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Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel arrived at our Tel Aviv studio hours after delivering what may prove to be the most consequential speech an American Democrat has given on Israeli soil in a decade.
But the first thing we talked about was Chicago. He was my city’s mayor for eight years. “I’m sure for you it felt like 80,” he offered before I could finish my compliment.
That is the Emanuel experience in miniature: He answers the question he prefers, lands the joke first, and dares you to interrupt.
Over the next half hour, I interrupted often. With him, there is no other way.
'Post' editor-in-chief speaks to Democratic presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel
As US president Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff, a former Chicago mayor, a congressman, and a US ambassador to Japan, by his own coy admission this year, “If I was thinking of doing it, which I am." Emanuel is circling a 2028 US presidential run.
His Tel Aviv University speech was billed as an honest conversation about the US-Israel relationship.
What he delivered, however, was closer to an indictment: Israel as a “territorial pariah” that has “lost Europe,” a prime minister who “led Israel into a dead end,” a promise to sanction violent settlers along with the officials who enabled them, and the companies and banks that financed settlement building.
That, and more, an end to American military aid and a declaration that the two-state solution is “now discredited,” replaced by what he called a 23-state solution.
In our conversation, Emanuel went further than that speech on nearly every count. He described, in detail, reported nowhere else, what he told New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to his face in a private meeting.
He said flatly that in a presidential run, he would not accept the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) backing.
Emanuel confirmed to the Post that his sanctions logic extends to Israel’s banking system. And he closed the most conspicuous gap in his Tel Aviv text: Asked why the speech never mentions a Palestinian state, he told me, “I’m for a state.”
I asked him why a man weighing a presidential campaign would fly to Tel Aviv to deliver a speech he knew would enrage much of his audience.
“I believe in honesty,” he said. “Almost the candor to a fault.” Then came the numbers, because with Emanuel, there are always numbers.
Rahm Emanuel says he supports a Palestinian state, criticizes Netanyahu
“Israel’s at its lowest standing since 1948 in America. Among kids 30 and younger, it’s in the tank. There’s a poll out today that Mamdani is more popular than [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu among American Jews. That is an unsustainable foundation for a political alliance.”
Whose fault is that? I pressed him directly because, by my count, his speech named Netanyahu a dozen times, and one man cannot be responsible for the opinions of an entire generation of Americans.
“He is your longest-serving prime minister,” Emanuel shot back. “He is your prime minister for the 19 years in which you went from one place to the other. I could pick a taxi driver, but I don’t think that taxi driver is responsible for it.”
“You have four tools in your national security toolbox: military power, political persuasion, economic statecraft, and cultural attraction. Three of the four have been totally atrophied, and you’ve decided military power is not a tool, but the toolbox,” he went on to say.
Netanyahu, Emanuel said, “has directed this ship into a wall. You are economically, politically, and strategically more isolated than you have ever been since 1948.”
I told him the truth: it was a depressing speech. “You didn’t see the end,” he replied. “I gave you a choice.”
When I objected that a relationship has two sides, he insisted he had been “an equal opportunity” critic.
“I blame the Palestinian leadership for being corrupt. I blame the Arab League for using the Palestinian people and paying lip service,” the politician said.
“And I blame us for not telling you the truth along the road when you were messing up,” while others, he added, “were silent” for years. “I have a bad gene when it comes to candor,” he repeated.
That much is verifiable. His fights with Netanyahu date to 2009, when, in his capacity as Obama’s chief of staff, he challenged the prime minister over settlements in a clash that prompted Netanyahu to label Emanuel a “self-loathing Jew.”
He has worn the insult ever since; this week, he wore it as armor.
This is where I pushed onto ground I suspect he found less comfortable. His party, I told him, was part of the problem. Israelis have watched the Democratic Left turn hostile, and Jewish Democrats increasingly describe a party in which they no longer feel at home.
Emanuel refused the premise and turned it around with a line that will sting Israeli ears, one he repeated across a local media blitz this week that included Yediot Aharonot, Ynet, and the N12 news site.
“You don’t have a problem with the Democratic Party. You have an America problem.”
Saying that Israel had enjoyed a 60% approval rate among Americans, the percentage has now dropped to 32%.
“And among kids 30 and younger, who are the future of America, you’re at 20%,” he added.
When I countered that Israelis have learned in recent months that the Republican Party is not reliably with us either, he did not soften.
“You have a problem with America. You can only sustain a relationship without political support [for so long], and then at some point it breaks. I’m trying to prevent that break. You don’t like my medicine? Tell me what you want to do,” Emanuel countered.
