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

Rahm Emanuel’s recent declaration that Israel should henceforth be treated “like every other ally” was not serious strategic analysis. It was the sound of a longtime Democratic operative adjusting himself to the increasingly radicalized gravitational pull of his party’s anti-Israel wing.

The same political ecosystem now mainstreaming figures like Hasan Piker — a man who declared that “America deserved 9/11” and routinely traffics in hateful anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda to millions — is steadily dragging Democratic rhetoric on Israel into territory that would have been politically radioactive even a decade ago.

Like others making similar arguments, Emanuel’s slogan collapses under even minimal historical scrutiny.

When looking at the evidence, it’s clear that Israel is already treated unlike many American allies.

First, some allies, like NATO members, are entitled to American military protection and defense if they are attacked. When Israel fights wars, Israelis fight them. That distinction matters enormously. Yet people like Rahm speak as though Israel is uniquely coddled rather than uniquely self-reliant.

Emanuel — who somehow served as ambassador to Japan while apparently learning little from the experience about how American alliances actually work — recently stated that the US should stop “subsidizing” Israel’s military and stop providing “financial aid” through the Memorandum of Understanding framework, and that Israel should instead simply “buy what they want” like every other ally.

The aid framework Rahm now caricatures as “subsidies” and “financial aid” was never an act of American charity. It emerged from strategic bargains and overlapping interests that benefited Washington enormously.

A major turning point in that strategic bargain came in the 1980s with Israel’s Lavi fighter project — an ambitious domestically developed fighter program that many in Washington feared could become a genuine export competitor to the F-16.

American pressure to terminate the program was immense because, contrary to today’s woke-right and far-left parody of the alliance, Washington was not interested in an Israeli aerospace rival competing with American defense giants globally.

Under that pressure, Israel closed the program.

The result was deeper Israeli integration into American military platforms and supply chains — strengthening American aerospace dominance while locking Israel more tightly into the American defense ecosystem.

In other words, the architecture Rahm now dismisses as though it were unilateral charity did not emerge because Washington was engaged in philanthropy for Jews. It emerged because American policymakers concluded that the arrangement benefited the United States strategically, militarily, technologically, and industrially.

Almost all US military assistance to Israel is effectively spent in America on American systems built by American workers in American factories. Meanwhile, Israel became one of the most battle-tested laboratories for American military doctrine and technology anywhere in the world — missile defense, cyber operations, tunnel warfare, counterterrorism, intelligence integration, and urban combat.

American defense officials do not maintain these relationships because they are sentimental Zionists at the Pentagon. They maintain them because Israel provides enormous strategic value to the United States.

But the most absurd part of Emanuel’s slogan remains the slogan itself.

Because when Rahm says Israel should be treated “like every other ally,” he ignores the fact that Israel receives less benefits than many “other allies.”

Japan gets treaty guarantees. South Korea gets treaty guarantees and American troops on its front line – the DMZ. NATO states get the full weight of American deterrence and outsized military spending – compared to all other NATO countries, as the US accounts for roughly 70% of all NATO defense expenditures.

The Gulf monarchies host sprawling American military infrastructure protecting regimes that likely would not survive long without it.

Israel often gets lectures about “restraint” while fighting enemies openly committed to its destruction.

Israel gets told that the world’s only Jewish state — smaller than New Jersey and surrounded for decades by forces openly calling for its annihilation — should somehow behave like Holland while confronting enemies that behave more like ISIS with better public relations.

And through all of this, Israelis themselves still do the fighting.

That is the part the “subsidy” rhetoric always conceals.

When Hezbollah launches rockets into northern Israel, American Marines do not fight in southern Lebanon. When Hamas massacres Israeli civilians, American reservists are not mobilized into Gaza. When Iran openly threatens both the United States and Israel, American parents are not preparing their children for compulsory military service. Israelis are. That is not “special treatment.”

That’s why Emanuel’s rhetoric sounds less like strategy and more like ideological adaptation – the repositioning of a Democratic politician trying to survive a party increasingly shaped by activists who understand the Middle East primarily through slogans, intersectional dogma, and social media propaganda rather than military history or strategic reality.

For decades, American policymakers understood that Israel represented something uniquely valuable to the United States — a stable, democratic, technologically advanced regional power willing to fight its own wars without demanding or requiring American soldiers to die for it. Now figures like Rahm Emanuel speak as though this arrangement was some kind of American charity or a bad deal.

But it’s not — it’s a strategic partnership, and one squarely in America’s interest.

That consensus, however, is increasingly being subordinated to internal party pressures. The Democratic establishment’s attempts to placate the anti-Israel activist left will likely work about as well as it worked for Biden and Harris in 2024 — never anti-Israel enough to satisfy the far-left and Islamist activist ecosystem, but anti-Israel enough to alienate moderates, independents, and pro-American voters.

The party will soon likely decide if it should become outright hostile to these voters — but history rarely rewards political classes that mistake ideological fashion for strategic wisdom. Rahm Emanuel should know that by now.

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.