Gavin Newsom—GAVIN NEWSOM!—Calls Israel ‘Sort of an Apartheid State’

The Democrats’ ranking political weather vane has spoken. In a conversation with Jon Favreau on Pod Save America, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ventured onto what was for him new terrain, invoking the A-word—“apartheid”—to describe a nation that had once been the cynosure of American liberals’ eyes. He’d clearly ascertained, however, that this was terrain he could safely navigate.

In a Gallup poll released last Friday, more Americans (41 percent) said they sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis than the 36 percent who said they sympathize more with the Israelis. This marked the first time in Gallup’s years of polling when sympathy for the Palestinians outpolled sympathy for the Israelis. “From 2001 to 2025,” Gallup reported, “Israelis consistently held double-digit leads in Americans’ Middle East sympathies.”

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For anyone aspiring to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2028, this repudiation of the Netanyahu regime that has dominated Israel for most of this century is all but mandatory. Fully 65 percent of Democrats told Gallup they sympathize more with Palestinians, while just 17 percent said they sympathize more with Israelis. For anyone aspiring to win the November 2028 presidential election, that repudiation looks today to be a pretty good bet. Gallup reported that 41 percent of independents also sympathize more with Palestinians, which is 11 percentage points higher than those whose sympathies are more with the Israelis. Only Republicans maintain the pro-Israeli edge, by a lopsided 70 percent to 13 percent margin.

Newsom’s flip, in other words, has landed him square in the middle of Democrats’ worldview. That view and that flip will persist so long as Israel’s government maintains its overall policies. Newsom certainly didn’t repudiate Zionism as such; when asked about halting America’s longtime policy of providing military aid to Israel, he responded, “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.”

Newsom is one of those rare political animals whose funding base is so vast and secure that he could weather whatever torrent of AIPAC dollars could be hurled against him. One consequence of his new position might even be that it could make AIPAC’s funding of down-ticket candidates running in Democratic primaries this year politically toxic to Democratic voters if it’s sufficiently called out. The first test of that could come on March 17, when Illinois holds its primaries. AIPAC donors are funding candidates in four Democratic congressional primaries there. Now that the Democratic establishment’s presidential front-runner considers it all but obligatory to repudiate AIPAC’s fundamental orientation, the candidates whom AIPAC is opposing in the forthcoming primaries might just consider it safe to call out their AIPAC-backed opponents for their support of the savage ethnic cleansers whose rule AIPAC devotedly promotes.

The ground has shifted, as Newsom’s repositioning makes abundantly clear.

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