The Democrats who are running to be the next governor of California gave “shocking” answers when asked if Israel is guilty of committing “genocide” in Gaza, according to former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican candidate in the race.
Making that accusation against the Jewish state is “offensive,” and “it’s obvious that it was a response to one of the most brutal atrocities in the last 100 years,” Hilton told JNS, of Israel’s reaction to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks.
Using the term “genocide” to “describe a legitimate act of self-defense is preposterous and offensive,” Hilton said.
When the nonprofit news site CalMatters asked the candidates if Israel is guilty of “genocide,” Hilton said simply “no,” per a video the site released earlier in the month.
Xavier Becerra, a former U.S. secretary of health and human services and the Democrat who has been leading in recent polls, told the site that Israel’s actions in Gaza “cannot be classified as within international norms” and that the Israeli prime minister “should answer for all he has done before the international community.”
Tom Steyer, a businessman running as a Democrat and another leading candidate in the polls, told CalMatters that it asked an “old question” and that the current issue is that the United States and Israel are “prosecuting a war against Iran that is hurting Californians.”
“It’s raised our gas prices. It’s raising our food prices. It’s raising our mortgage rates, and they’re taking $200 billion of our money and burning it, bombing someplace a world away for no reason that helps us, or that I can even understand,” he told the site.
Katie Porter, a former congresswoman and a Democrat, said that “there should be an investigation” and that “there has been enough evidence” for the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice to investigate the matter.
Both courts are based in The Hague. The former is the principal judicial arm of the United Nations, while the latter, which has issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is an independent body.
Chad Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff and a Republican, said in response to the “genocide” question that “we don’t know what happened there” and that people should “quit believing social media, quit believing just one news network or one frame of mind.”
“You are being led down a path to believe something that either is or is not true depending on the side,” he said.
Matt Mahan, mayor of San Jose and a Democrat, told CalMatters that “it’s not a word that I use” and that “we need to focus on what it will take to save lives there.”
“We’ve spent a lot of time fighting over the meaning of a word,” Mahan told the outlet. “What’s happened there is a human tragedy. Anytime you see children dying, you should be horrified. I know I’ve been horrified.”
Antonio Villaraigosa, a former Los Angeles mayor and former speaker of the state Assembly running as a Democrat, told the site that he doesn’t believe Israel has committed “genocide” in Gaza, but “some of what I’ve seen is excessive.” He added that he doesn’t support Netanyahu.
Tony Thurmond, state superintendent of public instruction and a Democrat, told CalMatters that he’s not qualified to say if Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza, but “what has happened to the Palestinian people, I think, has gone way too far.”
“We have to make sure that there needs to be ways to support the survivors and to bring in humanitarian aid and help to rebuild what has been destroyed and to create a real government for the Palestinian people,” he said.
Hilton told JNS that “it’s really shocking to me how deeply anti-Jew hate has infected the left in this country.”
“The fact that so many thoughtful, intelligent people—and that’s how I think of my Democrat opponents, however much we may disagree on policy and so on—can actually say these things is really shocking,” he said.
“It’s so obvious what happened. We don’t need to dress it up. We don’t need to engage in these ridiculous games,” he told JNS. “It’s all because they won’t confront the cancer within their party, which is where the core of anti-Jew hate these days seems to reside in America.”
‘Very serious risk’
As California’s June 2 primary approaches, Hilton is “encouraged that we continue to lead,” he told JNS.
“The fact that we seem to be generating a huge amount of grassroots energy that’s reflected in our fundraising, where we have a large and growing number of small donors,” he said. “You’re seeing it in the crowds coming to our town halls up and down the state.”
But Hilton thinks that there is a “very serious risk” of the remaining, undecided Democrat voters splitting “roughly equally” between Becerra and Steyer. That would leave two Democratic candidates in the general election due to California’s open primary system, where the top two vote-getters advance.
Hilton doesn’t think that is the likeliest scenario but believes it would be a “calamity.”
“It would mean not only that there’s then no chance for change in California, because we’ll have another four years of Democrat one-party rule, it’s also a calamity for all the other elections on the ballot in November,” he told JNS.
“If there’s no Republican in the governor’s race, that will massively depress Republican turnout,” he said. “That means you can kiss goodbye to any of the congressional seats that are being contested—that obviously affects the House majority—any chance of making progress in the state legislature, even the voter ID ballot initiative.”
The latter is an effort to require voters to present a government-issued identification card or the last four digits of such an identification card when mailing a ballot.
“It’s incredibly important that we have a Republican in the top two, and there’s a very simple way to make sure that that’s the case,” Hilton told JNS. “That’s for every Republican voter to realize how serious this is and to be real about the situation here.”
“Whatever Republicans may think of myself or the other Republican in the race, the time for that kind of evaluation is over,” he said. “We now just have to be very practical. There’s only one Republican, only one candidate for change who can make it in the top two, and that’s me.”
Hilton shared a message with JNS for Jews in the state.
“There’s only one candidate who’s going to be a reliable champion for the rights and safety of Jewish people in California,” he said.
