A sitting member of the U.S. Congress was detained against his will Wednesday on foreign soil, not by a hostile government but by armed settlers and the soldiers of a nation America counts as its closest ally in the Middle East.
Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a Democrat who is publicly weighing a run for president, was blocked for 90 minutes on a narrow road in the occupied West Bank.
The men who held him there carried guns.
The troops of the Israel Defense Forces, dispatched to the scene, did not clear his path.
Instead, they smoked cigarettes, chatted with the armed civilians, and then moved a vehicle to reinforce the barricade. It was a scene so blunt in its meaning that no diplomatic translation is required.
The congressman had come to see what remains of Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian Bedouin village erased from the map by settler violence. He found instead a live demonstration of the lawlessness that erased it.
A car blocked the road. Men cursed at the American delegation and kicked the tires of their minibus. When the IDF arrived, the reasonable expectation was rescue.
What arrived instead was an unmistakable message: In this territory, the armed civilian and the uniformed soldier operate from the same script.
Khanna said he felt powerless, and he noted the irony without pleasure. A man of considerable privilege, a member of the House of Representatives with access to the U.S. Embassy and the Israeli police, was reduced to a seated captive waiting for permission to move.
If 90 minutes could do that to him, he asked, what does a lifetime of occupation do to a people without a state or a phone number to call for help?
The Israeli military issued a statement saying it received a report of civilians blocking foreign nationals, that troops reopened the road, and that the involvement of its soldiers in the blockade is disputed.
The armed civilian’s identity is under review. The review will be cold comfort to anyone who understands that the road was never supposed to be blocked in the first place and that the settlers who did the blocking operated with the confidence of men who have never been taught the meaning of consequences.
There was a time when American politicians traveled to Israel to demonstrate solidarity, stand at the Western Wall, tour towns hit by rocket fire and meet with Palestinian officials in Ramallah as a nod to balance.
The purpose was to cement a relationship. Khanna’s trip signals a new era. He went to the West Bank not to affirm an alliance but to document a grievance.
He walked through destroyed villages. He met mayors who had never seen a member of Congress. He sat with the family of a slain activist.
He stood at a school where a 14-year-old was shot to death by a settler in broad daylight. He came away saying the reality on the ground is brutal and that the removal of violent settlers is a prerequisite for any talk of two states.
The occupied territories are off limits to settlers under international law but Israel is flaunting those prohibitions.
This is no longer the foreign-policy tourism of a bygone generation.
The Democratic Party’s relationship with Israel is being renegotiated in real time, not in conference rooms but in places like the dirt roads of the southern West Bank.
American voters now tell pollsters they are more critical of the Israeli government than supportive, a reversal that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
Midterm candidates from Michigan to New York have discovered that opposition to Israeli policy has become a moral litmus test for a rising progressive wing.
Khanna and Rahm Emanuel, another potential 2028 candidate, both used their visits this week to deliver sharp public critiques of the Israeli government.
Emanuel called the prime minister’s path a dead end and urged an end to U.S. military aid.
This is a far cry from pilgrimage. It is an audit.
The congressman said he still supports Israel’s right to exist, but his language has grown harsher.
He has used the word “genocide.” He has endorsed cutting support for Iron Dome.
Last month, the same man who was once a target of pro-Israel political groups won the endorsement of an organization formed to oppose them. The arc of that trajectory tells you everything about how fast the ground is shifting under this issue.
Khanna emerged from his 90-minute detention with a piece of free advice for the Israeli government, delivered with the wry understatement that comes naturally to a man who has just been bullied by amateurs.
Detaining a long-shot presidential candidate, he said, is not how you build goodwill with the next American president, whoever that turns out to be.
The remark was clever, but it is worth pausing on the assumption behind it.
The congressman apparently believes there is a real chance that the next American president might be someone who looks at what happened on that road and sees a disgrace, not a distraction.
He might be right. That possibility, more than any diplomatic statement, explains why a congressman from California found himself stuck behind a settler’s car, waiting for soldiers to decide he had waited long enough.
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