Ro Khanna’s Publicity Stunt in Israel
A quick note before we get to Khanna: for readers who like to accuse others of living in an information bubble, it’s worth actually knowing the history behind the conflict he’s now building a campaign around. I laid out that background in Before You Ask for a Palestinian State, Define What You’re Asking For. Worth a read before the next paragraph.
The Ambush That Wasn’t
Ro Khanna wants you to believe he was ambushed. Armed settlers, a blocked road, soldiers who “sided” against an American congressman — the kind of scene that writes its own headline. And for a few days last week, it did: outlets from Al Jazeera to NPR ran with Khanna’s account of being held in the occupied West Bank, cast as a Democrat brave enough to see the occupation “firsthand.”
There’s just one problem. When NPR’s Ailsa Chang asked him directly whether Israel’s ambassador was right that he’d refused an offer to coordinate his visit, Khanna didn’t dispute it. He agreed with it. He simply didn’t want the coordination — didn’t want to meet with Israeli officials, didn’t want his trip filtered through anyone but the Palestinian activists who organized it, with a J Street-affiliated staffer along for the ride.
A Convenient Witness
It wasn’t just Palestinian activists and a J Street aide riding along, either. A New York Times photographer was there too — not incidentally, but as the source outlet Khanna’s office chose to break the story through in the first place. The Times reported the initial account on a Saturday, sourced almost entirely to Khanna’s own staff, with their photographer’s presence offered up as the corroborating detail. CBS, PBS, and NBC all picked up their coverage citing the Times’ reporting as the anchor.
That is not what skeptical journalism looks like. That is a campaign press shop handing a friendly outlet an exclusive, and the outlet running with it.
The Megaphone, Not the Referee
Here’s what’s conspicuously absent: any real Times follow-up giving comparable weight to the other side. Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter’s detailed rebuttal — that Khanna was offered in-depth coordination and refused it, that his group entered a closed military zone without permission, that no one was ever threatened — ran in the Jerusalem Post, Fox News, the Washington Times, JTA, and NewsNation. U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee’s “stunt” accusation and Israeli police’s account of body-camera footage showing a calm, procedural warning made the rounds everywhere except, as far as I could find, back in the paper that broke the story -- the NY Times.
Days later, Khanna got an opinion platform to restate and expand his version of events — invoking “apartheid,” tying the episode to his push to block U.S. arms sales to Israel, casting himself as a truth-teller undone only by Israeli power. That piece ran at MS NOW, MSNBC’s outlet, giving him a second friendly megaphone before the other side’s account had even finished making the rounds.
The Real Story Behind the Story
None of this requires Israel to be beyond criticism, and none of it requires pretending the West Bank is a simple place. It requires only noticing that Khanna’s own words, on the record, concede the central fact his critics have been pointing to: he chose not to de-escalate the risk. He chose the version of the trip most likely to produce a story. And when you set out looking for a story instead of the truth, you tend to find exactly the one you brought with you — and the outlets willing to print it without asking too many questions.
What changed in the two years since a pre-October 7 Khanna voted for Israel aid packages and met warmly with Netanyahu and Bennett wasn’t the war. It was Khanna’s map of the Democratic primary electorate. He has said outright that he’s eyeing 2028, and that Palestinian rights will be “central” to that campaign.
The West Bank trip wasn’t a detour from that project. It was the project, in miniature: court a confrontation by skipping the coordination that might have prevented one, bring the camera crew along either way, then use whatever resulted — and a sympathetic press — as a launching pad for the exact rhetoric his prospective primary voters want to hear.
He Should Have Seen This Coming
None of what happened at Khirbet Zanuta was unpredictable, and that’s precisely the point. Khanna wasn’t wandering into unfamiliar terrain — he’d toured the West Bank before, in 2022, as part of a Pelosi-led delegation.
Add to that a trip deliberately built around Palestinian activists, with no Israeli government coordination and no military escort by design, and you have all the ingredients for exactly the kind of confrontation that occurred. When Fox anchor Turner pressed him on whether he really didn’t expect entering a restricted area without coordination to get his group stopped, Khanna’s answer had two parts: first, a flat denial — “It was not an area that was restricted by the military” — then a fallback to precedent: “American congresspeople had been there before.”
Turner cut him off on the second point with the detail he’d skipped: those members of Congress went “with prior coordination.” That’s the whole ballgame. Congress members visit the West Bank regularly — through AIPAC-sponsored trips, official CODELs, staff delegations — and virtually all of it involves advance coordination as a matter of routine practice. Even Rashida Tlaib’s contentious 2019 attempt to visit her family involved Israel formally engaging with her office, not silence followed by a roadside standoff. Khanna wasn’t citing precedent for what he did. He was citing precedent for something else entirely and hoping nobody would notice the difference.
