Benjamin Netanyahu and Rahm Emanuel were both the second of three sons born and raised in households steeped in Revisionist Zionism, a right-wing ideological movement founded in the 1920s by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and currently represented by the Likud Party in Israel.
Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, who died in 2012, served as a close aide and personal secretary to Jabotinsky, while Emanuel’s father, who died in 2019, had been a member of the Irgun, the movement’s paramilitary arm, which operated in Mandatory Palestine between 1931 and 1948.
Emanuel’s father changed the family surname in memory of his brother, Emanuel Auerbach, who died of an infection after being hit by a stray bullet during a 1933 clash between Arabs and British police. He named his son Rahm in honor of a fighter from Lehi, another pre-state Israeli underground organization.
Benjamin Netanyahu remained loyal to his father’s ideological principles to become the longest-serving prime minister of Israel and of the Likud Party. Rahm Emanuel, however, joined the Democratic Party in the United States, becoming a staunch opponent of both his father’s and Netanyahu’s ideology. (One wonders how Emanuel felt when his father told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2009 that he supported Netanyahu.)
As a senior advisor to former President Bill Clinton, Emanuel played a significant role in U.S. foreign policy during the 1990s, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He supported Israeli statesman Shimon Peres, especially during the 1996 Israeli elections when Peres ran against Netanyahu and Clinton openly favored Peres. Emanuel lost what would turn out to be his first campaign against Netanyahu.
In 1999, Clinton and Emanuel supported Ehud Barak against Netanyahu. Democratic political strategists James Carville and Stanley Greenberg were sent to Israel to work for Barak, who defeated the prime minister. Emanuel thus won his second campaign against Netanyahu.
Despite having worked closely with the Clintons, Emanuel chose to remain officially neutral—or, as he put it, “hidden under the desk”—when Barack Obama ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Obama rewarded Emanuel with the position of White House chief of staff.
The new president knew that Israelis rank the ability to work with the U.S. president as a top qualification for prime minister. Two months after his inauguration, while it was still unclear whether Netanyahu would be able to cobble together a governing coalition in the aftermath of a very close election, Obama declared that “the emergence of an Israeli government led by a strong skeptic of peace negotiations with the Palestinians [i.e., Netanyahu] makes it no less necessary for the U.S. to push for a resolution.”
Clearly, Obama preferred Netanyahu’s opponent, Tzipi Livni. One may reasonably assume that Chief of Staff Emanuel did so as well. But Netanyahu succeeded in forming a government, and Emanuel lost his third campaign against Netanyahu.
Obama and Emanuel exerted significant pressure on Netanyahu, creating daylight between Israel and America while only rarely criticizing the Palestinians. In May 2009, Emanuel famously clashed with Netanyahu in the Oval Office over housing construction in Judea and Samaria. According to Emanuel, “Obama had to separate the two of us,” and Netanyahu reportedly called Emanuel a “self-hating Jew.”
During Netanyahu’s 2015 reelection run, Emanuel made no statement about the election itself, but he publicly backed Obama’s Iran deal, the very policy Netanyahu traveled to the U.S. to oppose and a central issue in his campaign. Nevertheless, Emanuel ended up losing his fourth campaign against Netanyahu.
Fast-forward to the present: Netanyahu is once again running for re-election in Israel this year, and Emanuel is “considering” a run for U.S. president in 2028. In what will most likely be his last chance to defeat Netanyahu again, Emanuel recently traveled to Israel to campaign against his nemesis for the fifth time and more aggressively than ever before. Emanuel delivered a fiery speech and gave several interviews, sharply criticizing Netanyahu, claiming he has turned Israel into a pariah state, is losing the support of young voters in the United States because of his policies, and even accusing him of perpetrating the war crime of starving civilians in Gaza.
The reality is that countries under left-wing governments often shun Israel but embrace it after replacing them with right-wing governments. Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia and Slovenia are only the most recent of many such examples, with Brazil potentially next depending on the results of its presidential election in three months.
The erosion of support for Israel among young Americans stems largely from decades of leftist indoctrination of students, especially but not only in universities. The policies of Netanyahu-led governments are a post-hoc pretext rather than the original cause.
The claim that Netanyahu deliberately caused the deaths of thousands of Gazans by starvation ignores both the Hamas-run Health Ministry’s brazen manipulation of data and the fact that even the United Nations has acknowledged that nearly 90% of aid trucks never delivered their supplies due to hijacking by armed Hamas thugs.
Emanuel’s obsessive antipathy toward Netanyahu is transparent and growing. His break with his father’s ideology and his father’s support for Netanyahu lend it an almost Shakespearean dimension. One should expect even stronger accusations from Emanuel, which will not only please him, but also the anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party.
