Rahm Emanuel, who is exploring a run for the US presidency in 2028, came to Tel Aviv to warn that Israel was losing international legitimacy, that its current trajectory with the Palestinians was unsustainable, and that fundamental changes are needed to preserve the alliance with America. He’s right – but he’s also only telling half the story.
There’s indeed no doubt that Israel, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is losing the Democratic Party, which has long been a friend and which may soon be back in power, whether in Congress or at the White House. Indeed, Netanyahu’s Israel – with its hubris, indifference to the world and vulgar populism – is also rapidly losing the Republican Party; the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham badly weakens its non-antisemitic, non-isolationist wing.
I reject the pedantic argument that says outsiders have no right to lecture. This is a globally connected world in which events in one country can ripple across the planet. In fact, Israel’s mess contributed to the Democratic loss of the White House in 2024.
The problem is not what the former Chicago mayor and Obama official said in his Tel Aviv speech last Wednesday. The problem is what he did not: Israel would have trouble among Democrats no matter what it did, because of a virus that has infected the American Left.
Somewhat centrist Democrats like Emanuel would like to be able to support Israel again wholeheartedly. But the “Progressive” faction views Israel as a totem for everything it opposes: colonialism, the idea of Western civilization, nationalism, and inequality. This is why Israel appears repeatedly in debates that ostensibly concern other subjects: racial justice, capitalism, colonialism, gender politics, and academic freedom.
This ideological fixation around hating Israel, turbocharged by vicious social media campaigns that are well-financed by outside actors, is the reason why, after the Hamas-led massacres on October 7, 2023, universities across the United States saw large-scale protests, encampments, and demands for divestment from Israel – the victim.
Criticism of Israel is not antisemitic. I criticize Israel. Nor is displeasure with Zionism automatically antisemitic: one may believe that nationalism itself is outdated, or that the creation of Israel was historically unjust. The problem begins when Israel is singled out by standards applied to no other country – and when its own suffering is dismissed.
The world is overflowing with injustice, much of it barely noticed.
Tens of millions of Kurds live without a state, divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Catalans and other distinct national groups have their own languages, histories, and identities but no sovereign country. The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh were driven en masse from a land where they had lived for generations.
Entire peoples face something far worse than statelessness. China has subjected the Uyghurs to mass detention, forced labor, and coercive assimilation. Myanmar drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from their homes through killing, rape, and village-burning. The Yazidis suffered sexual enslavement at the hands of ISIS – the fellow traveler of Hamas. Afghanistan’s women have been erased from education and public life.
Sudan has been devastated by mass killing, ethnic atrocities, famine, and the displacement of millions. Eastern Congo has endured decades of massacres, sexual violence, and armed conflict. Across the Sahel and Central Africa, civilians are slaughtered, starved, and uprooted. Russia is waging an imperial war against Ukraine, destroying cities, killing civilians, displacing millions, and abducting Ukrainian children.
Where are the campus protests? Where are the fake connections to transgender rights based on “intersectionality”?
Yes, Palestinian civilians have suffered terribly, and concern for them is entirely legitimate. But it’s reasonable to ask why this conflict generates a much higher level of sustained activism and moral outrage than all other humanitarian disasters.
There are antisemites on the Republican and global Right, and historically they have been far more dangerous. But in today’s Democratic coalition, the more new and immediate challenge is that the Progressive faction – still a minority, but growing fast and with tons of frenzied energy – has made hostility toward Israel a central element of its political identity.
That’s the challenge facing Democrats like Emanuel, who still believe in the US-Israel relationship: that the far Left sees Israel as, absurdly, the global symbol of evil – and unlike the right-wing antisemites, they claim it is in the name of justice.
They have international allies for their obsession, of course. The UN Human Rights Council has a permanent agenda item devoted exclusively to Israel – the only country in the world singled out in this way. Since its creation in 2006, the council has adopted more condemnatory resolutions against Israel than against any other country.
The UN General Assembly has routinely adopted more country-specific resolutions condemning Israel in a single year than against all other countries combined. In 2023, for example, it passed 14 resolutions singling out Israel, and just seven targeting all other countries.
The big question
The political side of this nonsense is the activist ecosystem surrounding the Progressive wing of the Democratic coalition: socialist organizations, racial-justice groups, university activists, Progressive unions, queer organizations, and anti-colonial movements. Jewish Voice for Peace explicitly argues that Palestinian and queer liberation are intertwined, while queer activists have portrayed Israeli references to its comparatively strong LGBTQ protections as “pinkwashing” – an attempt to distract from Palestinian oppression. Hamas, of course, would have them killed; it is not clear if they don’t know this, or don’t care.
So fanatical has this coalition become that one must put a question to Rahm Emanuel.
He’s right when he says that America cannot continue with “the assumption that the best thing Washington could do for Jerusalem was to blindly and silently stand behind your government, without conditions, without demands, and without consequences, when we disagreed.” The Netanyahu coalition – demonizing the Palestinian Authority while enabling Jewish terrorism in the West Bank – is too awful for that. But what if Israel did everything Emanuel wanted?
Suppose it restored a reasonable, moderate, centrist governing coalition after the October election, expelling from power the reprehensible likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Suppose it ended settlement expansion and committed itself unequivocally to a negotiated two-state settlement. Would the Progressive movement then be mollified and end its obsession? Or would we discover that, for a significant part of this movement, the animating principle is that the Jewish people must not exercise self-determination in any part of their historic homeland?
And if opposition to Israel has become central to Progressives, then what exactly is the Democratic Party going to do about it?
Will centrist Democratic leaders call out the madness? Will they state clearly and repeatedly that they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state within borders negotiated with legitimate Palestinian representatives? Will they say plainly that they oppose not only Israeli extremism but also the jihadist project that rejects any Jewish state in the Middle East? Will they defend Israel’s existence with the same moral clarity with which they condemn the abysmal failures of the Netanyahu coalition?
And do they believe they can prevail? Can Progressives be persuaded to distinguish between opposing Netanyahu, opposing settlements, and opposing Israel itself?
Emanuel, having inserted himself into this debate and having prescribed a political transformation for Israel, owes us an answer to a fundamental question: Are moderate Democrats ready for a fight that would set their house in order?
The writer is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books.