No one has ever launched a presidential campaign on the message that things are basically fine. The product a candidate sells is emergency, and the cure he offers is himself. Rahm Emanuel, doing everything a 2028 hopeful does short of filing the paperwork, understands this mechanism better than any man alive. He wrote its operating manual back in 2008: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

So when Emanuel stood at Tel Aviv University on Wednesday to announce that the alliance between Washington and Jerusalem cannot survive in its present form, that Israel has turned itself into a “territorial pariah,” that its sole diplomatic gain in three years is Somaliland, that settlers and the banks financing them should be sanctioned, and that salvation lies in a 23-state solution administered by the Arab League, he was doing what candidates do.

Within hours, the angrier precincts of the pro-Israel commentariat reached for the ugliest word in the Jewish political vocabulary. The response is as lazy as it is wrong. Emanuel began his visit at his uncle’s grave on the Mount of Olives, a fighter who fell in the underground, and his Jerusalem-born father fought in the War of Independence. Whatever else the man is, a collaborator he is not, and the Israel-hater label misses just as badly. His condition is more ordinary and more forgivable: the occupational disease of every political hopeful, the compulsion to call the existing situation unsustainable. A candidate who concedes that matters are tolerable has explained why nobody needs him. If the patient is healthy, what is the doctor doing on stage?

I say this without much malice, because weighing in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a perfectly legitimate pursuit; I do it myself. I have argued before, and again more recently, that there will never be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan, and that the only paths toward genuinely ending it are unorthodox: the slow growth of a new, non-eliminationist and non-Palestinian Arab identity in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria, followed by integration with Egypt and Jordan; a generously funded program of voluntary emigration; perhaps a Palestinian state built elsewhere entirely. Each of these is unlikely. Each is still likelier than the two-state incantation coming true. And the likeliest outcome of all, by a wide margin, is that the status quo, or some variation of it, simply carries on.

Here Emanuel and I briefly touch, because buried in the address was a remarkable concession: he called the two-state solution a discredited path. Savor that sentence. Bill Clinton’s Middle East hand, Barack Obama’s chief of staff, standing in Tel Aviv and declaring the holy grail of three decades of American diplomacy dead. Coming from a man who spent those decades pursuing it, that is not a small thing to say out loud, and he deserves credit for saying it.

But having buried one fantasy, he commissioned a larger one. In Emanuel’s telling, the 21 members of the Arab League will now build a Palestinian governing authority that embraces the Jewish bond with this land, stops paying salaries to the murderers of Jews, and rewrites the textbooks. These are the same governments that expelled some 300,000 Palestinians from Kuwait in 1991, still bar the residents of Lebanon’s refugee camps from dozens of professions, and whose Hashemite branch turned artillery on the fedayeen in 1970. A speech that opens by reminding Israelis they offered sovereignty for security three times, and were repaid with Dizengoff, Mahane Yehuda and the Second Intifada, closes by proposing a fourth round with more flags at the table. Multiplying the parties who must perform a miracle does not improve its odds.

We have heard this precise certitude before, from a man of the same party and the same seniority. In December 2016, John Kerry stood at the Saban Forum and lectured his audience that there would be “no advance and separate peace with the Arab world” without the Palestinians — a hard reality, he assured them, that everybody needed to understand. Four years later the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan signed the Abraham Accords, and the Arab world made its separate peace without waiting for the Palestinians or asking Kerry’s leave. Saudi normalization, when it comes, will be a question of terms rather than principle. The lesson is not that Emanuel is uniquely foolish; it is that the whole school of thought he........

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