Rahm Emmanuel still thinks he’s going to be President some day, which is about as likely as me running a sub-4-minute mile, but we all gotta have our dreams. Since he’s looking in the mirror and seeing a future President, he knows that he’s out of step with the base of his party on Israel.
Yet even as he builds a profile as a potential candidate willing to tell the Democratic Party hard truths and challenge orthodoxy on a range of issues from trans rights to child social media bans to age limits for politicians, Emanuel, 66, was reticent in exploring his views on Israel in more depth during an interview with Jewish Insider, which he had resisted for nearly a month.
“What I said couldn’t have been clearer,” he told JI last Thursday, referring to his recent comments on “Real Time With Bill Maher” calling for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel that raised eyebrows in the Jewish community. “There will no longer be U.S. taxpayer subsidies for the purchase of U.S. military equipment. Israel will be like every other ally. They can buy what they want, and they have to live within the restrictions.”
Rahm thinks that public officials should face mandatory retirement at 75, that social media should be banned for kids under 16, and he was one of the many chickenshits who decided to throw trans kids under the bus when the party establishment was hiding in the corner pissing itself after Trump was elected. Since he’s such a brave truth-teller, of course he’s going to tell us all the truth about Israel.
This “truth” is his recognition that the Gaza genocide is incredibly unpopular and hurt Israel’s standing in the US, and he wants to end offensive military aid to Israel immediately. But, he won’t commit to a position on defensive military aid like Iron Dome. And he says that calling Gaza a “genocide” is a “legal question”.
In other words, he wants to split this one right down the middle. He wants Israel to buy offensive military weapons with its own money, but finance their defensive weapons, plus I guess he’s a little pissed at Netanyahu for abandoning the pretense that he had any interest in a two-state solution? The piece isn’t very clear on this. Either the Jewish Insider reporter can’t write, or Rahm is a weasely fucker. Probably a bit of both. Rahm probably believes this nonsensical claim:
One prominent Jewish Democrat, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss a charged issue, called Emanuel’s stance a practical response that “takes the wind out of the sails of the far left and the far right,” which have politicized funding for Israel.
Nobody on “the far left” not to mention “the near left” is going to be fooled by this “defensive vs. offensive” distinction. It’s the classic dumb notion that a position that is unsatisfying to everyone is correct by virtue of its universal unpopularity. That’s peak consultant brain at work.
The reason I’m spending so much time on such an unimportant subject (Rahm, not Israel) is that it’s pretty notable that one of Israel’s biggest allies thinks he needs to change his position to be electable.
Moving on to nukes, Cheryl Rofer has a good piece about the letter written by 30 House Democrats (basically the progressive caucus) asking Marco Rubio a bunch of questions about Israel’s nuclear capability. Cheryl makes the point that denying the reality of Israeli nukes distorts analysis of Middle East foreign policy. For example, if the fact of Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons is accepted, Iran’s nuclear program is a response to Israel, not (solely) an offensive act.
It’s about time Democrats’ attitudes towards the Israeli government changed. You don’t have to be Tucker Carlson saying that Trump is “held hostage” by Netanyahu to realize that he’s Democrats’ political enemy. Israelis can pay for their own defensive and offensive weapons as long as that asshole is in charge. And we can arrest that war criminal if he tries to step foot in the US when we’re back in power.
(By the way, my take on the Iran war is that Trump and Hegseth were on a high after the Venezuela intervention, and Netanyahu probably pushed them a bit, but it was like pushing a drunk on a bender to take another drink. He might have had a little influence, but they’re responsible for their own mistake.)
