by Jonathan S. Tobin
The veteran politician foolishly thinks that he can carve out a middle ground for 2028 between antisemitism and “blind” support for Israel by recycling the two-state solution.
 |
| Former White House Chief of Staff and
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel speaks during a conference at Tel Aviv
University on July 8, 2026. Photo by Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90. |
Say this for Rahm Emanuel. He may have about as much chance of being
nominated for the presidency in 2028 by the Democratic Party as he does
of being elected pope. But he knows how to retain the attention of the
national media by manipulating contacts inside the Beltway.
That’s
the only way to explain why someone who is not even being included in
way-too-early polls about presidential preferences could get the kind of
massive coverage he got for a speech given this week in Israel, when those far ahead of him in the contest struggle to be noticed.
On July 7, The Washington Post devoted three full articles to previewing Emanuel’s July 8 talk at Tel Aviv University. The Post, The New York Times, CNN
and the rest of the corporate press then followed up with even more
coverage of the speech after the fact. Those articles not only depicted
it as deeply relevant to the current debate about the U.S.-Israel
relationship going on in his party, but also to the reality on the
ground in the Middle East.
A rerun of failed ideas
But
what made this public relations coup even more remarkable is the fact
that the much-ballyhooed address consisted of little more than a
recycling of the conventional wisdom of his long-past political heyday.
Emanuel’s speech was more or less a rerun of what passed for
foreign-policy establishment canon in 1995 and 2015, put forward as a
formula for peace in the second quarter of the 21st century.
Once
you strip away Emanuel’s attempts to claim both the credibility and
credentials to demand that Israelis discard everything their lying eyes
and ears have been telling them about their nation’s struggle to survive
a multifront war launched by Iran and its terrorist auxiliaries, all
you’ve got is what we might term a piece of political nostalgia.
Emanuel
calls his big idea the “23-state solution” because it is based on the
notion that the Arab and Muslim world can cajole the Palestinian Arabs
to make peace. But that’s just window dressing for what is the same
two-state solution that his former bosses, Presidents Bill Clinton and
Barack Obama, foolishly expended so much political capital trying to
force into being. Contrary to liberal myth, that formula was thwarted
not by Israeli intransigence but by the stubborn refusal of the
Palestinians—enabled by much of the Muslim and Arab worlds, in addition
to Western leftists—to countenance any future but one in which Israel is
erased.
The context here is the fact that the former U.S.
ambassador to Japan (2022-2025), mayor of Chicago (2011-2019), White
House chief of staff to President Barack Obama (2009-2010), U.S.
congressman from Illinois (2003-2009), investment banker (1999-2002) and
senior adviser to Clinton (1993-1998) believes that his already
impressive résumé ought to be rounded out by a stint as
commander-in-chief. The man renowned as a serious policy wonk, albeit
one with a predilection for profanity and a notorious temper, may have
much to say about a lot of different topics. Yet when it comes to
Israel—a subject he claims intimate knowledge of—Rahm is nothing but a
blast from the discredited past.
That’s why the truly significant
aspect of the speech and the massive coverage it generated isn’t what it
says about the 2028 race, efforts to prevent the Democratic Party from
becoming the anti-Israel party
or even the one that is comfortable with antisemitism. Rather, it
points toward the fact that while Israelis have absorbed the lessons of
the last 33 years of history, including the Oslo Accords disaster, the
Second Intifada, the fruits of the withdrawal from Gaza and the horrors
of Oct. 7, 2023, supposedly smart people, including those like Emanuel
who know a thing or two about Israel, have learned nothing.
Emanuel claims to represent a rational compromise between two factions.
On
the one hand, he disdains the rabid antisemites chanting for Jewish
genocide (“From the river to the sea”), terrorism against Jews
everywhere (“Globalize the intifada”) and their political frontmen, like
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who speaks for his party’s base, if
not the overwhelming majority of its rank-and-file. But he has equal
contempt for those politicians who, he says, give “blind” support to
Israel and its democratically elected government. Few Democrats these
days, other than an outlier like Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), come even
close to basic support of the Jewish state, and not even the most
hard-core backers like the senator and the many Republicans who share
his views do so blindly.
