By Lucy Komisar
May 15, 2026

At a recent Council on Foreign Relations meeting on U.S. foreign policy, Rahm Emanuel, on the long list for the Democratic nomination for president, didn’t mention Gaza, the only international issue that galvanizes Democratic voters, except to say the Trump-Netanyahu strategy didn’t work: “You unilaterally acted in Lebanon and in Gaza, and you got Hezbollah and Hamas.”

Emanuel’s talk to the Council envisioned dewy-eyed futuristic plans. He said he was for “a twenty-three-state solution. No longer just two states. You agree to work with the Palestinian entity. Stand up a state and recognition. And twenty-one Arab League nations will recognize Israel…. All the Arab countries will stand up and help the Palestinian Authority become a real authority and a real governing party.”

Will Israel remain an apartheid state? With what boundaries? Nothing said about that.

He boasted that he told Netanyahu, “Your housing strategy on the West Bank will lead to nonstop war. And, unlike others, I said it to his face. Others didn’t say it. Didn’t have the courage to say it. Said it.” Did he talk to Netanyahu about the Gaza genocide? Not mentioned. Lack of courage or he just doesn’t find it a problem?

Then a young man in the audience asked him, “Your fellow Chicago Cubs fan, known as the Pope, if you got elected in 2028 how would you manage the relationship with the Pope, and what strategic alignments would you like to pursue?”

Pope Leo XIV has spoken out repeatedly on the war in Gaza, consistently calling for peace, condemning the scale of civilian suffering, and advocating for a two-state solution. However, he has officially refrained from using the specific legal term “genocide” to describe the conflict, noting that the Holy See does not believe it can make such a declaration at this time .

He has also condemned U.S. policy in Iran, calling called Trump’s threats against Iran “truly unacceptable,” warned that “war is back in vogue” and criticized a “diplomacy based on force.” He urged U.S. lawmakers to “work for peace.” Trump called the Pope “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy,” said that the Pope was “OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon” (a claim the Pope has denied).

Emanuel cherry-picked his response, declaring, “Thank God for the moral clarity of his voice in a time which is a pretty dark desert out there.” And “To disparage the Pope when there’s no sense of moral clarity in a period of darkness really is beneath, not only the president, it’s beneath the country.” So clearly, Emanuel was talking about Iran, not Gaza.

As someone critical of Deep State policies, I am routinely not called on to ask questions at the Council, where I have been a member since 1994. (It was different under previous Council presidents.) Sometimes, the moderator’s gaze avoiding me in the center of the first or second row is actually comic, and as that happened as expected, I approached Emanuel after the meeting.

“Moral clarity” was just what I wanted to ask about. Referring to the moral clarity he admired in the Pope, I asked what he thought about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

His eyes blazed. “How could I say that about a people who had suffered the Holocaust,” and he started naming concentration camps, “Auschwitz….” I interrupted, “But the Arabs didn’t run those concentration camps.”

Then he quoted an academic asserting that a genocide means that you are destroying the entire people and their land, everything….” And he walked away.

Are there people in Gaza still breathing? Is he waiting for their deaths to be achieved, for the silence of the graveyard, before his “moral clarity” kicks in?

The moderator, CNN anchor Bianna Golodryga, reminds us why we don’t watch that network for real news. That “senior global affairs analyst” informed us that Iran radicals were behind the recent “murder of 40,000 protesters.” First, there is zero evidence of that number, the more realistic figure of the dead is about 3,000, given by the Iranian government, or about 5,000 given by a UN Rapporteur, and many were “protestors” with guns, organized and armed by Mossad, a fact the Israeli spy agency has bragged about. So not all the dead were protestors. Media outlets like CNN reporting the 40,000 claim from “anonymous sources” admit they could not independently verify it.

There was no question from Golodryga about the Gaza genocide.

In a recent Pew Research Center survey, six in 10 Americans said they had a negative view of Israel; among Democrats, that number was eight in 10. In April, the majority of Senate Democrats voted to block further arms sales to Israel. Emanuel appears not to have read the DNC report (kept from the public but probably not from insiders) that says Kamala Harris lost the presidency because she refused to condemn the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Asking a presidential hopeful about the issue that brought down his predecessor is obviously what a real journalist would have done. It’s a question Emanuel tries to finesse with his, “I said it to his face” bragging. But he will be asked about Gaza by serious reporters.

Rahm Emanuel was Obama’s chief of staff, then mayor of Chicago, and till last year ambassador to Japan. He is a standard-issue centrist Democrat. He would be no different than the past U.S. presidents of both parties, who have enabled the slow-moving and now fast-moving Israeli genocide. However, an electorate displaying moral clarity will likely block his chance at the Oval Office.

For the full Council transcript go here, for the video go here.