Gavin Newsom isn’t waffling on Israel — he’s voicing sensible ideas in an era of outrage
Questions about ‘Zionism’ and ‘apartheid’ tongue-tie the California governor
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks at the Vox Media Podcast Stage at SXSW on March 15 in Austin, Texas. Photo by Rick Kern/Getty Images for Vox Media
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman March 25, 2026
When California Gov. Gavin Newsom told Politico in an interview on Tuesday that he regretted using the term “apartheid” in reference to Israel earlier this month, I wasn’t at all surprised. Anyone who cared to listen to the podcast in which he supposedly made the accusation could understand that his critics were twisting the meaning of his less-than-articulate wording. (Israel, he said, is discussed by some “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state.”)
That’s what happens when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes, in the public eye, less about working toward a solution and more about scoring political points or drawing eyeballs to endless social media feeds.
Who cares what someone really said when I can score a point for my side? Who cares what a person really means when I can spin it to boost likes?
As Newsom explained on Tuesday, he used the term “apartheid” in reference to a New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, who warned that if Israel continues down the parth of annexing the West Bank, it runs the risk of becoming an apartheid regime.
“And that is a legitimate concern I have, that I share with Tom,” Newsom told Politico.
That is not a radical idea. It is, to borrow a cliche, an inconvenient truth that too many American Jews who are supportive of Israel refuse to confront.
Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank, advancing a longstanding goal of many members of the current Israeli government, would result in a state whose boundaries contain about 7 million Jews and 7 million Arabs. That would mean the loss of Israel’s Jewish identity, if all incorporated Arabs are given full rights. If they aren’t — at this point the much more likely scenario — it means apartheid.
The vast majority of American Jews, and Americans, support Israel as a Jewish democratic state. The “democratic” part of that is not optional. Apartheid nations, aside from being immoral, are pariah nations.
You know who else knew that?
David Ben Gurion, for one. Israel’s founding prime minister, right after the 1967 Six-Day War, got on the radio and said that Israel must not take control of the Palestinian territories, “or it risks becoming an apartheid state.”
Yitzhak Rabin reiterated that point in a 1976 interview, during his first term as prime minister. “I don’t think it’s possible to contain over the long term, if we don’t want to get to apartheid, a million and a half Arabs inside a Jewish state,” he said.
Many other more contemporary Israeli leaders share that concerns. Meir Dagan, former chief of the Mossad, said on Israeli TV in 2015 that “in the Palestinian arena,” Netanayhu’s “policy will lead … to apartheid.”
I understand that “Newsom calls Israel an apartheid state” is an alluring headline — both for some Israel-supporters, who’d prefer a 2028 Democratic presidential candidate who treats the “A” word as verboten, and for Israel haters looking to pile on. It certainly has more dramatic appeal than “Newsom’s thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are identical to Rabin’s.”
Yes, the governor could have expressed his views more coherently from the beginning. But anybody who spent a second parsing his word salad would know what he meant — and that he was dead on.
Unfortunately, we live in a world that monetizes rage. That’s why, even when Newsom set out to repair the damage from his first interview, he refused to identify as a Zionist.
“I revere the state of Israel,” he answered when asked if he considered himself a Zionist. “I’m proud to support the state of Israel. I deeply, deeply oppose Bibi Netanyahu’s leadership, his opposition to the two-state solution and deeply oppose how he is indulging the far-right as it relates to what’s going on in the West Bank.”
The word “Zionist” itself has become rage-bait, as much if not more so than “apartheid,” and Newsom refused to take it.
To some, “Zionism” refers to the current policies of the current government, which in fact many Israelis and American Jews find anathema to, well, Zionism. (That sense may be part of why only a small fraction of American Jews identify with the word “Zionist,” despite maintaining a strong sense of investment in the state of Israel.) To others it means nothing less than the expulsion and oppression of Palestinians.
To others still it means Jewish sovereignty “from the river to the sea,” or the right of Jews to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.
Better to describe what you think about Israel than adopt a label that will be defined for you. And what Newson was saying was exactly what needs to be said: if you support Israel, you must oppose the creeping annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, which Meir Dagan, the former Mossad director, said would spell, “the end of the Zionist dream.”
Too bad that all the chatter around what Newsom believes obscured the eminent reasonableness of what he actually said.
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