This week, Rahm Emanuel — a chief of staff in the Obama White House and widely rumored 2028 candidate — went to Tel Aviv to deliver a stern message to the Israeli public: If Israel wants to keep America as an ally, it needs to change.
“Without question, the alliance is at a crossroads. It cannot stand or survive as it has been,” he said. “To maintain the strength of our ties, we need significant changes and a new direction.”
The problem, per Emanuel, is that Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has become “a modern-day Sparta” — a militarist, expansionist state that sees no alternative to crushing Palestinians under its foot. Such a country does not deserve the “unconditional support” Emanuel believes it has gotten from the US, which is the geopolitical equivalent of giving vodka to an alcoholic.
“Unconditional support has allowed you to deny food and medical relief to innocent Palestinians in Gaza, leaving the world to conclude that Israelis not only want to kill Palestinians, but they are completely indifferent to their death, to their destruction, and completely indifferent to their suffering,” he wrote.
Instead, he said, the United States needs to push Israel to be a better version of itself. This means sanctioning Israeli political and business leaders who enable terrorism against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, ending US military aid to Israel, and launching a new framework for peace negotiations with the Palestinians built around support from other Arab countries.
No one thinks this speech will change American policy. Rahm Emanuel very much does not speak for President Donald Trump. Rather, the speech should be understood in the context of intra-Democratic politics.
While both Barack Obama and Joe Biden clashed with Netanyahu at various points, both attempted to keep those disagreements mostly private and their public steps to punish Israeli misbehavior relatively muted. Even as multiple administrations called for a Palestinian state and opposed new settlements in the West Bank, sanctioning Israeli leaders and cutting off military aid were completely off the table — the sort of thing that only a left figure like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would even dare suggest.
Emanuel is not Sanders. In his memoir The World as It Is, Obama adviser Ben Rhodes recalls Emanuel repeatedly mocking his concerns for Palestinians in internal administration discussions — giving Rhodes the nickname “Hamas” and accusing the advisor of making “it impossible for my kid to have his fucking bar mitzvah in Israel.”
That a Jewish Democrat like Emanuel is now comfortable with once-marginalized rhetoric and policies is a marker that the old pro-Israel consensus is well and truly dead among Democrats. What’s coming in 2028 and beyond is going to be very different — and much tougher for Israel — than what came before it.
“I think [Rahm’s position] becomes the baseline of Democratic primary candidates,” Ilan Goldenberg, the chief policy officer at the liberal J Street lobby, said. “You can’t go to the right of this.”
The new center on Israel is the old left
For pretty much all of 2026, Rahm Emanuel has been positioning himself to capture the centrist lane in the Democratic primary.
In interview after interview, he has argued that the party has become unduly influenced by left-wing activists who are obsessed with unpopular trans issues, defunding the police, and abolishing capitalism. Instead, he argues, the party should refocus on “middle class values” and “pocketbook issues” — meaning deprioritization of social issues, stronger border enforcement, and welfare state expansion.
In the past, this type of centrist candidate would almost invariably be taking a lockstep pro-Israel stance: unconditional military aid and diplomatic support. Democratic presidents, House speakers, and Senate majority leaders used to be regular attendees at AIPAC’s annual conference — signalling their alignment with the pro-Israel lobby’s stance.
This old approach reflected public opinion. Most Americans were broadly supportive of the US-Israel alliance, and had been for decades. The basic centrist impulse — that politics should be about winning the median voter — militated in Israel’s favor, leading both Obama and Biden to keep their frustrations with Netanyahu and clashes with him over policy as private as possible while in office.
But the outcome of the Gaza war has changed everything. In February, Gallup’s annual survey found that more Americans sympathized with Palestinians for the first time in the poll’s history. A brand-new Pew survey found that 62 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Israeli government. This new American hostility is overwhelmingly driven by Democrats, with just 16 percent of Democrats expressing a favorable view of the Israeli government in Pew’s data.
This has been brewing for years. Netanyahu’s involvement in American politics — including his 2015 effort to sabotage Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran — has long been driving down Israel’s numbers. But it was the Gaza war that finally pushed Democratic voters to snap, with a July AP poll finding that a majority of Democrats now believe Israel committed genocide during the conflict.
