Beto O’Rourke denied on Tuesday that donations from supporters of Israel had influenced his approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in stark terms, saying that Israel’s leader had “openly sided with racists.”

As the Texas Tribune correspondent Patrick Svitek reported, the comments came during an event at Keene State College in New Hampshire, after O’Rourke was asked about rumors that he had taken “pro-Israel lobbyist money” during his failed Senate run in 2018.

O’Rourke explained that, in fact, he had taken no money from political action committees in that race — although J Street, a pro-Israel lobbying group that aids candidates who favor a two-state solution and oppose the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, helped solicit $170,000 in individuals donations to his campaign.

“If you’re asking if the contributions I accept connect to the policies I support, the answer is no,” the former Texas Congress member replied, according to Paul Steinhauser of Fox News.

“I believe in peace and dignity and full human rights for the Palestinian people and the Israeli people,” the former Texas representative said. “The only way to achieve that,” he added, “is a two-state solution.”

The difficulty, O’Rourke continued, is that “right now we don’t have the best negotiating partners on either side: We have a prime minister in Israel who has openly sided with racists — who, in a previous election, warned that the Arabs were coming to the polls — and on the Palestinian side, you have an ineffectual leader, in Mahmoud Abbas, who has not been very effective in bringing his side to the table either.”

O’Rourke’s condemnation of Netanyahu centered on the Israeli prime minister’s recent efforts to boost the electoral prospects of an openly racist, far-right party, Jewish Power, which he had hoped to include in a new coalition government after elections next month. The party’s leaders are former followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the virulently anti-Arab founder of the Jewish Defense League, whose extremist Kach party was designated a terrorist organization in 1994 after one of its members, Baruch Goldstein, killed 29 Muslims praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs shrine in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.

Netanyahu’s outreach to the racist party was stymied this week by Israel’s Supreme Court, which barred Jewish Power’s leader, Michael Ben Ari, from running in the April 9th general election. The 8-1 decision was supported by Israel’s attorney general, Avichai Mendelblit, who cited Ben Ari’s well-documented history of incitement against Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Mendelblit also recently approved the indictment of Netanyahu on corruption charges.

One day after the Israeli Supreme Court’s ruling, Israel’s justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, boasted of her plans to rein in the high court by insisting on political control of the judiciary. In a bizarre, satirical campaign ad, Shaked reeled off a list of measures she intends to impose and then sprayed herself with a perfume labeled “Fascism,” before saying, “To me, it smells like democracy.”