I liked Rahm Emanuel as mayor of Chicago.  He was tough, competent, and unapologetic about it.  I counted him as one of the last credible centrist Democrats left in a party that keeps drifting farther from the center.  That is why his speech at Tel Aviv University this week is so disappointing.

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Emanuel told his audience that America’s support for Israel should no longer be unconditional.  He said Prime Minister Netanyahu has led Israel to a dead end and called the country increasingly isolated by choice.  He floated a “23-state solution” and warned that unconditional support has let Israel deny food and medical relief to Palestinians in Gaza.

Every part of this is wrong on the facts.  Support for Israel has never been unconditional.  Arms sales go through the same export restrictions as every other country.  Congress votes on aid every single year.  Presidents from Reagan to Biden have withheld aid when they disagreed with Israeli policy.  The memorandum of understanding that governs U.S. assistance sets a floor, not a blank check.

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Emanuel knows all of this better than almost anyone in American politics.  He grew up in a family with deep ties to Israel, spent time volunteering there during the Gulf War, and has spent decades in Washington immersed in the details of the relationship.  He is not making an honest mistake born of ignorance.  He is making a political calculation and dressing it up as candor.

Emanuel also compared Israel to Japan, South Korea, and Germany, suggesting that Israel should fall in line the way those allies do.  The comparison does not hold up.  Those countries host thousands of American troops on American bases, costing the United States tens of billions of dollars a year to defend them.  The $3.8 billion Israel receives annually is not stationed anywhere.  It is spent entirely in the United States, mostly with American defense contractors.  Israel is not the free rider in this relationship.  If anything, it is the better deal for American taxpayers and American industry.

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The timing is worse than the substance.  Israel has elections in a matter of months, and the polls already show Netanyahu in trouble.  An American politician flying to Tel Aviv to lecture Israelis on their own politics accomplishes nothing except handing Netanyahu a foil to run against.  Obama tried something similar years ago.  It backfired then, too.  Israelis do not like being told what to do by American officials any more than Americans would like the reverse.

Here is the part that should embarrass Emanuel most.  J.D. Vance is now making nearly identical arguments from the other side of the aisle, warning that Israel risks losing its last sympathetic allies in Washington.  When a Democrat weighing a 2028 presidential run and a Republican vice president are singing the same tune on conditioning support for Israel, that is a signal of how far the ground has shifted under both parties, and not in a good direction.  It should worry anyone who cares about the U.S.-Israel relationship regardless of which party he votes for.

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Some will argue that this is not really a left-right story at all, that the deeper problem is an Israeli governing coalition steering the country toward international isolation on its own.  There is something to that.  Netanyahu’s coalition bears real responsibility for how isolated Israel has become.  But that argument cuts against Emanuel, not for him.  If the coalition in Jerusalem is the problem, the answer is for American allies to let Israeli voters sort it out in their own elections this fall.

Emanuel spent thirty-five years building a reputation as a serious, hawkish, pro-Israel Democrat, going back to his work for Bill Clinton and his tenure as Barack Obama’s chief of staff.  He cashed that reputation in this week for a speech that looks a lot like an opening bid for 2028, distancing himself from Israel before Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, or Josh Shapiro can be tagged with the same label by the party’s progressive wing.  It will win him no one on the left and cost him real credibility with everyone else.  Progressives will not forget his record, and centrists and pro-Israel voters will not forget this speech.  That is not courage.  That is a career politician reading the wind on a presidential primary and getting it badly wrong.

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Israel does not need lectures from American politicians auditioning for a national ticket.  It needs allies willing to say plainly that the country’s right to defend itself did not expire on October 7, 2023, and that the blame for this war lies with Hamas, not with the ally trying to survive it.  Rahm Emanuel used to understand that.

Josh Kantrow is a lawyer in Chicago, where he focuses on technology, privacy, and complex commercial litigation.  He writes on law, politics, and culture at his Facebook page: facebook.com/share/1BLwcus4PR.

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Image: Rahm Emanuel.  Credit: Daniel X. O’Neil via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.