Today, anger at Israel is a potent voting issue. Left-wing candidates, including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Graham Platner in Maine, have used the issue to burnish their anti-establishment identity and rocket to the top of hotly contested primaries. Mainstream Democratic candidates are using the word genocide to describe what happened in Gaza. AIPAC is frequently denounced as an enemy, if not outright evil.
This is where Emanuel’s speech is coming from. A consummate centrist, he has decided that what used to be the far-left position among Democrats — that America should use its leverage to try and push Israel to change for the better — is the center. It’s the latest sign that the old pro-Israel consensus within the party is dying, and something new is emerging to replace it.
The new Democratic debate on Israel
So if the Democratic debate on Israel has changed fundamentally — if the old consensus is well-and-truly dead — what does the future look like?
Goldenberg is a helpful guide here. J Street, his organization, has long occupied the ground Emanuel is now attempting to claim. Indeed, J Street hosted Emanuel on their podcast in March, and his speech is very clearly influenced by their ideas. His proposal for reviving the peace process — a “23 state solution” in which Israel works with Arab governments to bring about a Palestinian state as part of a regional settlement — is directly taken from J Street literature.
Unsurprisingly, Goldenberg liked the speech, telling me he agreed with “80-90 percent” of what Emanuel said. His critiques were less with its policy vision and more with some specifics: Emanuel offered a view of the peace negotiations of the 90s and 2000s that put nearly all the blame for their failure on the Palestinian side, which Goldberg thought was unfairly one-sided. This reflected, in his words, an “Israel-centric” worldview that took the perspective and needs of the Palestinian side less seriously than he’d like.
But the fact that the disagreements between Emanuel and Goldenberg are this narrow reflects just how far the Democratic center has moved. When they were founded in 2008, J Street’s views represented the left fringe of the Democratic coalition. Now, one of the party’s consummate insiders is literally lifting its talking points.
Matt Duss is perhaps the leading left-wing policy wonk on Israel-Palestine, having advised both Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the topic. He tells me that he found real things to like in the Emanuel speech — in particular, that it marked a decisive break with the lockstep pro-Israel past.
But he was more exercised about its discussion of the conflict’s history than Goldenberg was. “To call this a tendentious presentation of history would be to give it too much praise,” Duss wrote in the Nation. In general, he thinks, the speech simply didn’t go far enough, describing it as a “landmark,” but one “we should’ve passed long ago and should quickly leave in the rear view mirror.”
This is the future of the Democratic party conversation on Israel. Gone are the arguments over whether the US should put pressure on Israel to change; the questions now are what kind of pressure, how much of it should be applied, and what the ultimate end goal of said pressure should be.
Emanuel’s view will hardly be the only one. Just as J Street has moved from the left to the center of the party, the growing discontent with Israel has also elevated competing groups and ideas into the conversation that were almost invisible in the halls of power until recently, like the rising slate of DSA-aligned candidates.
One can imagine a spectrum of views here. The J Street side wants to preserve both Israel’s existence and its strong relationship with the US, conditional on Israel ending its occupation of Palestinian land. There’s a more left position, that the US no longer has any interest in being an ally of a country like Israel. And there’s a lefter-still position, in which US policy should actively aim towards a one-state binational solution that dissolves Israel’s identity as a Jewish state.
The boundaries between these positions are not always clear in policy terms, and they can blur together at the edges. It’s hard to know exactly what the balance of forces will be in the 2028 election, let alone beyond it. A lot will depend on Israel’s own election, scheduled for this fall, in which lightning rod Netanyahu might finally lose power.
But the forces behind this change run deeper than one prime minister. Through its occupation of the West Bank, wanton violence in Gaza, and direct partisan interference on behalf of Republican priorities, Israel’s leadership has fundamentally broken its relationship with the Democratic party. That’s not something that’s fixable without a fundamental transformation of Israeli policy — one that doesn’t seem especially likely in the short term.
There is, thus, every reason to believe that the Emanuel speech is, as Duss said, a “landmark” — another all-but-formal codification of the reorientation of the Democratic party.
“If you’ve lost Rahm Emanuel,” Goldenberg said, “you’re kind of toast.”
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