TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Rahm 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 “territorial pariah,” in a speech at Tel Aviv University on Wednesday.
Emanuel’s condemnation of Israel’s 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’s standing with the Democrats has plummeted.
About 58% of Democrats say the U.S. is “too supportive” 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.
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.
“You cannot fight indefinitely against a world that has stopped believing you have the right to fight,” Emanuel told a packed auditorium of students and supporters in a speech hosted by the university's Center for the Study of the United States. “You must instead find a new sustainable path to peace, security, and economic prosperity.”
Emanuel offered a slate of tough love for Israel to “bust it out of its strategic pariah status,” focused on strengthening Israel’s diplomatic ties with Arab states and economic ties with the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, to provide an economic alternative to China’s sprawling multinational infrastructure program.
Specifically, he wants to end U.S. subsidies to Israel’s 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 “engendered the worst of your domestic politics.”
The speech was well-received by the liberal Tel Aviv University crowd, who applauded even when Emanuel condemned Israel's policies, such as Netanyahu role in not preparing for the day after in Gaza. He said “true friends tell each other the truth.”
Israeli media, however, preoccupied with the NATO conference in Turkey and a possible flare-up of conflict with Iran, barely registered Emanuel’s visit.
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’s desire for stability, Israel’s need for security, and Palestinian demands for sovereignty, he said.
Emanuel arrived in Israel on Sunday, and visited several projects prior to his speech, including a partnership between hospitals in Tel Aviv and Nablus where Israeli and Palestinian doctors train together. He also met with President Isaac Herzog and visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum and memorial, in Jerusalem.
Emanuel told The Associated Press earlier in the week he is avoiding meeting with political leaders before the country’s elections in the fall. Israel’s president is a symbolic, appointed position, not an elected official.
Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on the speech. Netanyahu famously called Emanuel a “self-hating Jew” over Emanuel's condemnation of Israel’s expansion of settlements in 2009, when he served as President Barack Obama's chief of staff. His denunciation so incensed far-right Israelis that a number of activists were detained while protesting his son's bar mitzvah in Jerusalem the next year, Emanuel recalled.
One of the activists police detained was Itamar Ben-Gvir, who today serves as Israel’s public security minister and oversees the police, which Emanuel dryly noted was representative of Israel's overall political direction in the past 15 years.
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.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, including those killed since the ceasefire, Gaza’s 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.
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. “This sense of post-Oct. 7 vulnerability, I had read about it, but you don’t feel the visceralness of this and the rawness of this until you sit across the table from people,” he said.
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's done bike tours of early voting states like New Hampshire.
Emanuel, who said he still hadn’t 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.
“The status quo is unacceptable, where you can’t say anything negative, which is an implicit endorsement,” he said. ___ Associated Press writer Steven Sloan contributed from Washington and Steve Peoples contributed from New York.
