Rahm Emanuel Is Israel’s Bellwether, Not Zohran Mamdani

Rahm Emanuel’s speech has upset many in Israel. We hear familiar complaints that he does not love Israel, has little understanding of Israelis, and is unwilling to listen to their experiences after October 7. But that misses the mark. Emanuel is holding up a mirror, showing Israel how the developed world now sees it. From Israel, his argument sounds unfair and infuriating. That is beside the point. Whether justified or not, it reflects the reality Israel now faces. Much of the developed world is exhausted by the occupation, by talk of annexing the West Bank, settler terrorism, and by Israel’s inability to take any agency in this cycle of violence. Many American Jews are, too.

What makes Emanuel’s speech significant is not that he comes from the left or the right, but that he comes from the center. This is not how the American political center normally speaks to Israel. Emanuel is not a campus radical, not a fringe anti-Zionist, and not Zohran Mamdani or Tucker Carlson. He is a Jewish Zionist fixture of the Democratic establishment with deep ties to Israel. If someone like Emanuel is speaking this way, Israel should hear the warning.

Part of what has alienated that center is Benjamin Netanyahu’s long embrace of the American right. In the United States, that alignment makes Israel look increasingly partisan and increasingly indifferent to the concerns of the political center that once buffered it. Netanyahu’s embrace of the American right did not simply alienate Israel from the political center. It also taught Israel that the concerns of the American center, no less than those of American Jews, could be ignored so long as right-wing Christian Zionists remained in its corner.

Gaza has deepened that estrangement. Not because Israel defended itself after October 7. We are horrified by the Hamas terrorizing, shooting, murdering, gutting, raping, and the kidnapping of 251 Israelis on October 7. But the killing of tens of thousands of civilians to counter the terror is also incomprehensible. To say that is not to justify Hamas terror, or to deny Israel’s right to defend itself. It is to name the reality many Americans, including many American Jews, now see and can no longer explain away. Getting over the mass killing of civilians and the blaming of an entire population for a criminal gang they did not choose is not processable. We know, too, that Netanyahu bears responsibility through his neglect of the southern border and his policy of propping up Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority. We have little to no regard for him.

Netanyahu has never taken American Jewry seriously, whether on our domestic concerns or on our concerns about Israel itself. His embrace of the xenophobic Christian right is one example. American Jews warned for years that these people were not Israel’s friends. Israel is now finding out the warning was real. The Netanyahu assumption that support for Israel in the United States is secure so long as Republicans remain on board is no longer enough. Support on the right is increasingly tied to ideological and religious agendas that do not map onto the long-term interests of Israel, not to mention American Jewry. At the same time, the political center is beginning to speak in a voice Israel once associated with its critics. Israel will be a major issue in American politics in 2028.

What many Israeli Jews still fail to see is that they are no longer heard as credible narrators of their own story. American Jews are confronting a version of this too as antisemitism rises and Jewish claims are increasingly waved away or treated with suspicion. Emanuel’s speech gives the answer. Israel can keep talking to itself, or it can change. If it rejects even someone like Emanuel, what comes next from the United States? JD Vance?

Many Americans on the far left and far right dismissed Emanuel’s speech as little more than Israeli talking points. I doubt that is what most Israelis heard. But that is exactly the problem. Israelis still do not seem able to hear what is happening around them. They hear constructive engagement and criticism as betrayal.

Many Israelis keep pointing to Mamdani and his allies as the great global Jewish threat. That is New York City, not the country. Stop changing the subject. Emanuel is your bellwether, not Mamdani.