A preview of Rahm Emanuel’s upcoming remarks shows the era of absolute U.S. support for Israel’s government is over.
Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel mingles ahead of the Obama Presidential Center dedication ceremony, June 18, 2026, in Chicago. | Alex Brandon/AP
John Harris is founding editor and global editor-in-chief of POLITICO. His column offers a regular perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption.
Rahm Emanuel is in Israel this week to deliver a speech designed to be a thunderclap. The combination of message and messenger should produce a loud echo.
The message is that the war in Gaza and shifts in American and world opinion have converged with seismic consequences. Decades in which U.S. policymakers would often fret about Israeli choices and behavior but regard support for its government as absolute and unshakable are at an end.
Going forward, Emanuel plans to say, Israelis should regard U.S. support as expressly contingent: On reviving a serious commitment to Palestinian sovereignty; On rejecting dreams of asserting dominion beyond official borders in pursuit of “Greater Israel”; On abandoning a security strategy that emphasizes brutally effective military force with scant attention to diplomacy or credible what-next plans in Gaza and Iran. U.S. administrations of both parties have spent too long “averting our eyes” from Israeli misjudgments and strategic misadventures, Emanuel’s speech reads. The country, once lauded as being a prosperous, high-tech democracy, is now more commonly viewed as a “pariah.”
The near-final draft of the speech shared by Emanuel’s team — to be delivered at Tel Aviv University on Wednesday — is infused at multiple turns with disdain for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two of them go back a long way. Netanyahu was once quoted in the Israeli press describing Emanuel as a “self-hating Jew” — an episode the former Chicago mayor brings up explicitly in his prepared remarks.
That underlines the second element that makes the speech noteworthy: the messenger. Emanuel is the son of a father who was born in Jerusalem. The late Benjamin Emanuel as a young man was a member of a group fighting for Israeli independence. His son, now 66, has spent the past 35 years moving, first as an operative and then as an elected official, in the top ranks of Democratic politics, including senior tours in the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations. While the specific words and prescriptions are his alone, Emanuel, a 2028 presidential hopeful, is not the sort simply to wing it with a speech this provocative. It comes after extensive conversations with well-known names in the Democratic foreign policy establishment. He shared his draft with both former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others.
In other words, this is not Zohran Mamdani or Ilhan Omar speaking. Emanuel has been an engine of centrist policymaking and political position since the 1990s. He unambiguously denounces Hamas and the killings on Oct. 7, 2023 and says the Palestinian leadership has been corrupt for decades. Words he regards as a form of tough love for the Israeli people — and tough non-love for Netanyahu — now reflect mainstream Democratic thinking. The U.S.-Israeli relationship “cannot stand or survive as it has been,” Emanuel is expected to argue. “To maintain the strength of our ties we need significant changes and a new direction.”
That sentiment is fast becoming a truism in Democratic political circles, and to some degree among Republicans contemplating the post-Trump landscape in Israel and the Middle East. But if there is not going back to an old status quo, it is murkier what this really means for the future.
Emanuel’s speech represents an opening bid on some possible answers. He says Israel is now rich enough that it should receive no U.S. subsidy for its military procurement. He says he’s prepared to levy sanctions against people who participate in violence against Palestinian civilians or property, and, notably, against companies and banks who support building in Israeli settlements in occupied areas of the West Bank.
Above all, he backs resuming the old, tortuous, and often futile peace process between Israel and Palestinians — this time with a new emphasis and new premises.
Under Netanyahu, backed by Donald Trump’s administration, Israel has steadily moved toward treating the peace process as effectively irrelevant. As Emanuel himself acknowledges, at multiple turns in the 1990s and the early years of this century Palestinians themselves rejected peace-for-sovereignty proposals — episodes that were often followed by new spasms of Palestinian violence. The Netanyahu-Trump alternative has been to try to marginalize the Palestinian question and focus diplomacy on regional security and economic prosperity, as reflected in Trump-facilitated Abraham Accords between Israel and countries like the United Arab Emirates.
By Emanuel’s lights, Oct. 7 and the Gaza catastrophe that followed proves there is no escaping the Palestinian question. But rather than the familiar “two-state solution” between Israel and Palestinians, he supports a “23-state solution.” In other words, using U.S. and Western pressure to persuade the nations of the Arab League that the economic modernization and regional security they crave is contingent on them taking more ownership of the Palestinian problem, including an end to Palestinian violence. Whether a 23-state solution is a clever rhetorical line, or the basis of real policy, is too early to know. It depends a lot on what happens in the closing two years of the Trump administration and whatever follows.
That’s why Emanuel’s speech is fascinating. He is a thoroughly political creature, as much or more than the skilled politicians he served in the White House.
Netanyahu’s reported insult of Emanuel as self-loathing, as well as numerous criticisms of him as an irritant in his memoirs, certainly justify a reaction of “screw you.” A fully honest reaction, however, would be “thank you.”
Emanuel’s presidential ambitions so far are defined by two pillars. One is the essential plausibility of his resume: In addition to a big-city mayor, he was a key figure in winning the speakership for Nancy Pelosi as a member of Congress, a White House chief of staff and ambassador to Japan. There’s no one in the gathering field who has such a diverse range of experiences and personal associations, or moves as confidently or as restlessly in policy debates. The other pillar is the essential implausibility, amid prevailing political currents, of his nascent candidacy: He is an establishment centrist who is deeply mistrusted by many of the more left-leaning, insurgent and increasingly Israel-skeptical activists who reasonably believe their energy will power the party’s next generation.
Netanyahu is a useful foil, and a potential bridge between the two pillars. Emanuel can accurately tell younger Democrats: Trust me, I have been at this fight longer than you have, and I have the enemies to show for it.