His supposed compromise involves smearing
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, and
placing the lion’s share of the blame for the current state of the
Middle East on them. He points a finger at the supposed unconditional
support that Israel has gotten from the United States. And while he also
says that Palestinian Arabs bear some responsibility for their
problems, this is secondary to his belief that the United States can
help impose a solution on the region.
The architect of ‘daylight’
If
that sounds familiar, it ought to. The same condescending tone with
which Emanuel blasted Netanyahu and Israeli voters this week was the one
he helped orchestrate a campaign of pressure on the Jewish state during
the opening months of the Obama administration in 2009. At that time,
Emanuel’s big idea wasn’t some nonsense about 23 states, but rather a
belief in the value of creating more “daylight” between Washington and
Jerusalem.
It’s been more than 17 years since Emanuel
stage-managed the launch of that initiative. Obama snubbed Israel on his
first trip to the Middle East and then gave a speech in Cairo in which
he not only apologized for America’s alleged past sins committed against
Muslims, but compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the
Holocaust.
In the years that have followed, the world has seen
that such “daylight” didn’t encourage Israel’s enemies to give up their
quest for its destruction. To the contrary, it only encouraged the
Palestinians and their supporters to double down on their belief that if
they are only patient and brutal enough in their assaults on the Jewish
state, the West will someday abandon it and acquiesce in its
eradication.
Obama’s appeasement of Iran, which, instead of
preventing them from achieving their nuclear ambitions, actually
guaranteed that it would someday get a bomb with Western permission,
illustrated the same principle.
And yet, Emanuel thinks this
record of failure that dates back to his support for the folly of Oslo
entitles him not merely to pose as an expert on the situation. He
believes that it gives him the right to scold and dictate to Israelis.
The
veteran politician has closer ties with Israel than most American Jews.
His father fought with the Irgun Zvai Leumi during Israel’s War of
Independence, and his mother is buried in Israel. But unlike the Israeli
people whom he now lectures, he not only doesn’t share their dangers
but played a not-insignificant role in increasing their peril. So, his
“tough love” approach is not only unhelpful but deeply offensive.
In
his Tel Aviv speech, Emanuel gave a potted recent history of the Middle
East that acknowledged Palestinian intransigence, but then demanded
that Israelis ignore it. With his quotes of the late Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin and lauding Obama’s “achievements,” he showed
just how rooted he is in the patent nostrums of the past.
The
truth is, Israel has repeatedly attempted to trade land for peace, and
as a result, received only more terror. Withdrawing from the Gaza Strip
in the summer of 2005 brought into being what is now, for all intents
and purposes, an independent Palestinian state in all but name.
Israel
tried to live with that state. Netanyahu is ceaselessly chided by his
critics, including Emanuel, for having allowed funds from Qatar to flow
into Gaza in the hope that doing so, along with allowing Palestinians to
work inside Israel, would cause the Strip’s Islamist rulers to think it
was in their interest to keep the peace. The prime minister deserves
the criticisms he gets for that, but the truth is that few of his
political opponents inside Israel or his American critics thought it was
wrong while that was happening. None of them would have supported an
effort to push Hamas out of Gaza if Israel had sought to do so before
the events of Oct. 7, 2023.
If this bribery failed to achieve its
purpose, it’s not because of Netanyahu’s bad judgment. It’s because the
Palestinian people and the terror groups they support, like Hamas, had
no interest in peace, including merely the maintenance of the status
quo. The Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7
bears witness to the folly of those who preached for “two states.” They
also exposed the cluelessness of those who failed to understand that,
unfortunately, the conflict with the Palestinians has been and remains a
zero-sum game.
If Israel were to withdraw from the larger and
more strategically important Judea and Samaria, as it did from Gaza,
that would not only be an unconscionable abrogation of Jewish rights and
the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the heart of their ancient homeland.
It would also set Israel up for more Oct. 7 horrors on an even greater
and more dangerous scale.
