Dem Rep Tried to Bait Israeli Authorities Into Confrontation with Him - Israeli Ambassador Has One Big Question
This story doesn’t sound completely kosher.
California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, a self-proclaimed “long shot” for the presidential nomination of a political party that increasingly supports Islamist terrorists, is apparently trying to bolster his credentials with the anti-Semite left by provoking a confrontation with the government of Israel.
And in an interview Sunday, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. raised a question about what else Khanna might have been trying to achieve.
As The New York Times reported Saturday, Khanna was on a three-day trip to Israel last week when his vehicle was halted by armed Israelis in the West Bank region.
“I felt powerless in that situation, which is not an easy thing, as I have a lot of privilege in life,” Khanna told the newspaper. “Imagine how people feel every day, Palestinians under the occupation, if they could make an American congressperson feel powerless for 90 minutes.”
If it was ever true at all — which it probably wasn’t — that feeling of being “powerless” clearly didn’t last long. The article closed with Khanna making what amounted to a brazen threat to the Israeli government.
“Free advice to the Israelis: It’s not a good idea to detain long-shot presidential candidates,” he said. “Not how you’re going to build goodwill with the next American president, whoever that is.”
To back up his story, Khanna posted a video to the social media platform X — a video lasting all of four seconds.
Israeli settlers, brandishing American made M4s, detained me & other Americans on my trip to Palestine.
When the IDF arrived, they sided with the settlers & continued our detention.
They made a huge mistake.
You will be hearing more soon. https://t.co/rZw8bRAn64 pic.twitter.com/4z50Ye4I7K
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) July 11, 2026
Not surprisingly, the video showed exactly nothing in the way of context. But Michael Leiter, Israeli Ambassador to the United States, offered a little context of his own in an interview on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”
And surprisingly — shockingly — Khanna’s story didn’t exactly ring with truth.
Rep. Ro Khanna said his office alerted the U.S. embassy in Israel of his visit to the West Bank, where he said he was detained by Israeli settlers, but Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Dr. Michael Leiter tells @margbrennan, “There was not an alert. There was a question about visas,… pic.twitter.com/CYpr2vaCe7
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) July 12, 2026
First, Leiter said, the congressman ignored previous protocols and declined to coordinate his visit with Israeli officials. Visiting with survivors of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel clearly wouldn’t have suited Khanna’s leftist worldview.
Second, Leiter pointed out that the incident that so terrified Khanna and left him “powerless” took place on Wednesday, yet he did not see fit to make the information public until Saturday — the same day he posted a video to X announcing his return to the United States.
Considering that, according to The New York Times, one of the newspaper’s own photographers witnessed what the article called the “interaction,” there doesn’t seem to be a reason for a newsworthy event like that to be held for two days.
In the “Face the Nation” interview, according to a transcript, Brennan suggested that the Khanna camp had wanted to hold the news until he had left the country.
What, did he think Israel was going to hold him hostage, the way Hamas held American citizens hostage (with murderous results) after taking them prisoner in their 2023 blitzkrieg?
Or, as Leiter suggested, did Khanna have maybe another agenda?
The California rep was one of the Democratic Party’s most outspoken supporters of Graham Platner, the disgraced former Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine.
Platner on Wednesday released a video announcing his withdrawal from the race after being accused of rape. On Friday, he filed paperwork to make that official.
So, Saturday would have been a fine time for Khanna to change the subject entirely.
“Maybe this had more something to do with his support of — of Graham Platner beforehand and the difficulties he had with that? And trying to shift the focus to something else, perhaps?” Leiter told Brennan. “I’m asking a question.”
Leiter then took a shot at Khanna’s political aspirations — announced with his trip to Israel in the first place, then underscored with his comment about Israel building “goodwill with the next American president, whoever that is.”
“This whole incident is unfortunate,” Leiter said. “And if — if somebody, it’s kind of interesting that somebody wants to declare a presidential run by running off to Israel? Not strange?”
At 49, Khanna has grown up in a century when the Democratic Party has been moving increasingly to the left — and he’s clearly moving with it.
In 2026, that means unremitting hostility to Israel — and Khanna can play his supposed “detention” by “settlers” for all it’s worth.
(What it’s actually worth is about as much as Joe Biden’s claim that he was “arrested” trying to visit Nelson Mandela.)
But smart Democrats looking at the Platner episode might think it’s smart to ask some questions about Khanna, too.
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