This article was first published in Haaretz.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, currently considered the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, offered his sharpest criticism of Israel to date, likening it to “sort of an apartheid state.”
In a March 3 conversation with Pod Save America host Jon Favreau, a former Obama staffer and leading Democratic Party influencer, Newsom leveled criticism on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying, “He’s got his own domestic issues. He’s trying to stay out of jail,” referring to the prime minister’s ongoing corruption trial.
“He’s got an election coming up [in or before October]. He’s potentially on the ropes. He’s got folks — the hard line — that want to annex the West Bank,” Newsom said, adding that some like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman “are talking about it appropriately as sort of an apartheid state.”
Newsom, who has long maintained a noncontroversial approach to Israel, has increasingly sharpened his rhetoric about Netanyahu and the influence of pro-Israel organizations such as AIPAC on the U.S. political system as his political profile has grown.
Newsom’s recent criticism of Israel, however, marks both a new level from the 2028 frontrunner and, perhaps, a reading of what Democratic voters may find ahead of the presidential primary.
When asked if the U.S. should reconsider military support for Israel, Newsom said that “it breaks my heart, because the current leadership in Israel is walking us down that path where I don’t think you have a choice about that consideration.”
“To say this is in America’s interest — at a time when affordability is at crisis levels, with an administration that got elected saying this is the opposite of what they would ever consider doing — we’re now in this regional war, all the grift and corruption that marks a huge part of this, this Board of Peace and the piece the Witkoff family and Kushner are getting,” he added, to applause, referencing U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and the President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Newsom also attacked the premise of the Iran war, pointing to Israel’s failures to achieve a decisive military victory during the Gaza war. “We’re talking about regime change?” he said. “For two years, they haven’t even been able to solve the Hamas question in Israel.”
Newsom drew causality between Netanyahu’s current state of affairs and Trump’s decision to launch war, saying “that influence, in the context of where Trump landed on this, is pretty damn self-evident.”
His comments reflect a growing attack from both Democrats and “America First” Republicans, who all accused the Trump administration of allowing Israel to drag it into war. Both U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Speaker Mike Johnson had originally noted that the U.S. attacked Iran as a way to preempt any Iranian response to an inevitable Israeli first strike.
Since their comments, however, the White House and senior U.S. officials — including Trump himself — denied that Israel pushed the U.S. into war, insisting that Rubio’s original comments had been taken out of context and that the U.S. made the decision to strike at the timing of its choice based on its own calculations and considerations.