A member of Congress who’d already been to the West Bank before, touring one of the most volatile stretches of the territory alongside activists rather than officials, made a choice about how much friction he was willing to court. What followed wasn’t an ambush. Every ingredient in it — no Israeli coordination, a village with a known history of settler attacks, Palestinian activists instead of officials, a Times photographer along for the ride — was a deliberate choice Khanna made himself. He wasn’t betting on danger. He was betting on odds: that a Congressional visit — under a camera, with State Department awareness, in a confrontation type that has produced tense standoffs before but not fatalities — was alarming enough to generate the story without the kind of risk he couldn’t survive politically or otherwise. He didn’t control what the settlers or soldiers would do. He controlled every choice that put him in a position to find out. That’s not an accident. It’s a wager, and it paid off exactly as designed. He was ready to capitalize on it within hours: PBS and other outlets confirm he sent a fundraising email that same day, turning the episode into a line about what “life is like for Palestinians who have no smartphones, no security, and no national platform” — sent, as those same reports noted in the same breath, by a man who is exploring a run for president in 2028.
The Scripted Detail
There’s one phrase Khanna reached for again and again describing the men who stopped him: American-made. To the Times, the settlers were carrying “M4s, an American-made machine gun.” On X, they were “brandishing American made M4s.” He repeated the description to Reuters, and folded the same logic into a separate line about IDF soldiers funded by “my tax dollars.” That’s not a detail that slipped out once under stress. It’s a phrase that showed up in at least four different retellings, across four different platforms, worded almost identically each time — the mark of a line written down before the story was ever told out loud.
The function is transparent enough. “American-made” converts a personal grievance into a policy argument: not just that Khanna had an unpleasant hour, but that American taxpayers armed the people responsible for it. That happens to be the exact argument behind the arms-sales restrictions he was already pushing before he ever set foot in Zanuta. And the label isn’t even inaccurate — under the Foreign Military Financing rules that govern U.S. aid, the large majority of Israel’s assistance has always had to be spent on American-made weapons, and a longstanding exception letting Israel spend some of it on its own domestic defense industry is being phased out entirely by 2028. So “American-made” is technically true of most Israeli military hardware, aid-funded or not. But Khanna isn’t an average American discovering that fact in the moment — he’s a member of the House Armed Services Committee who has spent years pushing legislation to restrict arms sales to Israel specifically. He knew the FMF mechanics cold before he ever set foot in Zanuta. That’s not a spontaneous observation. It’s a rehearsed cue, delivered by someone who understood exactly what it would do the moment he said it. What it still isn’t is relevant to what actually happened on that road — a settler carrying a locally made rifle could have blocked the same van just as effectively. The point was never the rifle. It was the label.
Following, Not Leading
Khanna would like his sudden conversion (since 2024) to anti-Israel views to read as moral clarity, arrived at independently, ahead of his party. The polling tells a different story: he’s not out in front of Democratic opinion on Israel. He’s chasing it.
Multiple national polls now show the same basic result: a majority of Democratic voters say their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis — a reversal from where the party stood for most of the last decade. Most Democrats now also say they oppose continued U.S. aid to Israel. The shift is sharpest among younger voters, the exact demographic any Democrat eyeing a 2028 primary needs to win.
None of that makes Khanna wrong on the merits — plenty of people hold these views for reasons that have nothing to do with electoral math, and a politician can genuinely change his mind while also moving with his voters; those aren’t mutually exclusive. But the timing is hard to ignore: his “evolution” from AIPAC-friendly Democrat to leading Israel critic in Congress tracks his party’s base almost perfectly, arriving right on schedule as a presidential campaign starts to take shape. When conviction and electoral incentive point in exactly the same direction at exactly the same moment, it’s fair to ask which one is doing the driving.
Let’s Call an Opportunist an Opportunist
Khanna still insists he believes in Israel’s right to exist, that he’s no enemy of Zionism, that this is all in service of a “two-state solution” he’s for. Fine — take him at his word on the label. But labels aren’t the same as behavior, and the behavior on display in Zanuta was that of a man auditioning for a primary, not a legislator working a policy problem. The next American president, he told Israel’s paper Haaretz, will demand the arrest of violent settlers. Maybe. But the next American president will also, presumably, know the difference between diplomacy and choreography — and won’t need a closed military zone, a Times photographer, and a friendly editor to make a point he’d already decided to make before he landed.
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