Newsom says US military support for Israel should be reconsidered:
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that critics have “appropriately” described Israel as an “apartheid state” and argued that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current leadership has given the United States no choice but to reconsider its military support.
His comments came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that President Donald Trump “preemptively” bombed Iran on Saturday because the administration “knew” that impending Israeli strikes on Iran would trigger “an attack on U.S. forces.”
Newsom was speaking at an event in Los Angeles to promote his new memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry,” when “Pod Save America” podcast moderator and co-host Jon Favreau asked whether the United States should reconsider military aid to Israel at some point “down the road.”
“It breaks my heart, because the current leadership in Israel is taking us down that path where I don’t think we have a choice in that consideration,” Newsom said, according to several major news outlets and images of the event posted on social media.
“Pod Save” moderator and co-host Tommy Vietor had asked about sentiment that had recently shifted against “the Netanyahu regime,” noting that “many Democrats” are beginning to feel that “it’s time to rethink the United States’ relationship with Israel.”
“Well, Bibi is making it easy right now, let’s talk about it,” Newsom said of Netanyahu. “But the Bibi thing is interesting, because she has her own internal problems: she’s trying to stay out of jail, there’s an election coming up, and she’s potentially on the ropes.”
The California Democrat continued: “You have hardliners who want to annex the West Bank. I mean, [political commentator and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas] Friedman and others appropriately speak of it as a kind of apartheid state.”
Friedman wrote in his Monday column for The New York Times that the Iran war could help Netanyahu win the next election, arguing that this would accelerate his plans to annex the West Bank, destroy Israel’s Supreme Court and “turn Israel into an apartheid state.”
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu/Getty Images
Newsom denounced that Israel and the United States have been discussing regime change in Iran, arguing that they have not been able to resolve “the Hamas issue” in Gaza despite having had several years to do so. The number of US military personnel killed in Iran on Tuesday rose to six.
Newsom continued to lament “that we are in this now regional war” as the apparent “resentment and corruption” emanating from the Trump administration continues to grow, adding that Trump and his newly formed Peace Board are part of another “conversation we need to have.”
Chaired by Trump himself, the board was supposedly formed for a small group of world leaders to oversee his plans for the future of Gaza. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, said last month that “people are not personally benefiting from this.” A permanent position costs a billion dollars.
Newsom then criticized this “peace” council with a pun that drew applause, arguing that a conversation about it must involve “the piece” that members like Kushner and US special envoy Steve Witkoff are “getting” as part of the group.