NEWSOM PLAYS TO JEW-HATING DEMOCRATIC PARTY BASE

Gavin Newsom advocates regime change for Israel, not Iran

To place the Jewish state in the same category as a monstrous regime like the Islamic Republic is to enter a morally inverted world. 

 

By Ben Cohen 

 

JNS

Mar 6, 2026

 

 

Gavin Newsom likens Israel to ‘apartheid state,’ questions future military support

 

There is a great deal of anger swirling around California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s description of Israel “as sort of an apartheid state.”

That anger is entirely justified. The smear that Israel has duplicated the cruel Jim Crow-style segregation in the U.S. South that prevailed in South Africa for most of the previous century was originated at the height of the Cold War by the Soviet Union, as an ideological justification for both its alignment with Israel’s Arab enemies and its persecution of its domestic Jewish population.

But rather lost in the furor is the fact that Newsom said something arguably far worse at the same event where he uttered the “apartheid” libel in making the case to end U.S. military aid to Israel.

As Newsom speculated about what motivates Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—pointing to his legal woes and Israel’s looming national election—he suddenly pivoted to the subject of the combined U.S. and Israeli military operation against Iran.

Here is what he said: “They couldn’t even—I mean, we’re talking about regime change? For two years, they haven’t even been able to solve the Hamas question in Israel. So this is, I mean, you know, I wanna be careful here, but, you know, in so many ways, that influence in the context of the conversation of where Trump ultimately landed on this is pretty damn self-evident.”

These sentences are hardly eloquent, so one has to look closely to discern the meaning.

What stands out is the latter half of those remarks. The comments about Hamas are so vague as to be meaningless and could even be taken as criticism of the Israel Defense Forces for not going far enough in “solving” what Newsom called “the Hamas question in Israel.” But then he jumped back to the question of regime change in Iran.

There’s that telling whistle at the outset—“you know, I wanna be careful here.” That’s a form of words we’ve become accustomed to hearing whenever Jews are topic of conversation. What it really means is, “I’m about to invoke a stereotype about Jewish power, and I expect to be called an antisemite as a result.” Among many listeners, such wording tends to elicit a sympathetic rolling of the eyes or shrug of the shoulders, as if to say, “right, I hear you, you just want to tell the truth, but it’s so hard to do that when it’s about the Jews.”

Then we get to the stereotype itself: “that influence in the context of the conversation of where Trump ultimately landed on this is pretty damn self-evident.”

Again, these words aren’t connected particularly elegantly, but their meaning is clear. The “influence” is not spelled out, but it’s obvious that this is a reference to Netanyahu and Israel (and very likely their supporters outside) in the form of the nefarious “Jewish Lobby.”

It was an influence, Newsom says, that swayed U.S. President Donald Trump into attacking Iran instead of fretting about Israel’s actions in Gaza. For emphasis, he goes on to add that “this is pretty damn self-evident.” In other words, it is unarguable, so if you do argue with that contention, then you are automatically under suspicion.

Like the “apartheid” slur, the argument that the Jewish state dragged the United States into the current war against Iran’s vicious regime is based on distortions and half-truths rooted in the enduring myths about Jewish power and influence. Indeed, according to Trump, it was the other way around; he decided when to launch the attack, and the Israelis fell in line.

It’s correct that Israel’s primary concern is its own security and survival, as would be the case with any other state faced with an enemy sworn to its destruction and determined to obtain nuclear weapons. But Israel’s calculus is narrower than that of the United States. As the world’s main power, America is also concerned with, among other items, secure energy supplies, Iranian-backed terrorism against soft American targets in the Middle East and the well-being of its Arab allies, many of whom have spent at least the past decade praying for U.S.-led action against the Islamic Republic in private while distancing themselves in public.

All this was as much, if not more, influential over U.S. decision-making as Israel’s own imperatives were. Moreover, Israel is not asking Washington to fight alone on its behalf. With the region’s best military, the Jewish state is a full partner in the operation—its fighter jets taking part in risky missions against targets that include the Tehran regime’s nuclear facilities and its infrastructure of repression in the form of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the hated Basij militia and other allied institutions.

Newsom also caused offense by bracketing Israel’s democratically elected government with a theocracy that permits child marriage, tortures dissidents, and, in January, murdered some 30,000 anti-regime protesters in the space of a few days—and very likely more. In two years of war in Gaza, up to 75,000 people were killed, many of them Hamas terrorists. The Iranian regime managed to eliminate at least half of that number in a fraction of that time, doing so while looking into the whites of the eyes of unarmed protesters.

To place Israel in the same category as a monstrous regime like this one—to hint, as Newsom did, that Israel should be a candidate for “regime change” in the way that Iran is—is to enter a morally inverted world. More practically, it is another ominous sign that the Democratic Party, once the political home of some of Israel’s greatest supporters in government and diplomacy, is steering itself in the same direction as left-wing parties in Europe.

It is also a sign of the Palestinians’ success in elevating their cause into the center of the progressive consciousness to the exclusion of all else, nurturing terms like “genocide” and “apartheid” as sticks with which to beat Israel. At the same time, that strategy has won them no material benefits, least of all a state, while the alignment with Iran’s clerical regime does them no favors in much of the Sunni Arab world.

For as long as the Democratic Party is dominated by those who believe that the Palestinian cause is the only international cause that matters, forcing those in its ranks who still support Israel to sound apologetic and defensive, it cannot be regarded as a trustworthy partner in the quest for peace in the Middle East. Such a peace must encompass the region with all its nationalities, minorities, religions and languages—not just the Palestinians—to be worthy of the word.