With Friends Like Rahm…

Rahm Emanuel flew 6,000 miles to deliver a stump speech and billed it as a friendship. On Wednesday at Tel Aviv University, the former ambassador, mayor, and undeclared candidate for president told Israelis that the American relationship “cannot stand or survive as it has been,” then laid out his terms: cut the military aid, sanction the banks, accept the blame. He called it truth-telling between friends. Read it the way a lawyer reads a complaint, weighing what it alleges against what it omits, and it is something else entirely: an indictment of the victim, drafted for a jury that lives in New Hampshire.

Start with the premise. Emanuel says American policy stood behind Israel “without conditions, without demands, and without consequences.” That sentence cannot survive contact with his own résumé. He served an administration that clashed publicly with Jerusalem over Iran and settlements, and he watched another pause shipments of 2,000-pound bombs in the middle of a war to force a change in Israeli operations. Every American weapon Israel buys travels through the Arms Export Control Act, end-use monitoring, and congressional notification, the same as every other purchaser. The unconditional ally of Emanuel’s telling has been conditioned, lectured, vetoed, and paused for 50 years. He knows this. He was in the room for some of it.

Next, the charge. Emanuel told the Associated Press that Israel has been “reckless and careless” and accused it of “using food and medicine as an instrument of your military goals.” That is a war-crimes allegation, delivered in a pre-speech interview, unencumbered by evidence. Here is what he said, and here is what he left out. He left out that Hamas started the war by murdering some 1,200 people and dragging 250 more into tunnels. He left out that Israel facilitated aid into Gaza throughout a war against an enemy that hijacked the trucks on camera. He left out that the one sustained pause in assistance was an attempt to pry hostages out of those tunnels. A prosecutor who omitted that much from a charging document would be sanctioned.

Then the dodge. Asked directly whether Israel committed genocide, Emanuel answered that he is “ready to have that discussion” but worries the term is being politicized. Genocide has a precise legal definition: specific intent to destroy a people as such. A man with Emanuel’s experience knows the elements are not met, because a nation bent on destroying a population does not run humanitarian corridors into its territory or treat its patients in Tel Aviv hospitals. If he believes the accusation, he should say so and defend it. If he does not, the honest answer was available, free of charge, and one syllable long.

No is a complete sentence. He declined to say it because roughly half his primary electorate believes the charge, and he checked the polls before he booked the flight.

On the money, Emanuel wants to end American “subsidies,” so Israel buys arms under the same terms as every other trusted ally. Call it a subsidy, and you have already miscounted. The funds flow under a 10-year memorandum of understanding; the overwhelming share is spent with American defense manufacturers, and flagship programs like Arrow are joint American-Israeli developments that feed directly back into American missile defense. As for “every other trusted ally”: name the other one with a genocidal militia dug in on its border, a United Nations apparatus dedicated to its prosecution, and an enemy sworn in writing to its destruction.

Then come the sanctions, where the speech stops being wrong and starts being dangerous. Emanuel proposes sanctioning not only violent individuals, whom Israeli law already reaches, but also “companies and banks that support settlements.” That is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions program with a federal letterhead. Punishing a bank for serving customers based on where those customers live is punishment by address, and everyone involved understands what the address stands in for. More than 30 American states have passed laws refusing to do business with entities that boycott Israelis, precisely because those legislatures recognized the address as a proxy for the Jew who lives there. Emanuel would write the proxy into federal policy.

His strangest passage is the one he thought was his strongest. “You’ve lost Europe,” he warned: Israeli scientists excluded from research networks, Israeli artists and academics shut out of exhibits and conferences. Every word of that is true, and every word of it describes discrimination, recited as evidence against the people being discriminated against. My organization represents Israeli researchers thrown out of international consortia for the crime of holding the wrong passport. Under American civil rights law, that is national origin discrimination, full stop. Run the substitution test. Tell Emanuel that Chinese scientists are barred from conferences because their government is unpopular, and he would call it bigotry and demand hearings. Tell him it is Israelis, and he calls it leverage.

He did not cite the discrimination as a problem. He cited it as ammunition.

To be clear, Emanuel gets one thing right. The Arab League’s 21 members have spent decades exploiting the Palestinians as a slogan while investing nothing in their governance, and his “23-state solution” at least says so out loud. But watch where the enforcement points. The Arab states receive an invitation to roll up their sleeves. Israel receives sanctions, aid cuts, and conditions. It is a plan that assigns the homework to 21 governments and grades only the 22nd.

Which returns us to friendship. Emanuel opened by declaring that a true friend tells the truth even when it is painful. Agreed. So here is one. A “friend” who arrives carrying a list of your sins, a catalog of your enemies’ talking points, and a demand schedule enforceable only against you is not being a friend. He is conducting a focus group. Fifty-eight percent of his party now says America is too supportive of Israel, up 13 points in 30 months, and Emanuel did not fly to Tel Aviv to reverse that number. He flew there to ride it. Popularity is a weathervane. He mistook it for a compass.

The speech was never for Tel Aviv. It was for New Hampshire.

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Mark Goldfeder is CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center and a law professor at Touro Law School, where he directs the nation’s first antisemitism law clinic. @markgoldfeder on X.