Sacramento – The democratic divisions compared to the bloody conflict in progress in the Middle East were exhibited this week while the candidates for the post of governor made their land of politically active Jewish Californians.
Five of the candidates who arise to replace Governor Gavin Newsom, who cannot appear in 2026 due to the limits of the mandate, massively agreed on the horror of the attack on Hamas against the Israelis on October 7, 2023, while moving the death which followed tens of thousands of Palestinians, including women and children.
But there were differences in their views of the response of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the terrorist attack, which, according to Jewish state authorities, caused the death of around 1,200 people, and 251 people taken hostage, including certain American citizens. Israeli efforts have resulted in more than 52,000 gasans, according to the region’s Ministry of Health, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
The former mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, raised the terrorist attack on Israel most directly when he spoke Tuesday at the Rally of the Jewish public affairs committee in the state capital.
“For me, October 7 was a day that will live in me and a day that will be seized in my memory,” he told hundreds of participants. “To see brutalized women and children, the elderly, people who are unarmed, killed in front of their family.”
He said in an interview later that he was not a supporter of Netanyahu, he does not believe that Israel’s response went too far.
“Listen, I am well aware of what Hamas does. Hamas puts their ammunition in hospitals. They put their rockets in buildings. They built infrastructure in places, daring the Israelis to take them back,” said Villaraigosa. “No one likes to see the number of innocent people who have been killed. But I put it especially on Hamas.”
During the conference, the former representative Katie Porter spoke of the growing anti -Semitism of the nation.
“So we must be honest and say that it is scary at the moment of being a Jewish person. It is frightening to be American in many cases, because we see increasing hatred, and that hatred has been targeted in particular on the Jewish people and in Jewish institutions,” said on Monday, pointing the house of Pennsylvania fire fires.
Porter, professor of law at UC Irvine, added that although it favors the protection of freedom of expression, “there is a line above which you cannot go”, when the word endangers.
Although governors do not develop foreign policy, the voice of California is influential due to the large number of Jewish and Muslims residents who live here – the second largest public in the nation for the two religious groups.
In addition, the conflict and support of the United States in Israel disrupted democratic policy in the state and across the country, not only among the members of the two religious groups, but also with young and liberal voters.
A few weeks after the terrorist attack, around 1,000 demonstrators closed an agreement from the California Democratic Party in Sacramento, calling the president of the time, Biden “Genocide Joe”. The incident occurred a few days after demonstrators clashed with the police outside the headquarters of the National Democratic Committee.
The administration’s response led some Democrats to turn against the party in the 2024 presidential election. Almost 70% of DEARBORN voters, Michigan, traditionally a democratic bastion that houses the largest concentration of Muslims in the country, voted for President Trump or the candidate of the Green Party Jill Stein last year.
The gap could reappear at the Convention of the State Democratic Party in Anaheim later this month.
The appearance of this week of five candidates to the governor underlines the importance of Jewish voters, who tend to vote at higher rates than average Americans, according to Brandeis University. Everyone talked about their links with the Jewish community.
The former state controller Betty Yee, whose husband is a rabbi, said that she thought that the governor of California can help build bridges between the various communities of this state.
“I’m just going to speak as a person who cares about our common humanity; as a humanitarian, I cannot spread out what happened,” she said in an interview, adding that Netayahu has exceeded.
The experiences of her husband directing interconfessional dialogues became more difficult in the aftermath of the attack.
“October 7 really put a lot of break up on these relationships, and it is finally in a way starting to go … to go ahead and understand who is the enemy,” she said. “Well, the enemy is anyone who is going to be for insane killings.”
Supt. Tony Tony Turmond public education, whose family has converted to Hebrew Pentecostalism when he was a child, said his agency had to intervene in certain districts from kindergarten to 12th year on discussions on the conflict and its effects on students.
“Teachers and educators at the end of the day must refrain from giving students their personal point of view and telling them what they should feel, and this has happened in some cases, and this caused these districts in difficulty,” he said in an interview.
Current events should be moments of learning, he said.
“We have a framework for the history of the social sciences which says that we should use the events of the world life as an opportunity to teach,” said Thurmond. “But the moment when whoever begins to give his personal point of view for any team, so it went too far. And what he led was experiences where Jewish students felt targeted and isolated, and finally, some left these districts.”
The former secretary of health and social services, Xavier Becerra, held the Jewish community as a paragon for what the state should endeavor in difficult times.
“When I visit communities through the State, I hear a very familiar concern that our policy is too broken, our systems too slow, our future too uncertain. But I do not believe to yield,” he said on Tuesday morning. “We cannot choose the challenges of our time, but we can choose how we answer them. The Jewish community of California has responded on this subject repeatedly, with action, with plea, with hearts. ”
Villaraigosa discussed his childhood in Boyle Heights, growing alongside the Latinos, Jews and Americans of Asian origin, as well as the strong support he received from the Jewish Angelenos during his campaigns. Porter tackled his relationship with the Jewish community of Orange County, including the holding of his first town hall in a synagogue there.
Lieutenant-Governor Eleni Kounalakis was to appear at the conference, but had a time conflict due to a family business.
California Daily Newspapers