It is a fair debating point, and an incomplete one. Emanuel would be running in a Democratic primary whose energy belongs to a wing that regards Israel with open contempt.
As for his medicine, ending military aid, sanctioning Israeli officials, pressuring Jerusalem, this is exactly what that electorate wants to hear from a candidate whose middle name is, incidentally, Israel.
When I suggested Israelis view him through a specific prism, and not a moderate one, he bristled.
“I have fought for Israel, as I say in the speech, when it was unpopular.” That is the puzzle of Rahm Emanuel in 2026: The son of a Jerusalem-born father who fought in the War of Independence now stakes out positions his former colleagues would have called unthinkable, and insists nothing has changed but the facts.
‘I told Mamdani river to the sea means destroying the Jewish people’
The name missing from his Tel Aviv speech was the one American Jews are searching for more than any other. Mamdani, the Democratic socialist mayor of New York and the most prominent anti-Zionist elected official in America, appeared only as an unnamed chanting crowd. I asked why.
His answer produced the interview’s most striking disclosure. The two met privately when the newly elected Mamdani sought advice from former mayors.
Emanuel opened with a joke: “I’m not sure who’s gonna hate this meeting more, AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] or my rabbi.” (“Both,” he suspected.)
Then, by his account, the conversation turned serious. “I said, look, you’re your father’s son. I’m my father’s son. I’m gonna break the news to you. There will never be a river to the sea,” Emanuel said he told Mamdani.
“I have fought against the idea of a greater Israel. You haven’t. Let me be clear to you: When I hear you chant ‘river to the sea,’ I hear you calling not just for the destruction of Israel, but the destruction of the Jewish people.”
He paired this with a mirror-image warning to the Israeli Right: “I happen to think both philosophies are fantasies chanted by fanatics who want endless perpetual violence.”
Later, when I noted that I kept returning to Mamdani because our American readers cannot stop reading about him, Emanuel made the confrontation a point of pride.
“Of course it’s an issue. And unlike other people, I actually said it to his face. Like [when] I said [what I said] to the prime minister, who I think is wrong, to his face.”
The centerpiece of Emanuel’s Tel Aviv address was his proposal to replace the two-state framework with a 23-state solution.
This would encompass the 22 current members of the Arab League, Israel, and a Palestinian entity. The Arab states, he said, would finally be forced to become “the adult in the room” with the Palestinian leadership.
They would set up a governing authority that accepts the Jewish connection to the land, ends payments to terrorists’ families, and stops teaching children to hate Israelis.
In turn, Israel would halt unilateral moves in the West Bank. The payoff: Full diplomatic relations with the entire Arab world.
The idea’s lineage is the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which offered normalization in exchange for a Palestinian state.
What has changed, Emanuel argued, is the Gulf’s economic exposure. “They now have a vested interest” in stability.
“You’ve got to stop using the Palestinian cause as lip service. You’ve got to put some sweat equity in this deal.”
I told him that parts of the framework appeal to me, particularly the demand that the Arab world stop hiding behind the Palestinian cause while doing nothing for actual Palestinians.
But Emanuel’s speech was strangely silent on the endpoint. It invoked Palestinian “sovereignty and self-determination” while never using the word “state.” I asked about the omission.
“I’m for a state,” he said without hesitation before repeating his conditions: Recognition of a Jewish connection to the land that “is not a post-’48 phenomenon,” an end to rewarding “people for killing Jews for being Jewish.”
This would be coupled with an end to incitement in schools and in institutions “that could serve as an independent entity, make peace, and enforce it.”
Readers should note what happened here. A formulation engineered for a Tel Aviv audience collapsed under one direct question.
The man who declared the two-state solution “discredited” on Wednesday endorsed a Palestinian state in our studio, on the record, a day later.
He was less careful with history elsewhere. Defending his claim that the Palestinians squandered three offers of sovereignty, he repeated the figure former prime minister Ehud Barak allegedly offered to the first president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat.
Emanuel said that it contained “98% of what the Palestinians were seeking” at the 2000 Camp David Summit, a number most historians of the negotiations regard as inflated, before delivering the most Rahm sentence of the morning: “My wife, Amy, has never offered me 75%, and I say yes.”
On Iran, Emanuel mounted an unapologetic defense of the 2015 nuclear deal his old boss negotiated.
“Under JCPOA [the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], Russia and China were enforcing an isolated Iran.”
“Today, they’re supplying them with the weapons they need to kill you. The uranium was at 3% and outside of Iran. Today, it’s in Iran, and it’s at 90%. You had international inspectors with boots on the ground. Today, they’re kicked out of the country,” Emanuel said.
