The irony is that the entire causal center of Emanuel’s speech rests on the accusation that Netanyahu instrumentalized the U.S.-Israel alliance for domestic political survival: he took American support for granted, pursued reckless policies because he faced no cost, and leveraged the relationship to entrench himself in power. And Emanuel delivered this indictment by flying to Tel Aviv to stage a presidential campaign event, using the U.S.-Israel relationship as the set piece for his own domestic positioning. And, of course, the DSA is doing the same thing from the other direction — using Israel as a progressive credentialing mechanism, a litmus test whose function is entirely internal to Democratic coalition politics. The relationship is being instrumentalized up and down the Democratic Party, by every faction, for domestic purposes, but only Netanyahu is predatory.
When you are endorsing candidates with covered-up Nazi tattoos because you cannot afford to be outflanked on the left, you clearly are not setting the terms of debate. All of this is happening inside the ecosystem that Emanuel and his generation of Democratic operatives built, staffed, and funded, and he cannot even talk about it because that would require him to indict his own coalition, which would end the presidential campaign before it begins. So instead, the entire causal architecture of the speech is organized around Netanyahu as the independent variable: remove Bibi, restore the managerial relationship, and the problem resolves. Netanyahu is the scapegoat — and in fairness to Emanuel, what is politics if not the supreme art of finding the proper scapegoat? It is time for Bibi to go anyway. Khalas, enough is enough — but the problem is not Netanyahu, and scapegoating him for the deterioration of the U.S.-Israel relationship, or for the rise of antisemitism inside all the institutions that the Dems control, is a maneuver that is just too much for any person who wants to remain sane.
Let us consider a counterfactual. Had Netanyahu been replaced in 2021 by a Labor-Meretz coalition that froze settlements, pursued negotiations, and conducted the Gaza operation with maximal concern for proportionality (whatever that would mean in practice against a lunatic group of terrorists embedded in civilian infrastructure), would the DSA wing have moderated? Would Mamdani — Mandani? — have recognized Israel as a Jewish state? Would the Columbia encampments not have happened at all? No professor would have justified the murder of Israelis because, you know, decolonization? Would BDS not have become the litmus test in Democratic primaries? The answer to every one of these questions is obviously no, because the ideological framework that drives the anti-Israel position inside the Democratic Party is indifferent to Israeli behavior and responds to the category of Israel as such, as a settler-colonial ethnostate whose existence is the offense. “From the river to the sea” is not a critique of settlements or of Netanyahu; it is a demand for elimination. Emanuel quotes the phrase in the speech and says he will fight it, but he cannot fight it because the people chanting it are the voters his party needs, and the machinery that trained them to chant it — the universities, the activist organizations, the identitarian epistemology that underwrites “Palestine as colonized people” — is machinery his political generation built, imported from the Third World, funded, and deployed as the operating system of the Democratic coalition.
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