No Thanks, Rahm
No Thanks, Rahm
Rahm Emanuel had a lot to say during his recent trip to Israel.
To sum it up, the rise in global antisemitism and the world’s double standards toward Israel are, apparently, Israel’s fault. What is Israel doing wrong? Defending itself.
Israel “needs an agenda,” Rahm claims. It “has to come up with an agenda besides a war north, a war on the other part of the north, a war south, and a war across there. You can’t just do that.”
Far be it from me to remind Rahm Emanuel that Israel never asked for the wars its enemies started, but, in the words of Rahm’s former boss: “Come on, man.”
Of course, Rahm “acknowledges” the failures of the Palestinian leadership and the broader Arab world. Yet despite that acknowledgment, nearly all of the responsibility for creating peace somehow falls on Israel.
According to Emanuel, peace is impossible under Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. His solution? As President of the United States, he should pressure Israel into changing its own domestic policies. In Rahm’s words, “that’s what good friends do.”
No proposal, however, was as egregious as his new 23-State Solution.
The shamelessness of the name says it all.
To achieve peace with the Arab world, Israel must help create a 22nd Arab state—not somewhere else in the Middle East, but in its own spiritual and strategic heartland: Judea and Samaria.
Think about what that means. There are already 21 Arab states. Yet the one state expected to divide itself for peace is the Jewish state.
According to Rahm, those same Arab states should help oversee and establish that new state. These are many of the same states that, for decades before and after Israel’s establishment, sought to prevent its creation or destroy it outright. Yet we are told this is the indispensable path to peace.
While condemning Hamas, Rahm argues that the road to October 7 was paved by settlement expansion in Judea and Samaria. Curiously absent from that narrative is the fact that Hamas rose to power only after Israel dismantled every settlement and withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005.
Rahm equates supporters of settlement expansion—or what he calls “Greater Israel”—with the “From the River to the Sea” movement, arguing that both fuel endless violence.
But Israel’s modern history suggests the opposite. The more strategic territory Israel has retained, the more security it has enjoyed. The more territory it has surrendered, the more violence has followed.
Rahm Emanuel came to Israel with a plan to rescue what he portrays as a weak, isolated, even “pariah” state.
That plan: divide the world’s only Jewish state so the Middle East can have a 22nd Arab state.
No thanks, Rahm.
