(Oct. 9, 2026 \/ JNS)\n <\/p>\n
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who counts supporters of Israel among his biggest source of campaign cash, said that the Jewish state deserved to share the blame with U.S. President Donald Trump for the Iran war.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne clear issue that New Jerseyans are paying for is that Israel and the United States decided to go to war with Iran,\u2019\u2019 the two-term Democrat said during a debate Thursday with Republican challenger Justin Murphy, a former local official.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is going to go down in history as one of the most colossally stupid things the president has ever done,\u201d Booker said.<\/p>\n
He said the Iranian regime is more extreme than its predecessors, American soldiers have been killed, billions of dollars that could have been spent to address domestic problems paid for this war instead, the conflict pushed up gasoline prices and the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe and Israel rushed into this war with no conceivable end game, and it\u2019s gotten worse,\u2019\u2019 Booker said of Trump. \u201cThis president is a foreign policy disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n
Murphy defended the decision to go to war and said that the Iranian regime needed to be blocked from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.<\/p>\n
He said Trump should finish the job.<\/p>\n
\u201cMr. President, get your cowboy hat on and go out there and kick some a** and get this done the right way,\u201d he said during the debate in Lawrenceville, N.J., sponsored by the New Jersey Globe and Rider University.<\/p>\n
Booker raised $1.3 million for his re-election from pro-Israel donors, according to the research group OpenSecrets. His biggest donor was AIPAC, which contributed or raised $818,206. Booker said he has stopped taking money from AIPAC, part of his decision not to accept contributions from any political action committee.<\/p>\n
AIPAC lists Booker among its list of \u201cpro-Israel incumbent members of Congress.\u201d It doesn\u2019t allow users to donate via that page, as it does with many other members of Congress.<\/p>\n
He broke with AIPAC in 2015 when he voted for the Iran nuclear deal championed by then U.S. President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
Murphy called Israel \u201ca great ally of ours\u201d and said he supported its right to exist. But when asked how he differed from Trump, he cited the president\u2019s failure to call out \u201csettlers\u201d in Judea and Samaria, who he said have been attacking Palestinians living there.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome Israeli settlers who are absolutely a deviation from the Israeli citizen, who I believe wants peace, are attacking and burning homes,\u201d Murphy said. \u201cI would like the president to be a little harder on Israel to make sure that that stops, because it\u2019s the entire process to get that region stabilized.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Oct. 9, 2026 \/ JNS) Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who counts supporters of Israel among his biggest source…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-641465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}