Still smearing Israel
For
100 years, the Palestinian Arabs have refused any such compromise that
would involve them living in peace with a Jewish state, no matter where
its borders might be drawn. The war they launched on Oct. 7 with the
largest mass slaughter since the Holocaust wasn’t a response to Israel’s
policies. It was, like the decades of terrorist attacks that preceded
it, an expression of anger at the existence of a Jewish state in their
midst, coupled with a desire to see it destroyed and its people
annihilated. Emanuel claims that harping on such history is to ignore
opportunities for change; however, this insight applies as much to the
present situation as it does to the past.
But, as was the case
back in the 1990s when Clinton was pushing the same ideas, and in the
2010s when it was Obama falsely claiming that Israelis were not brave
enough to take “risks for peace,” none of that matters to Emanuel.
For
him, the problem is that Netanyahu has transformed Israel into a
militarized “Sparta” and international “pariah” state. But whatever you
might think about Netanyahu, an observer who was less determined to
double down on past failures would understand that the prime minister’s
political success and the policies he has pursued were merely a response
to the reality of Palestinian intransigence that a generation of
Democratic policymakers like Emanuel has either downplayed or tried to
wish away.
His peace formula involves America punishing Israel by
cutting off aid and political pressure, matched by the Arab world doing
the same to the Palestinians. This is nonsense. The Palestinians have
made it clear that they cannot be bribed or persuaded to accept peace
with Israel. And as long as that is true, no amount of pressure on
Jerusalem will end the conflict. That is why, though Israelis disagree
on much, including whether Netanyahu should remain in office, there is a
broad consensus within Israel that there is no Palestinian peace
partner and that withdrawal from territory, let alone the uprooting of
Jews, is a non-starter.
A futile candidacy
Does
Emanuel think that Israelis will listen to his stale prescriptions for
policies that have already been tried and proven failures? Probably not.
But his insatiable ambition and his ego have placed him under the
misapprehension that his position on Israel is critical enough to
satisfy Democratic primary voters. The vast majority seem to have
accepted blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” and swallow
toxic leftist ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and
settler-colonialism that led them to think it has no right to exist.
Emanuel
epitomized the sort of establishment Democrat who ran the party under
Clinton and Obama, but who is now reviled by the progressives who
dominate it today. There is also the problem that during his time as
mayor of Chicago, Emanuel alienated the African-American community
because of various controversies over police brutality. It is a long
shot for someone like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is nominally
pro-Israel but critical of Netanyahu, to win the nomination of a party
where hatred for the Jewish state has become normative. But the chances
of someone at odds with both African-Americans and the Israel-haters in
the party are about as close to zero as one can get.
Still, we
should not dismiss the damage that speeches such as his do to the
U.S.-Israel alliance and the dwindling chances of reviving support for
Israel inside the Democratic Party.
Israelis know that it is in
their long-term interests to phase out the military aid they get from
Washington. That’s despite the fact that almost all of it is spent in
the United States, and is part of a mutually beneficial relationship
that enhances American security. Still, the idea that America can
bludgeon Israelis into endangering their security to conform to outdated
notions about the formula for peace that were discredited long ago is a
dangerous myth. The effort to revive interest in a two-state solution
that Palestinians don’t want will, as it did in the past, only encourage
them to continue their century-old war on Zionism.
Bashing Israel
or claiming that “bad” Israelis like Netanyahu have been the obstacles
to peace isn’t just wrong. It will make it that much harder to fend off
the antisemitic push to anathematic Israel that has been the hallmark of
discussion about the Middle East on the left since Oct. 7. Democrats
like Emanuel, who engage in such discourse, may claim that they love
Israel. However, all they’re doing is making it easier for their fellow
party members to demonize the Jewish state and ignore the ongoing
Palestinian quest for Jewish genocide.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek
and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American
political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle
East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice”
podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily”
program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube.
Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief
political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.
He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other
writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and
foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia
University.
Source: https://www.jns.org/opinion/column/jonathan-s-tobin/rahm-emanuel-and-the-persistent-delusion-of-failed-policies
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
