Hoping to transition from being “Chicago’s Most Connected Banker” to once again holding elected office, the two-term former Mayor of Chicago and former chief of staff to Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, did this month what all savvy political hopefuls do: He traveled to meet some of the largest power brokers in American politics at their homes in Tel Aviv.
In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama flew to Israel and declared his “unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security,” and in 2015, Hillary Clinton pledged to “immediately dispatch a delegation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to meet with senior Israeli commanders” and to “invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House” in her first month in office.
Emanuel, who as a civilian volunteer worked with the Israel Defense Forces in the early 1990s, and whose father was a member of the Jewish terrorist group Irgun, is widely suspected to be eyeing a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028—one that will require winning over a base that has notably soured on Israel amid its genocide in Gaza and nonstop wars of aggression in the region.
To court Democratic voters, the longtime pro-Israel Emanuel arrived in Israel with a markedly different message than the one past Democratic hopefuls have carried on the same pilgrimage. It was the latest attempt by the Democratic establishment to come to terms with its voters’ turn against Israel, whether through a serious reckoning or—as the evidence suggests and as the Democratic Party traditionally does—merely through deception and cooptation.
At Tel Aviv University, Emanuel opened by conceding ground to his Israeli hosts, naming a “corrupt Palestinian leadership” that has “never lived up to the Palestinian people’s legitimate aspirations for sovereignty and self-determination,” and reheating a stale narrative of rejected peace offers by Palestinian leaders.
But after the requisite throat clearing effectively blaming Palestinians for their own ethnic cleansing, Emanuel did put forward a harsh criticism of Israeli behavior and unconditional American backing for it, arguing it “has allowed [Israel] to deny food and medical relief to innocent Palestinians suffering in Gaza, leaving the world to conclude that Israelis not only want to kill the Palestinians but that they are completely indifferent to their death, destruction, and suffering.” He decried an emboldened “political coalition in the Knesset that learned it can burn Palestinian farmland in the West Bank and terrorize Palestinian families without consequence.” All this, Emanuel says, has turned Israel into a “territorial pariah.”
The line that drew the most attention and applause from progressives was Emanuel’s pledge that “every Israeli found attacking Palestinian civilians or their property in the future will be sanctioned,” a threat he extended to “every Israeli official who supports such violence” and “every construction company or bank building or financing illegal settlements.”
But the true PR purpose of his visit—and his function as a pressure release valve for the foreign government of Israel—was revealed soon afterward, when Emanuel’s speech was applauded by the Israel lobby and its main Democratic Party organ, the Democratic Majority for Israel, which praised it as “thoughtful, serious, and grounded in a sincere commitment to Israel’s future security and prosperity.” Indeed, a centerpiece of his speech, the Jerusalem Post noted, was the “23-state solution”—a proposal cooked up by the liberal Israel lobby group J Street.
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