{"id":197453,"date":"2026-07-09T03:34:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T03:34:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/197453\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T03:34:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T03:34:15","slug":"rahm-emanuel-avoids-visiting-with-elected-officials-in-israel-visit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/197453\/","title":{"rendered":"Rahm Emanuel avoids visiting with elected officials in Israel visit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pausing as he looked out at the packed hall at Tel Aviv University, Rahm Emanuel<\/a> offered his audience a warning about what he was about to say.<\/p>\n

\u201cHold your applause, because you may not like this,\u201d he said, before laying out his proposal for US sanctions targeting Israelis who attack Palestinian civilians and property, Israeli officials who voice support for that violence, and companies and banks that support \u201cillegal settlements.\u201d<\/p>\n

The crowd applauded anyway \u2014 three separate times.<\/p>\n

Under a 2017 law, Israel bars foreign nationals who publicly call for boycotts of Israel or its settlements from entering the country. Emanuel issued his call for sanctions from a stage in Tel Aviv, a measure of how far Democratic politics on Israel have shifted since Hamas\u2019 Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.<\/p>\n

Widely viewed as a possible contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, Emanuel, a former congressman, White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor and US ambassador to Japan, and one of the most prominent Jewish figures in American politics, arrived in Israel on Sunday. His speech Wednesday afternoon, billed as \u201cAn Honest Conversation: The US-Israel Relationship, Where It Stands Today and The Road Ahead,\u201d was the keynote of the visit, and was meant to signal the need for a \u201cfundamentally new and di\ufb00erent approach\u201d \u00a0to the US-Israel alliance, as he put it.<\/p>\n

\"FormerFormer U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel speaks during a House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party hearing on Capitol Hill July 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. (credit: Andrew Harnik\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Whether Emanuel\u2019s critique will land with the Israeli establishment, or with the ruling coalition, remains to be seen. Emanuel made a point of avoiding Israel\u2019s elected officials during his visit, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he did not want to interfere with elections set for the fall. He did meet with President Isaac Herzog, who is appointed by the government, as well as visit hospitals in Tel Aviv and Nablus that partner with each other.<\/p>\n

But it was clear that it was resonating with attendees. Moti Porath told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he believed Emanuel correctly diagnosed the ailment at the heart of the Israeli government, a leader who has become an outcast abroad but remains too skilled a politician to easily dislodge.<\/p>\n

Porath, who splits his time between Newton, Massachusetts, and Tel Aviv, and who attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the same time as Netanyahu, said he recognizes the prime minister as a singularly talented political operator. \u201cHe\u2019s a fantastic politician,\u201d Porath said. \u201cMaybe he\u2019s a manipulator.\u201d<\/p>\n

To the attendees who spoke with JTA, Emanuel\u2019s message was not anti-Israel but pro-Israel, in Porath\u2019s telling, what a good friend is obligated to do when the other is acting out of line. Emanuel put it similarly from the stage, \u201cTrue friends tell each other the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

‘A common political vision’<\/p>\n

Porath said he hopes the United States and Israel can once again find \u201ca common political vision,\u201d but that doing so will require tough love from America\u2019s next president.<\/p>\n

The event was hosted by Tel Aviv University<\/a>\u2019s Center for the Study of the United States and moderated by its founding director, Yoav Fromer, alongside Yael Sternhell, the professor who heads the university\u2019s American studies program. Organizers solicited questions from students in advance and said more than 100 were submitted.<\/p>\n

But with a university audience likely to skew liberal, attendee Yoam Barash said the program would have benefited from a right-wing voice to push back on Emanuel\u2019s comments, since most Israeli voters lean right. A February poll by the Midgam Institute for Israel\u2019s Channel 12 news found 68% of veteran voters and 75% of those voting for the first time identify as right-wing. \u201cWhy didn\u2019t they bring somebody from the right?\u201d Barash asked.<\/p>\n

Barash is the uncle of Daniel Barash, a managing director at the public affairs firm SKDK who helped organize the event. He attended with Hannah Winkler, a friend from his army days and now a doctor in the Tel Aviv area. She said she pins her hope not on the US-Israel alliance but on a left-wing<\/a> victory in the upcoming elections. \u201cWithout that, I have no hope,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Told that some attendees had wanted a more politically diverse lineup, Fromer defended the format. \u201cThis is academia,\u201d he said. \u201cThe goals here are very different than they would be on a political panel.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time, Fromer echoed the attendees\u2019 view that Emanuel\u2019s message was that of a friend rather than an adversary. \u201cTo say to someone, look, I\u2019m trying to save you, if you don\u2019t change your behavior, you\u2019re going to self-destruct \u2014 that\u2019s someone who cares,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The stakes, in his telling, are high for Israel and for the university. \u201cIsraelis have become pariahs. We used to be admired, the most admired,\u201d he said, echoing Emanuel\u2019s own warning from the stage that Israel\u2019s leadership has turned it into a \u201cterritorial pariah.\u201d<\/p>\n

‘It\u2019s not just feeling bad. It has practical implications’<\/p>\n

The damage is not merely reputational, he argued. \u201cIt\u2019s not just feeling bad. It has practical implications,\u201d he said, speculating about investment and capital that will stop flowing, students and tourists who will stop coming, Israelis who will lose their jobs.<\/p>\n

During the anti-Israel protests that swept US campuses in 2023 and 2024, ties with Israeli universities, including Tel Aviv University, were frequent targets of divestment<\/a> demands. Emanuel himself warned in his speech that Israel\u2019s scientists face exclusion from international research networks and that its artists and academics are being shut out of exhibits and conferences.<\/p>\n

Inside the hall, at least, the message was received. \u201cMost of the people in this room are quite sympathetic to what you have to say,\u201d Barash told Emanuel on stage. \u201cThat is not the case across Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pausing as he looked out at the packed hall at Tel Aviv University, Rahm Emanuel offered his audience…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[2803,37,389,14924,14204,4056],"class_list":["post-197453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-chicago","tag-israel","tag-japan","tag-settlements","tag-tel-aviv-university","tag-us-politics"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116887923411191092","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197453","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=197453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}