He has been nicknamed "Rahmbo" for his hard-charging style. He was the inspiration for the character Josh Lyman on the TV show The West Wing. He was torn between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. And now the blogosphere, including those on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli issue, has been busy reacting to the news he will be returning to the White House.
Rahm Emanuel, 48, an Illinois congressman who spent eight years working in the Clinton administration, has been tapped by Mr Obama to be his chief of staff. His good friend from the Clinton White House, George Stephanopoulos, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, said on his blog: "Obama likes the fact that Emanuel knows policy, knows politics, knows Capitol Hill. He has told associates that he knows that Emanuel will 'have his back'."
A prodigious fundraiser, Mr Emanuel, the son of an Israeli-born paediatrician and an American Jewish mother, has represented Illinois' 5th district in the US Congress since 2003. He has risen to the No 4 position in the House of Representatives as chairman of the Democratic Caucus. Mr Emanuel once told The New York Times that "fund-raising for the last 100 years - go back and read the Lincoln books - is an unseemly business".
But he has revelled in it during much of his political career, from raising money for Paul Simon's election to the Senate from Illinois in 1984 to joining then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton's presidential campaign as a fundraiser in 1991. Mr Emanuel's ties to the Middle East are profoundly personal. His family changed its surname in 1933 as a tribute to an uncle, Emanuel Auerbach, who was killed in a fight with Arabs in Jerusalem. His father was a member of Menachim Begin's Irgun, the ultranationalist Jewish movement that operated between 1931-1948, battling for the creation of a Jewish state.
As youths, Mr Emanuel and his two brothers went to summer camp in Israel, and he returned to work as a civilian volunteer at an Israeli army base during the first US-Iraq war. Mr Emanuel, one of 30 Jewish members in the US House, has said that one of his proudest moments during the Clinton administration came during the 1993 White House Oslo Accords signing ceremony, which he planned, between Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority president.
Israeli media yesterday glowed about his getting the job, with the newspaper Maariv headlining its article, "Our man in the White House", Agence France-Presse reported. "It is obvious he will exert influence on the president to be pro-Israeli," Mr Emanuel's father told the paper. "My greatest fear about Emanuel is that he might perpetuate a 'false choice' orientation towards Israel in Middle East affairs that he's going to have to compensate for and get under control," said Steven Clemons, the founder of the Washington Note website and the director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation.
"There are no rational alternatives in the Middle East than actually delivering on a Palestinian state and finally putting the Middle East peace business out of business," he said "Emanuel needs to prove his judiciousness by not pre-empting serious progress in Israel-Palestine affairs and not encouraging Barack Obama to make the mistake of trying to define his presidency by exploiting some national security conflict."
The Arab American Institute has consistently given Mr Emanuel a mixed grade regarding his votes in Congress on issues of concern to its members. But the institute did note in the summer of 2007 that Mr Emanuel was the co-signer, along with Ray Lahood, a Lebanese-American congressman, of a letter to Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, urging her to find a safe place for students in Gaza to complete their university exams.
Mr Emanuel has also spoken out on the violence among Palestinian rivals. "Fatah and Hamas are tearing the Palestinian area of the Gaza strip apart in what they call a political rivalry, and the Palestinian people are paying a price for Palestinian violence," he said in 2007 on the House floor. Immediately after leaving the Clinton White House, Mr Emanuel worked as an investment banker, where he earned US$16 million (Dh59m), The Times reported.
He married Amy Rule in 1994, and the couple have three children: Zachariah, 11, Ilana, 10, and Leah, 8. @Email:rpretorius@thenational.ae