I wonder if the Rahm Emanuel story was not leaked to make Jewish voters feel more gemutlich (that's kin, in German/Yiddish, I believe) about Obama. Emanuel's father was apparently in the Irgun, the Zionist movement that used terrorist methods to blow up the King David Hotel in '46 and expel all the Palestinians from Jaffa, and that played a role in the massacre at Deir Yassin.

From the NY Times on 3 Emanuel sons:

All are the sons of an Israeli father, now a 70-year-old Chicago

pediatrician, who passed secret codes for Menachem Begin's underground, Iregun, [I assume this is misspelled] and an American Jewish mother, who worked in the civil rights

movement and owned, briefly, a Chicago rock-and-roll club.

From the Washington Times in 1993:

Rahm Emanuel, a presidential assistant named by his Irgun father for

the last Israeli soldier to fall in the 1948 battle for Jerusalem, was

designated chief impresario of the Israeli-Palestinian signing on the

White House lawn.

How does Rahm Emanual feel about dividing Jerusalem, and the right of return?

Alas, the Israeli narrative of national liberation (the Nakba, as

Palestinians will tell you) is intertwined with the highest reaches of

American politics. Douglas Feith's father was in Betar, the youth

movement founded by Ze'ev Jabotinksy, the expansionist Zionist. I seek a national discussion of the issue: Are you a Zionist? How does that affect your views on American policy in the Middle East?