TEL AVIV\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Rahm Emanuel, a potential Democratic presidential candidate and longtime defender of Israel, warned Wednesday that the country has become increasingly isolated as its leadership has turned it into a \u201cterritorial pariah,\u201d in a speech at Tel Aviv University on Wednesday. <\/p>\n
Emanuel\u2019s condemnation of Israel\u2019s leadership shows how far centrist Democrats have shifted away from historic support of Israel, three years after the war in Gaza began. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has curried favor with President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, Israel\u2019s standing with the Democrats has plummeted.<\/p>\n
About 58% of Democrats say the U.S. is \u201ctoo supportive\u201d of the Israelis, according to a new survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, up from 45% in January 2024. Roughly half of Democrats believe that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians during the war in Gaza, a charge Israel vehemently denies.<\/p>\n
Jewish adults, who overwhelmingly skew Democratic, have a slightly more favorable opinion of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel, than of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the poll found.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou cannot fight indefinitely against a world that has stopped believing you have the right to fight,\u201d Emanuel told a packed auditorium of students and supporters in a speech hosted by the university\u2019s Center for the Study of the United States. \u201cYou must instead find a new sustainable path to peace, security, and economic prosperity.\u201d<\/p>\n
A plan to end the pariah status<\/p>\n
Emanuel offered a slate of tough love for Israel to \u201cbust it out of its strategic pariah status,\u201d focused on strengthening Israel\u2019s diplomatic ties with Arab states and economic ties with the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, to provide an economic alternative to China\u2019s sprawling multinational infrastructure program.<\/p>\n
Specifically, he wants to end U.S. subsidies to Israel\u2019s defense budget, arguing the country should pay for American defense like any other ally. He also wants to sanction Israelis who attack Palestinian civilians and property, along with politicians who offer their support for that violence. He added that America turning a blind eye toward Israeli injustices had \u201cengendered the worst of your domestic politics.\u201d<\/p>\n
The speech was well-received by the liberal Tel Aviv University crowd, who applauded even when Emanuel condemned Israel\u2019s policies, such as Netanyahu role in not preparing for the day after in Gaza. He said \u201ctrue friends tell each other the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Israeli media, however, preoccupied with the NATO conference in Turkey and a possible flare-up of conflict with Iran, barely registered Emanuel\u2019s visit.<\/p>\n
Rather than a two-state solution, Emanuel wants to push a 23-state solution, involving 21 Arab states, that would hold the Palestinians accountable for progressing toward a sovereign nation while accepting the historic Jewish connection to the land. The new, three-pronged U.S. policy would leverage the Arab world\u2019s desire for stability, Israel\u2019s need for security, and Palestinian demands for sovereignty, he said. <\/p>\n
Emanuel arrived in Israel on Sunday, and visited several projects prior to his speech. One was a partnership between hospitals in Tel Aviv and Nablus where Israeli and Palestinian doctors train together. He also met researchers who recently published a report finding that sexual violence was systematic against Israelis in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and their aftermath. <\/p>\n
Emanuel also visited Yad Vashem, Israel\u2019s Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem, and met with President Isaac Herzog.<\/p>\n
He told The Associated Press earlier in the week he is avoiding meeting with political leaders before the country\u2019s elections in the fall. Israel\u2019s president is a symbolic, appointed position, not an elected official.<\/p>\n
A country abandoned by its government<\/p>\n
Netanyahu\u2019s office declined to comment on the speech. Netanyahu famously called Emanuel a \u201cself-hating Jew\u201d over Emanuel\u2019s condemnation of Israel\u2019s expansion of settlements in 2009, when he served as President Barack Obama\u2019s chief of staff. His denunciation so incensed far-right Israelis that a number of activists were detained while protesting his son\u2019s bar mitzvah in Jerusalem the next year, Emanuel recalled. <\/p>\n
One of the activists police detained was Itamar Ben-Gvir, who today serves as Israel\u2019s public security minister and oversees the police, which Emanuel dryly noted was representative of Israel\u2019s overall political direction in the past 15 years.<\/p>\n
Emanuel, whose father was born in Jerusalem and fought in the 1948 war that led to the founding of Israel, also took time in his speech to acknowledge the toll of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in which Hamas-led militants launched air and ground strikes on Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. <\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, including those killed since the ceasefire, Gaza\u2019s Health Ministry said. The ministry, part of the Hamas-led government, is staffed by medical professionals and maintains detailed records that are generally considered reliable by United Nations agencies and independent experts.<\/p>\n
In his conversations with Israelis over the past several days, the intensity of feeling that the country had been abandoned by its government surprised him, Emanuel said before his speech. \u201cThis sense of post-Oct. 7 vulnerability, I had read about it, but you don\u2019t feel the visceralness of this and the rawness of this until you sit across the table from people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
While no prominent Democrat has formally entered the 2028 presidential contest, that is likely to change soon after the November midterms. Emanuel, who also served as a congressman, Chicago mayor, and U.S. ambassador to Japan, has been one of the most direct about his intentions as a possible candidate. For example, he\u2019s done bike tours of early voting states like New Hampshire.<\/p>\n
Emanuel, who said he still hadn\u2019t officially decided to run, was emphatic Wednesday that the Democrats do not need to give up on Israel in order to win the White House in 2028. But Americans need to take a new direction when it comes to Israel, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe status quo is unacceptable, where you can\u2019t say anything negative, which is an implicit endorsement,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Lidman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Steven Sloan contributed to this report from Washington and Steve Peoples contributed from New York.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TEL AVIV\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Rahm Emanuel, a potential Democratic presidential candidate and longtime defender of Israel, warned Wednesday that the country…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[685,58242,1555,496,37,2421,1189,58243,2253,16143,20019,14204,36,2863,878],"class_list":["post-196671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-arab-state","tag-centrist-democrats","tag-country","tag-gaza","tag-israel","tag-israelis","tag-jerusalem","tag-netanyahu-role","tag-palestinians","tag-rahm-emanuel","tag-speech","tag-tel-aviv-university","tag-war","tag-wednesday","tag-year"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116885529343197689","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}