Rahm Emanuel speaks during a media interview with podcast host Megyn Kelly. Photo: Screenshot

Rahm Emanuel flew to Tel Aviv last week to deliver what he billed as “tough love” from a true friend. He staged it as something else entirely: an opening bid for the 2028 Democratic nomination, workshopped for weeks in advance, written in the language of a party that has moved further from Israel than at any point in its history.

Consider his framing: “for too long,” Emanuel said, the U.S. stood behind Israel “blindly, silently… without conditions, without consequence.” It’s a tidy line, and it’s false — anyone who knows the history from Eisenhower through Biden knows better, and Emanuel, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations and later as ambassador to Japan under Biden, knows it better than almost anyone. He isn’t reciting forgotten history. He’s selling a mendacious myth to an audience that wants one.

That myth-selling wasn’t a warm-up act — it was the frame for everything that followed, starting with the substance that we’ve heard before. Emanuel told his Tel Aviv University audience that Israel should stop expecting unconditional aid and start being treated “like every other ally.” I wrote about this exact claim two months ago, and it was wrong and dishonest then for the same reasons it’s wrong and dishonest now.

Israel doesn’t get what NATO allies, Japan, or South Korea get: no American treaty guarantee, no forward-deployed troops, no promise Americans will die defending it. What Israel gets is a framework built since the 1980s on one premise: a strong, Israeli military – reliant on US made weapon systems – is a strategic asset to the United States. Washington has enforced that premise before, and not gently. In 1987, Israel built the Lavi, a fighter jet test-pilots rated on par with the F-16 – and Washington killed the program with its funding leverage, because a successful Lavi meant real competition for American jets abroad. Israel scrapped its own design and bought American instead. That’s the actual history: not a blank check to Jerusalem, but a relationship Washington has always shaped to serve its own defense industry. Emanuel knows this – he oversaw funding for Israel’s Iron Dome as Obama’s chief of staff. He said it anyway, this time going further than ever, calling to end what are effectively U.S. vouchers for Israel to buy American-made equipment.

Why would a seasoned, previously centrist, pro-Israel Democratic politician say this, from a stage in Israel, mid-war? The polling answers for him. AP-NORC now has 58% of Democrats saying the U.S. is “too supportive” of Israel, up from 45% in January 2024. Roughly half believe Israel has committed genocide – a charge no court has found, requiring proof of intent to destroy a people, not a casualty count, with an old, ugly pedigree when leveled at Jews. Military analysts like John Spencer and Andrew Fox have documented that Israel’s combatant-to-civilian ratio in Gaza compares very favorably to America’s campaign against ISIS in Mosul – nowhere near the levels one would expect to see in a “genocide.” This libelous charge was already being leveled against Israel on October 8th, before Israel finished counting its own October 7th dead – proof it was never about evidence. That half a party’s voters believe it anyway isn’t a polling footnote. It’s a demonstration of how effectively TikTok (and social media more generally) can radicalize an electorate in real time – and it’s this electorate Emanuel is courting.

I’m hardly alone in tracking how we got here. From the House floor, where “Squad” members spent a decade trafficking in antisemitic dual-loyalty tropes and moral-equivalence smears while party leadership looked away, to a Democratic Socialists of America member becoming mayor of the most Jewish city in America, while libeling Israel as genocidal and refusing to disavow “globalize the intifada” — the trajectory has been visible to anyone willing to look.

Commentary’s John Podhoretz calls it the culmination of a forty-year ideological shift party leaders tolerated and even encouraged, not a break from it. Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur adds that American Jewish progressives and Israeli Jews have drifted into such different realities that the former can no longer parse the latter’s choices – and vote accordingly. What starts as unspeakable becomes debatable, then respectable, then policy. That pattern has now reached a man positioning himself for his party’s nomination. Emanuel isn’t a principled man bucking his party’s drift. He’s a cynic chasing it.

Notice, too, the false symmetry built into the speech itself. Emanuel paired those chanting “from the river to the sea” – a slogan with explicit genocidal intent – with fringe advocates of “greater Israel,” as though rejecting the land-for-peace formula and demanding the Jewish state’s elimination are two wings of one extremism. They are not remotely equivalent, and Israelis have earned the right to be skeptical of the land-for-peace ledger: Peel in 1937, the UN partition in 1947, Camp David in 2000, and Olmert’s 2008 offer were all rejected by Palestinian Arab leadership, not Israel’s. Left-leaning Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi has long made the more detailed version of this argument: holding Palestinian suffering and Israeli security fears as simultaneously true doesn’t require pretending both sides have been equally willing partners for peace. Emanuel’s tidy symmetry erases that history to flatter an audience that doesn’t want to hear it.

That symmetry does other work, too. Hamas- and PA-friendly advocacy groups like Euro-Med feed allegations to international bodies; media report the institutional framing, not the underlying source; by the time a politician cites it, he’s repeating a laundered consensus, not an independent judgment. No other democracy fighting an ISIS-like enemy embedded among civilians is presumed guilty the way Israel is, and no other war-crime accusation anywhere travels this fast on such little independent verification. Emanuel’s own language – “pariah,” sanctions built on unverified reports of “settler violence,” a refusal to reject the libelous genocide framing when asked directly by the AP – plugs straight into that machine. A friend does not import the vocabulary of Israel’s worst-faith accusers and call it “tough love.”

Then there’s the staging. Emanuel structured five days in Israel to avoid its elected leadership. He skipped Netanyahu. He skipped the Knesset. He met President Herzog, who has a ceremonial post with no policy authority, and delivered his marquee address to a friendly, self-selected crowd at Tel Aviv University – about as representative of Israeli opinion as a DSA chapter meeting at Columbia is of the American electorate. The hall applauded. Outside it, Israeli media barely covered him, preoccupied with a NATO summit and the live possibility of renewed war with Iran. An “honest conversation” that avoids everyone responsible for the relationship, and everyone likely to hold it after October’s election, isn’t one. It’s a highlight reel built for Iowa and New Hampshire.

None of this means Israel is beyond criticism. Its government hasn’t handled this war, the hostage crisis, or the day after — especially the PR around it — with extraordinary competence, and Emanuel is right about that; centrist Israelis, me included, agree with him. But friendly, honest criticism looks nothing like this. This was a campaign speech dressed up as one, delivered inside a country at war, aimed at a U.S. primary electorate that increasingly believes blood-libel-grade accusations against the Jewish state, using rhetoric indistinguishable from the people crafting those libels. Emanuel didn’t come to Tel Aviv to save the U.S.-Israel relationship. He came to bank points with his party’s far left, and he’s willing to use Israel, again, as the vehicle to do it.

With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.