Rahm Emanuel’s Dangerous Daylight Doctrine

Sadly, few Democrats these days—apart from an outlier like Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.)—can summon even the most elementary, unambiguous support for the Jewish state.

Which brings me to Rahm Emanuel, former White House Chief of Staff under President Obama. His presidential aspirations are transparent enough. His chances of winning the Democratic nomination, let alone the presidency, are about as plausible as the moon being made of cheese.

Yet irrelevance has never deprived Emanuel of confidence in his own wisdom. This week, he once again assumed his customary posture of enlightened superiority to lecture Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, by extension, the Israeli electorate. It was the same elitist, patronizing, and profoundly misguided tone he adopted during the opening months of the Obama administration in 2009, when he championed the creation of greater “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem.

The widening gap between America and Israel certainly let in more light. What it did not do was induce Hamas, Iran, or the Palestinian national movement to abandon their long war against Jewish sovereignty. Quite the contrary. It reinforced their deepest convictions: that time is on their side; that terrorism and rejectionism carry no enduring cost; and that if they are patient enough and brutal enough, the West will eventually tire of Israel and reconcile itself to the Jewish state’s destruction.

This belief is not merely mistaken; it is dangerous. Every public scolding of Israel by American politicians, every attempt to place the burden of appeasement on Jerusalem rather than on those seeking its eradication, nourishes that illusion and fans the flames of antisemitism.

The tragedy is that Emanuel and his fellow travelers may prove more prophetic than they intended. For within today’s Democratic Party there is an increasingly influential faction whose hostility toward Israel casts a long and foreboding shadow over the political landscape.