July 18, 2026

Good morning! Today is Saturday, July 18th 2026, and this is The American Conservative's Morning Brief. Rahm Emanuel's Tel Aviv speech recasts him as an Israel critic, but Harrison Berger reports the Israel lobby's applause and his refusal to back an arms embargo reveal a strategy to placate Democratic voters without changing policy. As Israel and its allies quietly move to embed military aid inside the Pentagon's procurement system, Congress could lose the ability to vote on the annual Foreign Military Financing line item altogether. In Britain, Andy Burnham's debut speech as Labour leader promised a "new politics" and hinted at a wealth tax, but Iain Macwhirter argues his slogans and statist instincts point only to continued economic decline. and now for the details. We begin with a look at the shifting rhetoric inside the Democratic Party on Israel, and what may lie beneath it. Former Chicago Mayor and Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, widely believed to be preparing a 2028 presidential run, traveled this month to Tel Aviv to deliver a speech at Tel Aviv University. In it, he broke with the usual script of Democratic hopefuls, criticizing Israel's conduct in Gaza, warning that Israel had allowed itself to become, in his words, a "territorial pariah," and pledging sanctions on Israelis attacking Palestinian civilians, on officials who back such violence, and on companies financing illegal settlements. As Harrison Berger reports for The American Conservative, that tough talk was quickly endorsed by the Democratic Majority for Israel and echoed the so-called "23-state solution" originally floated by the liberal Israel lobby group J Street. Pressed by the Financial Times, Emanuel confirmed he still wants the United States to sell weapons to Israel and walked back any suggestion of an arms embargo. Berger notes that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself has spoken of tapering off direct military aid, precisely because Israel and its lobby are moving to embed the arrangement inside the Pentagon's procurement system through Section 219 of the National Defense Authorization Act. That change, Berger writes, would remove the annual Foreign Military Financing line item Congress can vote on, and replace it with opaque defense-industrial integration that carries no line for lawmakers like Representative Thomas Massie to strike. Journalist Max Blumenthal, quoted in the piece, argues this is the template Democratic candidates will now use to placate a base that has turned sharply against Israel without actually changing policy. Across the Atlantic, Britain is about to get its seventh prime minister in a decade. Andy Burnham delivered his first speech as leader of the Labour Party on Friday, ahead of taking office at Number 10 on Monday. He promised, in his words, "good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart," a "new politics" free of factionalism, and a transfer of power away from Westminster and Whitehall to local communities. He also pledged to fix Britain's long-running social care crisis, so that elderly Britons no longer have to sell their homes to pay for care. Writing for The American Conservative, Iain Macwhirter finds the speech long on slogans and short on specifics. Macwhirter notes that Boris Johnson had already proposed a lifetime cap on care costs, only to see it scrapped by Chancellor Rachel Reeves in 2024. Burnham blamed four decades of neoliberalism since Margaret Thatcher for deindustrialization and stagnant wages, and hinted at a wealth tax and further tax rises to come. Macwhirter points out that Britain's tax burden is already at levels not seen since the Second World War, that business and energy costs are strangling industry, and that most European countries which tried wealth taxes, including Sweden, Denmark, and Austria, have since abandoned them because they raised little revenue and discouraged investment. Burnham's recipe of bringing transport and utilities back into public ownership, Macwhirter concludes, is likely to deliver only continuity in Britain's economic and social decline. Those are today's highlights. For the full stories and more, visit theamericanconservative.com. Thank you for starting your morning with us.