Democrat Rahm Emanuel tells Israel to no longer expect unconditional US aid

Democrat Rahm Emanuel, a former Chicago mayor who is expected to launch a 2028 presidential bid, has told Israel that it should no longer expect unconditional aid from the United States.

His address, delivered on Wednesday to Tel Aviv University, also included pointed criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Unconditional support has produced a prime minister who has presumed that his strategic interest would incur no political costs if he ignored America’s concerns about settlements and sparked a regional war,” Emanuel said.

In light of this dynamic, Emanuel argued that the US-Israeli bond needed to be reassessed. “We need, fundamentally, a new and different approach to this alliance,” he said.

Those remarks represent a leftward shift on the issue for Emanuel.

A longtime member of the Democratic Party’s establishment, Emanuel has played a key role in shaping US-Israeli relations.  He worked as an adviser to former US President Bill Clinton during Israel-Palestine peace negotiations in the 1990s, and he was also involved in Middle East policy as a chief of staff to former President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2010.

But since that time, public opinion polls have shown Democratic voters to be increasingly critical of Israel, particularly after the launch of its genocidal war in Gaza, which has killed at least 73,000 Palestinians since 2023.

The 66-year-old Emanuel pointed to those US polls, as well as tanking support for Israel in Europe, as he took the podium on Wednesday.

He warned that relations between the US and Israel were “at a crossroads” and in need of “significant changes and a new direction”.

“For too long, American policy toward Israel operated under the assumption that the best thing Washington could do for Jerusalem was to blindly and silently stand behind your government, without conditions, without demands, and without consequences when we disagreed,” he said. “That has been our mistake.”

Emanuel pointed to several areas of concern in his speech. He noted the violent expansion of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, in violation of international law, as well as attempts by Israel to block aid for Palestinians suffering in war-torn Gaza.

Those actions, Emanuel warned, have turned Israel into a “pariah” on the world stage.

“Here I want to be very clear: The United States cannot continue to finance and support that cynicism in silence,” he said. “You cannot fight indefinitely against a world that has stopped believing you have the right to fight. You must instead find a new sustainable path to peace, security and prosperity. America stands ready.”

Emanuel added that he supports sanctions against Israelis who attack Palestinian civilians and their properties, as well as officials who support the violence and “every construction company or bank building or financing illegal settlements”.

He did, however, have critical remarks for Israel’s Arab neighbours as well.  Emanuel called on Arab countries to take responsibility for establishing a Palestinian state, while acknowledging Israel’s claims to historic Palestine.

“The now discredited path to a two-state solution should be replaced by a 23-state solution,” Emanuel said.

“The 21 Arab nations that have exploited Palestinian rights as a slogan for decades now need to roll up their sleeves [and] stand up a governing authority capable of accepting the historic Jewish connection to the land of Israel.”

Shifting views

Many observers see the speech as evidence of the shifting tides within the Democratic Party, where US-Israeli relations have long been considered sacrosanct.

Emanuel, whose father was born in Jerusalem, has been a longtime critic of Netanyahu, but he is not known for openly advocating for conditions to be placed on US aid to Israel.

Rather, he helped to oversee the initial funding for Israel’s Iron Dome defence system as Obama’s chief of staff.

“I assume this was an effort to launch a presidential bid by addressing the issue that has become, for the first time, so central to Democratic Party politics,” said James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, DC.

An AP-NORC poll released earlier this week underscored the shifting sentiment among US voters towards Israel. It found that 58 percent of Democrats felt the US was “too supportive of Israel”, up from 45 percent in January 2024.

More than half of the Democrats polled said they believed Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

Recent primary elections have also underscored the changing opinions among US voters, with a slate of progressive candidates critical of US-Israeli policy winning races in New York, Pennsylvania and Colorado.

Legislation to limit aid has also seen unprecedented support in the US legislature. In April, for instance, 40 US senators voted to block a sale of bulldozers to Israel, noting their use in the demolition of Palestinian homes.

There has also been evidence of shifting sentiment among Republicans, with US Vice President JD Vance recently delivering harsh words for Israel.

“Donald J Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment,” Vance said last month, as he expressed frustration with Israeli backlash to a US-Iranian ceasefire memorandum.

Vance is also expected to launch a presidential bid in 2028.

‘Thread a needle’

Still, Zogby noted there were limits to how far so-called establishment politicians were willing to go in their criticism of Israel.

Zogby pointed out that Emanuel’s speech on Wednesday was rooted in pro-Israel talking points and was framed largely from an Israeli perspective.

The former mayor, for example, began his remarks by saying that, in the past, Israeli leaders had offered “the Palestinians sovereignty in exchange for your security”, only to have the offer rejected by corrupt Palestinian leaders.

That characterisation has been rejected by many Palestinians and others involved in the decades-long peace efforts, including Zogby, who was tapped by Clinton to help bolster the Palestinian economy following the signing of the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s.

While still technically in place, the accords have been rendered mostly defunct, as the peace process has stalled.

Emanuel also focused heavily in Wednesday’s speech on the actions of Netanyahu’s government.

That may be a more politically safe approach, given the Israeli prime minister’s diving popularity in the US, Zogby said.

But Zogby added that such remarks also avoid confronting the context behind the deeply entrenched conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

All told, Zogby saw the speech as a harbinger of what’s to come ahead of the 2028 vote as candidates, and how candidates might balance the competing interests of voters and big donors, including the pro-Israel lobby.

“The people running for president, for the most part, will try to thread a needle between where they see the debate going among Democrats,” Zogby said, “and what they’ll feel are positions they need to take to not get on the wrong side of big money”.