He said Uganda wanted to deepen cooperation with Israel in security and other areas and described the countries’ relationship as one based on mutual respect and practical cooperation.
An Israeli delegation attended.
Ugandan foreign-affairs, military, aviation and tourism officials were also present.
That gives the monument a clear official purpose.
It honors Yoni Netanyahu.
It commemorates Entebbe.
And it advertises the current Uganda-Israel relationship.
What it does not officially do is comment on Zohran Mamdani.
That connection was made afterward by political commentators.
Former New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a longtime pro-Israel activist and founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, described the monument as a form of “poetic justice” given Mamdani’s attacks on Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hikind has said Yoni Netanyahu holds particular personal significance for him and that he named his own son after the fallen Israeli officer.
Those are Hikind’s views.
There is no evidence that Mamdani himself has said the monument makes him angry, causes him to “lose sleep” or has any personal effect on him.
Claims about how Mamdani privately feels about the statue are therefore speculation.
There is an even deeper historical irony.
Zohran Mamdani’s father has recently written extensively about the same era of Ugandan history that produced Operation Entebbe.
Mahmood Mamdani is a Columbia University professor and one of the best-known scholars of postcolonial African politics.
His latest book is Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State.
The book was published in 2025, not February 2026.
That date in the original account therefore needs correction.
Harvard University Press lists the publication in October 2025.
The work is partly political history and partly personal.
Mahmood Mamdani himself was expelled from Uganda under Amin in 1972 as part of the dictator’s mass expulsion of the country’s Asian population.
His book attempts to reconsider both Amin and current Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni through the longer history of colonialism, nationalism and foreign intervention.
One of its most controversial arguments concerns Israel.
Mamdani argues that Britain and Israel helped Amin rise to power.
In an April interview about the book, he went further, saying British and Israeli actors “masterminded the coup together” in 1971.
That is a substantial historical claim.
It is also not something that can responsibly be dismissed merely as “nonsensical.”
There is substantial historical evidence that Israel had close relations with Uganda before and immediately after Amin came to power and provided military and other support to his government during its early period.
The more contested issue is exactly how direct Israel’s role was in bringing Amin to power and how much responsibility foreign governments should bear for what followed.
Mamdani takes a strong position on that question.
Other historians and reviewers have challenged his interpretation or argued that his broader reassessment risks minimizing Amin’s own brutality.
That is a legitimate historical debate.
It is different from saying no relationship existed.
Israel and Amin were not always enemies.
Their relationship changed dramatically.
Amin initially had close ties with Israel.
He later broke with Israel, strengthened relations with Libya and Palestinian organizations and became intensely hostile toward the Jewish state.
By the time Air France Flight 139 arrived in Entebbe in 1976, the relationship had completely reversed.
Ugandan forces supported the hostage-takers.
When Israeli commandos arrived, they fought Amin’s soldiers.
That history makes the August 2026 monument more significant than a simple statue of a soldier.
Uganda is commemorating the commander of a foreign military operation conducted on Ugandan territory against forces serving a former Ugandan government.
And Uganda’s current military leadership is doing so openly.
That represents a striking reversal from the politics of 1976.
But again, it is a reversal in Uganda-Israel relations—not necessarily a statement about New York City politics.
Zohran Mamdani’s relationship to the story is mostly biographical and contemporary.
He was born in Uganda.
He retains Ugandan citizenship.
His father is one of the most prominent scholars writing about Uganda’s political history.
And Mamdani is currently involved in a very public confrontation with Yoni Netanyahu’s younger brother.
Those connections make the story irresistible to political commentators.
They do not turn Mamdani into a participant in the Entebbe commemoration.
Nor does Uganda’s decision to honor Yoni Netanyahu establish that the Ugandan government agrees with Benjamin Netanyahu’s current policies in Gaza.
Foreign relations are rarely that simple.
Governments can honor historical military cooperation while disagreeing over current policy.
They can maintain security ties without endorsing every decision of another government.
And a monument honoring one member of the Netanyahu family is not automatically an endorsement of everything another member does half a century later.
That distinction becomes particularly important because Benjamin Netanyahu currently faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant.
The ICC issued warrants in 2024 for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity connected to the Gaza conflict.
Israel rejects the accusations and disputes the ICC’s jurisdiction.
Mamdani has sided firmly with those who believe the warrant should be enforced.
