Opinion: With Friends Like Rahm…
- Jul 14
- 1 min read
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...
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