Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff who is exploring a 2028 presidential run, landed in Israel this week with a stern tough-love message for America’s most embattled, isolated ally — a message that he hopes could point the way forward on one of the most divisive issues in U.S. politics.
Unconditional U.S. support of Israel should end, Mr. Emanuel bluntly warned in a speech at Tel Aviv University on Wednesday, demanding that Israel make major changes if it is to retain U.S. backing at its historic strength.
Above all, he said, Israel will need to allow again for the possibility of Palestinian sovereignty and give up on dreams of annexing all of the West Bank.
He said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have isolated Israel and led it “into a dead end” and argued that Mr. Netanyahu sees every security problem as a nail and military action as the only hammer.
“It should be obvious that strategic isolation is not a foundation for security,” Mr. Emanuel said. “It’s a countdown clock.”
At a time when Israel is hemorrhaging support in the United States, and especially in the Democratic Party, Mr. Emanuel is trying to chart a course between the anti-Israel left and the pro-Israel right.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Emanuel, whose career in Democratic politics has involved considerable friction with the party’s left, positioned himself in what he portrays as a realistic middle, between demonstrators chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and right-wing Israelis pushing to swallow up the West Bank as part of “Greater Israel.”
“Both are fantasies chanted by fanatics,” he said.
Mr. Emanuel’s ideas break little ground, however, and his overall rethinking of the U.S.-Israel relationship comes after many Democrats have already made a similar turn. A New York Times/Siena poll this spring found that 60 percent of Democratic supporters said they were more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis; only 15 percent were more supportive of Israel.
Like a growing number of Democrats — and like Mr. Netanyahu himself, of late — Mr. Emanuel called for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel, saying bluntly that Israel was wealthy enough to buy weapons like any other ally. He said that he would use sanctions, much as former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. did, to fight both construction of illegal settlements and violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
But Mr. Emanuel also offered a carrot to Israelis who may be uneasy with their diminished international standing but are warier than ever, after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, of a Palestinian state next door.
In his speech, he sketched out an idea for a new peace process aimed at a “23-state solution” whose broad contours resemble the Arab Peace Initiative proposed by Saudi Arabia in 2002. Israel would win recognition from and full diplomatic relations with all 22 members of the Arab League, who in turn would back the creation of a new Palestinian entity.
How such an entity might achieve sovereignty, and how Israel’s security would be guaranteed, would all need to be negotiated, Mr. Emanuel said in an interview Tuesday night in Jerusalem. But he said he had yet to see better ideas for how to address Israel’s predicament and its plummeting support in the United States.
“You can’t beat something with nothing,” he said, quoting his onetime boss, former President Bill Clinton.
Mr. Emanuel said little about what he would do about Israel’s conflict with Iran, instead singing the praises of an international plan for an economic corridor linking India, the Middle East and Europe, as a way to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. He said it would turn Israel and several Gulf countries into “indispensable nodes” in the global supply chain.
But he criticized Mr. Netanyahu for having campaigned against former President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, and then having persuaded President Trump to torpedo it.
“And look what happened,” he said Wednesday. “You’ve lost ground. You’re less safe today, not more.”
He also faulted Mr. Netanyahu for squandering what he described as a golden opportunity to reach at least a security agreement with Syria under its new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who has said that Israel and Syria share a common enemy in Iran.
“Everybody knows you know how to use an F-35,” he said, saying that Israel needed at least to “pick up the phone” and make an effort.
“If you can’t do it, get caught trying to do it,” he said.
Whether Israelis will heed him is uncertain, but Mr. Emanuel brings considerable credibility as a longstanding supporter of the country. His father was born in Jerusalem and fought in Israel’s war for independence. He was an adviser to Mr. Clinton during the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993 and, informally, during the Camp David peace talks in 2000.
He also has some firsthand experience with the Israeli right. Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Mr. Emanuel noted that in 2010, when he brought his son to the Western Wall to celebrate his bar mitzvah, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right-wing extremist, was arrested while protesting Mr. Emanuel’s presence there. Mr. Ben-Gvir is now Israel’s minister of national security.
In his speech, sponsored by Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of the United States, Mr. Emanuel was an equal-opportunity blame-placer. He called the Palestinian leadership corrupt and said that Arab leaders who have “exploited Palestinian rights as a slogan for decades” needed now to help create a new Palestinian entity capable of “accepting the historic Jewish connection to this land.”
But he expressed far more outrage toward the Israeli right, over land grabs and violence against Palestinians.
“Your government is complicit in the horrors now being inflicted on innocent families in the West Bank,” he said. “That undermines your international legitimacy, was a small nation, at a time when you can least afford it.”
Adding that “we’ve done you no favors by averting our eyes,” Mr. Emanuel said that he would impose sanctions on Israeli individuals who attack Palestinians or their property, and on Israeli officials who support such violence. Perhaps more significantly, he would impose sanctions on construction companies or banks involved in illegal settlement construction.
Mr. Emanuel, who boasts of having incurred Mr. Netanyahu’s anger during the Obama administration, repeatedly attacked the prime minister. He partly blamed U.S. policymakers over the years who believed “that the best thing Washington could do for Jerusalem was to blindly and silently stand behind your government.”
That, he said, produced a prime minister who could count on paying little price “if he ignored America’s concerns about settlements and sparked a regional war.” It allowed Israel to deny food and medical relief to suffering Gazans, “leaving the world to conclude that Israelis not only want to kill Palestinians” but are “completely indifferent to their death,” destruction and suffering. And it emboldened a governing coalition, he said, that learned that it could burn West Bank farmland and “terrorize Palestinian families without consequence.”
He also faulted Mr. Netanyahu for refusing to plan for the day after the war in Gaza, leaving Israel stuck in a holding pattern of “occupation and isolation.”
“Hamas’s goal on Oct. 7 was not just to kill and abuse as many Israelis as possible — it was to extinguish the idea that one day, Israelis and Palestinians could live side by side and find common ground,” he said. “The tragedy is that Netanyahu has helped Hamas achieve that objective.”
Mr. Emanuel’s audience of students and Tel Aviv liberals appeared to have been well chosen for the occasion. When he alluded to this year’s elections — the election of a new government in Israel in October, and the U.S. midterms in November — he spoke of his unhappiness with the Trump administration.
“We’re going to have a correction this fall,” he said.
A man in the audience responded: “So are we.”
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