His conclusion: “You are not more secure having chosen the path of this government.”
Many in Israel’s security establishment, surveying the deaths of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, and Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, would contest every step of that argument.
Nevertheless, for Emanuel, Israel “has failed to convert its military wins into strategic advantages.”
He offered one piece of evidence that deserves examination in Jerusalem.
“For the first time, you have a Syrian government, not [Basher al-]Assad, that says that Israel and Syria have a common enemy, Iran. I’ll pay the calling charges. Has anybody called?”
When I noted that Damascus appears to want a security agreement rather than peace, he waved it off: “That’s halfway. You have the most promising opportunity, and nobody calls.”
The sharpest exchange of the interview concerned Emanuel’s pledge, should he have “anything to say about it,” to sanction three categories: Israelis who attack Palestinian civilians, the officials who facilitate that violence, and “every construction company or bank building or financing illegal settlements.”
I put to him what any Israeli reader would: All of Israel’s major banks have branches in the settlements. Sanctioning them means sanctioning the Israeli financial system itself.
He did not retreat a centimeter. “Well, then, America uses its tools to achieve its policy goals. We believe in a two-state solution. You want to pursue a greater Israel? You pay full price for it. Everything. That’s a choice you make.”
Emanuel was similarly unambiguous when I asked whether he supported US president Joe Biden’s decision to withhold certain weapon shipments during the Israel-Hamas War.
“There is no doubt that during the war effort, you tie policy changes to weapons,” he said. Of Biden’s broader record, he was protective: “President Biden showed support for Israel in its hour of need. That is in America’s interest and character.”
The failure, in Emanuel’s telling, was Jerusalem’s refusal to produce a day-after plan for Gaza, “driven by your domestic politics, not your strategic interests.”
With his staff signaling from the control room, I asked the question that has been on American Jews’ minds all year: Assuming he runs for president, would Emanuel accept backing from AIPAC?
“No,” he said. Then, in the same breath, the hedge: “Well, first of all, AIPAC’s not for my 23-state solution.”
The lobby, whose political arm has existed only since 2021, would, he implied, refuse him before he refused it.
In this, he joins a trend: Sen. Cory Booker has stopped accepting AIPAC-bundled contributions, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom has pledged never to take the group’s money.
On J Street, the dovish lobby whose platform his Tel Aviv speech at times resembled, Emanuel would not be pinned. “I’m not looking for their support or not support. J Street will make its decision. AIPAC will make its decision. I’m not scared of that.”
Then Emanuel turned the lens on me, on this newspaper, and on Israeli journalism generally. We are, he charged, “not fully conveying the depth of [our] isolation.”
“Jews have walked away from Israel. If you think that is sustainable for another year, you should have the courage to say: We enjoy our isolation, and this is worth it.”
I told him it is not much fun. “Okay,” he said, “well, then you have to change it.”
By the time we sat down for this interview, the reaction was telling its own story. Israeli commentators largely received Emanuel’s speech as an attack rather than counsel.
Journalist Hagai Segal wrote that Emanuel is demanding that Israel withdraw to the 1967 lines to please Americans, and that if Israel obeys and is attacked from those lines again, as was the case on October 7, “Emanuel will once more explain why Israelis are to blame.”
Parts of the religious press simply asked whether Emanuel still loves Israel at all. Netanyahu had pointedly not responded, perhaps because a brawl with a Democratic presidential hopeful is an October election gift he is still deciding how to unwrap.
The criticism reached Emanuel from the opposite shore as well. James Zogby of the Arab American Institute dismissed the speech as rooted in pro-Israel talking points, the soft launch of a presidential campaign.
In a single week, the congressman had managed to be too anti-Israel for Jerusalem and too pro-Israel for the anti-Israel Left.
A word of my own, though I do not usually put my opinion into an interview. This was Emanuel’s first high-profile visit here since October 7, and I expected an American Jew arriving at this hour to pay more attention, in the speech and in our conversation, to what Israelis have lived through these past two and a half years.
He did not.
When Biden landed here days after the massacre and told us about sitting with Prime Minister Golda Meir as a young senator, he lifted a wounded country. Emanuel came from 180 degrees in the other direction: No comfort and no embrace, only a bill of particulars.
And yet, in one respect, he deserves credit the comforters do not always earn. With Rahm Emanuel, what you see is what you get. He is not trying to make anything look pretty, nor is he making promises he cannot keep. Israelis will argue about whether that is friendship.
It is, at least, the truth as he sees it, delivered to our faces, which is more than most of his party now bothers to do.