U.S. Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) recently spent 72 hours touring Palestinian Authority-controlled villages in Judea and Samaria without coordinating the visit with Israel’s Foreign Ministry, the Israeli embassy in Washington, the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem or Israeli security forces.

Khanna characterized his visit as a trip to “Palestine,” engaging in diplomatic cancellation of Israel in favor of far-left pro-Palestinian activism. Khanna’s itinerary was arranged by Breaking the Silence, a radical anti-government Israeli advocacy group established to delegitimize the IDF’s security role in Judea and Samaria. He also traveled with activists tied to J Street, an American organization that has lobbied against the Israeli government since 2008.

While Khanna was stopped on the road on July 8, 2026, New York Times reporters and cameras were ready to capture the encounter he had with Israeli civilians, police and the IDF. Khanna’s unmarked convoy, carrying unidentified passengers in an area that had only recently been redesignated from its former status as a closed military zone, drew the attention of Jewish residents of nearby communities who were unaware of the redesignation and suspicious of the convoy’s lack of identification and coordination.

They alerted the Israel Police and the IDF, who delayed the convoy until they received clearance orders. Footage uploaded online by Breaking the Silence activist Nadav Weiman shows that Khanna was not harassed. In fact, it is more likely that Israeli locals opposed Weiman’s presence in the area, while being completely unaware of Khanna’s presence or his identity, as the congressman, almost unknown in Israel, sat in a van behind darkened windows.

Once Khanna’s identity as a U.S. elected representative was established, the convoy was allowed to proceed. Khanna then publicly declared on X that Israeli settlers carrying American-made M4 rifles had “detained him,” implying that he was physically stopped, and that the IDF “sided with the settlers.”

He referred to the areas he visited as “Palestine,” though they remain under full Israeli security control under the Oslo Accords. He told The New York Times, in a line that captured the episode better than any critic could have written it—that Israel would be wise not to detain “long-shot presidential candidates.”

Israel has faced this situation before—bad-faith political actors who use Israel and the Palestinians as props in their own political theater to advance their domestic political agendas. In August 2019, Israel barred U.S. Congressional Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from a Judea and Samaria trip organized by MIFTAH, a Palestinian NGO, after President Donald Trump publicly urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deny them entry.

Israel had initially agreed to admit them, and the reversal became a bigger story than the trip itself would have been. U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the ban a “sign of weakness.” Israel’s refusal to admit drew criticism even from Israel’s allies in Congress. It handed advocates of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Palestinian-led movement yet another grievance.

Khanna represents the sharp progressive pivot in the U.S. Democratic Party. His run-in with Israelis became a political platform to assert his leadership bona fides for the far-left flank of the party. Khanna is in good company, joined by the recent victories of the Democratic Socialists of America, which have co-opted the Democratic ticket.

Khanna, an admitted presidential hopeful, has called for halting all weapons transfers to Israel, including missile defense funding. He has positioned himself as the candidate willing to break furthest from his party’s traditional support for the Jewish and democratic state.

This is why his adventure in Judea and Samaria with anti-Israel advocacy groups broadcast in real time was far from being a diplomatic fact-finding mission. Simply put, it was a public relations stunt, as Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer noted.

Notably, Khanna ignored requests to meet Oct. 7 survivors and hostage families, skipped the sites of the massacre, and instead used the trip as a “presidential campaign cameo,” in Gottheimer’s words.

Political analyst Haviv Rettig Gur has argued that the manufactured episode reveals how progressive American politicians now process the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of American racial and colonial guilt—a domestic argument transplanted onto foreign terrain, with Israel cast as the villain by default. Another case in point is that of former Chicago Mayor and Obama confidante Rahm Emanuel.

Emanuel’s widely publicized Tel Aviv University speech, delivered the same day as Khanna’s incident, presents another scene in political theater. Emanuel, also weighing a 2028 run, used his speech to platform his future foreign policy direction.

Emanuel, who notably refused to meet with Israeli elected officials, emphasized Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation, laying the blame on the Israeli government, which he depicted as warmongering and a territorial pariah losing its international standing.

He recommended cutting American defense budget subsidies for Israel, sanctioning Israelis who attack Palestinian civilians, and boycotting banks or businesses supporting illegal settlements, in his words. He also pushed for a two-state solution in which the 21 members of the Arab League would guarantee the new Palestinian state.

Emanuel’s naïve and self-serving speech, untethered from Middle Eastern realities, was clearly aimed at his political base. His advocacy of the two-state solution, stemming from the catastrophic Oslo experiment, reflects a lack of understanding and disconnect from the post-Oct. 7 reality in which the vast majority of the Israeli public flatly rejects another jihadist sovereign state, as reflected in a June 22, 2026, JCFA poll.

Emanuel and Khanna share the same political trajectory. They both align with the far-left J Street, founded in 2007 as a more progressive organization that sought to co-opt the well-established pro-Isael AIPAC lobby support. While J Street has labeled itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” in practice, its positions on conditioning U.S. security assistance, its hedging regarding the Abraham Accords, and its alignment with the Palestinian narrative on borders and settlements suggest a thin line between J Street and its colleagues in the anti-Zionist camp.

That leftward ratchet has now fully converged with Islamist and far-right actors who work together to invert the legitimacy of Israel and the P.A.-Hamas axis, especially since Oct. 7. Israel has been weaponized in American domestic politics, its legitimacy inverted with that of the PLO-P.A. and Hamas.

For emphasis, the unresolved Palestinian question is a defining issue of the U.S. 2028 presidential election, as opposed to the real threats to the American people, such as Iran’s global terror network, its disruption of Persian Gulf shipping lanes, the Chinese Communist Party’s penetration of Western technology and infrastructure, and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Only a standing policy and the capacity to anticipate and manage these visits before they happen can change the picture. Khanna’s single uncoordinated stop on a dirt road in the territories has produced a week of international headlines and a preview of a 2028 campaign issue. That is not fundamentally a failure of Israeli security on the ground.

It is a failure of Israel’s strategic communications structure to prevent or respond to these damaging provocations. The next generation of Israel’s political opponents in Washington has already learned to exploit this weakness.

Israel cannot always control who books a flight, or what associations and itineraries its visitors will have. But Israel can and must anticipate, monitor, prevent and respond to what have become frequent acts of political subversion and the cancellation of Israel, before they metastasize into disastrous media circuses.

That requires a National Strategic Influence and Information Security Directorate, reporting directly to the Prime Minister’s Office, integrating the IDF Spokesperson Unit, the intelligence services, cyber units, the Foreign Ministry and embassies worldwide into a single early-warning and rapid-response structure—the kind of institution Washington built during the Cold War to wage the information war against the Soviet Union that led to its demise.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.