That position has brought him into direct conflict with Netanyahu.
The confrontation intensified this summer when Mamdani called Netanyahu a war criminal and said he was not welcome in New York.
Netanyahu responded by accusing Mamdani of fomenting hatred and insisted that he intended to visit New York despite the mayor’s objections.
By August, Netanyahu’s Likud party had gone even further.
A campaign billboard in Tel Aviv placed Mamdani alongside leaders of Iran, Hezbollah and Turkey as figures whom Likud portrayed as wanting Netanyahu defeated in Israel’s upcoming election.
So the political hostility between Mamdani and Benjamin Netanyahu is real.
There is no need to manufacture one.
The more interesting point is that the Yoni Netanyahu monument now places Uganda—a country central to Mamdani’s personal background—inside the visual symbolism of that confrontation even though Uganda itself did not frame the monument in those terms.
That is political irony.
It is not evidence of political intent.
The same distinction applies to Mahmood Mamdani’s book.
His interpretation of Idi Amin and Israel is controversial.
Critics have accused him of going too far in reconsidering Amin and of understating the dictator’s responsibility for mass violence.
A Guardian review, for example, questioned whether the book comes close to rehabilitating Amin even while acknowledging the historical role Britain and Israel played during Amin’s rise.
Mamdani rejects the idea that he is apologizing for Amin.
He says his objective is to place the dictator within the political and colonial context that produced him rather than treating Amin as an inexplicable African monster detached from history.
Those are competing interpretations of history.
Neither is advanced by pretending Operation Entebbe did not happen.
Amin’s government supported the hostage-takers.
Ugandan troops fought Israel’s rescue force.
Hostages died.
Yoni Netanyahu died.
And decades later, Uganda’s own military leadership now publicly describes Amin’s government as a brutal dictatorship.
That may create tension with some arguments in Slow Poison.
But it does not automatically refute the book’s separate claim that Israel had previously supported Amin before relations collapsed.
Both periods existed.
Israel could have supported Amin early in his rule and later become one of his enemies.
History does not require the relationship to remain consistent.
That changing relationship is actually what makes Entebbe—and the new monument—so historically interesting.
In the early 1970s, Israel had worked with Uganda.
By 1976, Israeli commandos were flying into Uganda to rescue hostages from militants protected by Amin’s forces.
By 2026, Uganda’s military chief was standing at the same terminal and honoring the Israeli officer killed fighting those forces.
That is a genuine transformation.
And it is more consequential than speculation about whether Zohran Mamdani is personally embarrassed by a statue.
Uganda’s decision says something about Uganda.
It says the current government wants to distance itself from Amin’s regime.
It says Kampala values its modern relationship with Israel.
And it says the government now views Yoni Netanyahu’s role at Entebbe as something worthy of public commemoration rather than an invasion to be condemned.
For supporters of Israel, that reversal understandably carries enormous symbolic weight.
For critics of Mamdani, it offers an irresistible political contrast.
A mayor born in Uganda is attacking Benjamin Netanyahu while Uganda unveils a monument to Netanyahu’s brother.
That is an effective headline.
But the more accurate argument is narrower.
Zohran Mamdani did not choose Uganda’s monument.
Uganda did not say it erected the monument because of him.
And Yoni Netanyahu’s role in Operation Entebbe is historically separate from the contemporary accusations facing Benjamin Netanyahu over Gaza.
Conflating those three things creates a more dramatic political story.
It creates a less precise historical one.
The monument itself does not need the extra embellishment.
Fifty years after Israeli commandos crossed thousands of miles to Entebbe, Uganda has placed a permanent memorial to their fallen commander at the site where he died.
The country whose soldiers once fought him now honors him.
Uganda’s military leadership calls the monument a symbol of reconciliation and partnership with Israel.
That is already a remarkable story.
Mamdani’s connection adds political irony because of who he is, where he was born and how fiercely he now opposes Benjamin Netanyahu.
It does not turn the monument into a message addressed to New York’s mayor.
So the August 1 ceremony settles one historical question.
Modern Uganda has chosen to honor Yoni Netanyahu and publicly distance itself from the Idi Amin government he fought against.
What it does not settle is the contemporary political fight over Benjamin Netanyahu, Gaza or Zohran Mamdani.
Those arguments belong to another era.
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The fact that they now intersect at the Old Entebbe Terminal makes the story politically striking.
It does not make them the same story.
