Rahm Emanuel will never be president of the US. That was true even before his perfidious appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher in which he turned his back on a lifetime of support for Israel in the vain hope that he might somehow gain favor with the ascendant hate-fueled base of the Democratic party.
Emanuel lent credence to the assertion that Israel dragged the US into war with Iran, saying, “Netanyahu went to this president like he’s gone to four other presidents and every one of the other presidents said not a chance are we doing that because the equities are not worth it. This president bought it.”
For those who are ignoramuses like Rahm Emanuel and Joe Kent, the progenitor of this most current anti-Semitic calumny that Israel controls American presidents like marionettes on a string, there is no unseen hand guiding American foreign policy. As Emanuel noted, presidents are frequently lobbied, although he omitted that such lobbying is not just by Israelis. In the end, presidents make choices out of self-interest, sometimes political and sometimes personal, but not because they are forced by foreign powers.
As far as the war with Iran is concerned, if you did not realize on September 5, 2025, when Donald Trump signed an executive order to rebrand the Dept. of Defense as the Dept. of War, the US would be going to war somewhere, well, that one is on you, not Israel.
The truth is that the primary motivating factor behind any action Donald Trump takes is his thirst for the ambrosia of being immortalized by a history he curates.
The White House webpage declares “Welcome to the Golden Age” and his most recently released budget proposal for fiscal year 2027 includes a request for what he calls the “Golden Fleet” that will include new, Trump-class warships.
His hero complex is so profound that having failed to satisfy his avarice for a Noble Peace Prize by settling any conflict, he is now taking the route of a pyromaniac, starting fires so that he can put them out.
The transparent self-aggrandizement of Trumpism would make the obsession with Israeli influence laughable were it not so dangerous.
By the same token, Trumpian self-aggrandizement is itself laughable if not for its actual impact on the lives of people affected by his whims and outbursts both in terms of policy and the emotional toll of worrying whether he might actually take actions like nuking Iran.
The antidote to all of this insanity would be sanity, but there is no political profit to be made from reason or rationality.
The vacuousness of our political landscape is an open door for populist, rabble-rousing charlatans and hucksters to tap into the most venal emotions of the American people. Trump expertly played on these passions by creating straw men out of immigrants, trans people, voter fraud and the media to win two terms in office.
The lesson Democrats learned from this is that they need to create their own straw men for people to hate in order to inflame their passions enough to win an election.
Since hatred of Trump alone was not enough to accomplish this objective, Democrats have made AIPAC and Israel the bogeymen of American politics, as though cutting off $3.8 billion of military assistance to Israel is what will completely change the fortunes of a country with $7 trillion of spending.
I am not one to be cavalier about the dangers of anti-Semitism, but it is important to realize that this hyper-focus on Israel is a cynical ploy to harness the power of Jew-hatred for domestic political advantage by using Israel as the foil to bolster the foolish case for isolationism.
A retreat from supporting Israel is a tip-of-the-iceberg rationale for wholesale retreat from the world stage that makes the US less secure and creates opportunities for adversaries to build power.
The isolationist rhetoric in both parties is a terrifying trend for the country and especially for Jews, which is why we need to box our way out of the corner we have been backed into by embracing a political message simple enough to be comprehensible to a Tik Tok American culture. I suggest adopting the slogan, “Stop Hating Our Allies!”
“Stop Hating Our Allies” is a message to the Left and the Right from those of us squarely in the center. We live in a dynamic, multi-polar world, filled with dangerous actors. We cannot afford to torch our relationships with other countries for petty political advantages at home.
Trump convinced the American people that we were being played for suckers by all of our trading partners even though it was not true, and he imposed tariffs on friend and foe alike. He threatened Denmark over Greenland for baffling reasons and has consistently blasted NATO for taking us for a ride.
Then, when he needed the help of these allies in the Strait of Hormuz, he was dismayed to find them unwilling.
For Democrats, it is mostly all-Israel, all the time. They bash AIPAC and repeat the specious charge of genocide, but their rhetoric is a much broader threat. As Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani and others gravitate toward the mainstream of Democratic politics, the affinity of their party for Cuba, Venezuela and Iran (see the DSA platform) combined with their disdain for traditional American allies as imperialists is just as Trumpian as the Orange Don himself.
Progressive influence over the Democratic party threatens to isolate the US, undermining global security and stability while making the country, and the world, progressively more unsafe for Jews.
The US is a powerful nation, but cultivating animosity towards our allies degrades our power. Rahm Emanuel, Donald Trump and their ilk need reminding that allies do not always have to be friends, but they need to remain allies. We do not serve our own interests by demeaning them and abandoning them.
Please, Stop Hating Our Allies.
© IJN 2026