Zohran Mamdani says Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested if he comes to New York for the United Nations General Assembly in September. Most people immediately asked whether the mayor even has the authority to do that. Mamdani himself conceded that he did not know, and said he was consulting the city’s Law Department to clarify the limits of his power.

But the question of authority is the smaller one. The more revealing question is why he thought this belonged to his office at all. And the answer has less to do with municipal power than with a particular way of thinking about politics, one Karl Popper spent much of his life warning against. He called it historicism: the conviction that history has already decided who is right.

The idea runs through The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies: history unfolds according to an inner logic, and those who grasp that logic believe they know not only what happened, but who is right, who is wrong, and where the world is headed. Historicism, Popper argued, replaces inquiry with certainty and political judgment with historical inevitability.

That way of thinking helps explain Mamdani’s rhetoric. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with all its historical, religious, national, and security dimensions, is compressed into a single template: South Africa. If Israel is an apartheid state, then opposition to it naturally becomes the continuation of Nelson Mandela’s struggle.

Mamdani reinforced that analogy when he delivered the keynote address at the inaugural Nelson Mandela........

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