Third-party candidate for US president Jill Stein:
‘Zionism system of ethnic cleansing by design’
Every four years, politicians and lobbyists urge citizens of the United States to participate in the “most important elections” in the history of the country. Whereas 2024 is no different in that regard, there is in fact a now-or-never sense of urgency looming over the current race to the White House. On the other side of the world, far removed from the average American’s direct line of sight, Palestine and Lebanon remain in a state of bloody unrest at the hands of the Israeli cabinet. What’s unique about this ordeal is that social media users and independent media outlets based in the region have been broadcasting the war crimes taking place there on a day-to-day basis, leaving no doubts about the callousness of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership. For that reason, Netanyahu’s assaults on the surrounding civilian population are crucial to the upcoming elections since the violence in question has always been funded by US taxpayer dollars. Privy to this pressing threat of war and its broader implications, Dr. Jill Stein has once again stepped up as the presidential candidate for the Green Party in an attempt to put an end to the vicious crusade the Democrats and Republicans are set to persist in. Her unabated denunciation of the Joe Biden–Kamala Harris administration illustrates that not all Jewish people are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jewish — accordingly, Palestinian liberation is at the center of her campaign for People, Planet, and Peace.
By Karan Singh
Freelance journalist
The fact that you’re Jewish and your running mate is Muslim adds a great deal of credibility to your advocacy for Palestinian liberation. What can you tell us about the Jewish solidarity with Gaza that you’ve witnessed on the campaign trail?
From the very start, you had Jewish Voice For Peace out there with the students at the campus protests. At Columbia University, there was a huge community Seder for Passover at the Gaza solidarity encampment. It’s wonderful to see that the opponents of genocide and advocates for Palestinian human rights are basically advocates for humanity, and they’ve made it clear that this is not a religious conflict. Jews and Muslims and Christians and atheists and humanists are all together in this shared cause for humanity. So, the notion that it’s antisemitic to oppose genocide, in my view, is the most antisemitic thing one could possibly say.
The issue has never been a conflict of religions; the issue is a matter of Zionism, which is a political ideology basically dedicated to moving people off their land and claiming it. From the get-go, it’s been about ethnic cleansing and massacres that were being conducted against the Palestinian people before the State of Israel was even founded. The world has come to a consensus about how to solve that problem, including the rulings of the International Court of Justice, the United Nations Security Council, etc. People are really quite unified in understanding what needs to be done — we need compliance with international law and human rights, and we need to end not only the genocide but also the occupation as well as the apartheid nature of the Israeli Zionist state.
You were born not long after the Nazi Holocaust. So, you remember a world in which Israel existed for decades before Hamas did. How central is Hamas truly to the turmoil in Palestine today?
Not at all. Hamas is just the latest form of resistance. Occupation is not some innocent incidental; it is about abuse and displacement. It is a murderous and vicious way of life. So, occupation will generate pushback, like the institution of slavery did. That’s just reality — people may not like that, but if you don’t like that, then you have to fix the underlying cause of it. The Palestinian Liberation Organization were considered the “terrorists” before Hamas, but this is all essentially a resistance to occupation and ethnic cleansing.
Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived together peacefully in historic Palestine for millennia. The problem did not arise until Zionists came from Europe and basically began to displace Palestinians. According to the historic archives of the Zionist state, the propaganda surrounding Israel was not true. Israeli historians led the way in surfacing this material and the fact that Zionism was a system of displacement and ethnic cleansing by design. That is the problem. Whether it’s Hamas or some other group, there will be resistance to occupation and ethnic cleansing. So, let’s get rid of that resistance by getting rid of the fundamental violation of human rights generating that self-defense.
There seems to be a tug of war over progressive values based on what Israel represents to different groups. How do you respond to people who claim that uncompromising support for Palestinian liberation is tantamount to excusing sexual assault and the oppression of women?
Oh, well that’s been debunked a long time ago. There’s absolutely no evidence that has held up (proving) that the October 7 attacks involved the systematic abuse of women or rape — that didn’t hold up any more than beheaded babies or women having their breasts cut off or the fetuses sliced open from the abdomen of pregnant women. That basically did not hold up, whatsoever.
You know, the abuse of women is totally out of control now, where women are being slaughtered along with children by the thousands in Gaza. That’s where women are actually really being abused and destroyed. So, I don’t think this is about trying to single out the violence of October 7. Really, (the region) is so overwhelmed by this unending violence that has happened since October 7 and before October 7. I think trying to narrowly focus on October 7 is just misguided, and people who do that have their eyes closed to the much larger situation. You should not miss the forest for the trees here.
We can absolutely solve this problem of violence. So, let’s get focused on that — how we stop the violence and how we prevent the recurrent episodes of violence here by basically putting an end to the systematic abuse of human rights and the massacres of women and children and innocent civilians, and displacement and ethnic cleansing as a way of life. That’s what has to happen. We need compliance with international law and human rights, and when we do that, the other problems will go away.
You’ve previously said that the United States can end Israel’s ongoing onslaughts in the blink of an eye. How do you pull the plug on an active operation that so many politicians helped enable?
The fortunate thing is that the American people oppose this in huge numbers. That this genocide is being conducted by our colonial misleaders against the will and intentions of the American people is a violation of basic democratic principles.
Three sets of American laws are being violated by delivering aid to Israel. It is illegal to send aid to any country that is violating human rights, interfering with the delivery of humanitarian aid, and not complying with the nuclear weapons treaties — Israel is in violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. On all three counts, providing military aid to Israel is illegal.
Ever since October 7 of last year, the cabinet of Israel has killed thousands of innocent Palestinians, extended that violence to Lebanon, and is now on the brink of war with Iran. What do you believe Netanyahu is trying to accomplish here?
He’s trying to stay out of jail. He wants the war to keep going so that the corruption case against him will not come into action. I think he has personal motives here, which may be the most important thing to him, but he has also always kind of pursued a greater Israel through expansion. He’s been begging for a war with Iran for decades.
The man does not have an honest bone in his body. His assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, took place after Nasrallah had agreed to a cease-fire. In a similar way, they knocked off Ismail Haniyeh, the very moderate negotiator for Hamas. Bibi Netanyahu is very much opposed to anything that would advance the peace process.
What does Israel moving farther and farther away from a peace process entail for the United States?
There hasn’t been much discussion or reporting about the draft, but it was actually reenacted a couple of years ago. Now, people are being automatically registered for it. They won’t be called up until the president decides that we’re at war and we need bodies. How horrific would that be if we start paying not only in money and weapons but also in blood? Biden has expressed support for whatever Israel does — the baton for commander-in-chief has basically been passed to Bibi Netanyahu, who’s been given free rein to do what he wants. So, it’s very much of concern.
There’s this notion that Kamala Harris is bad but Donald Trump is far worse. Would the Middle East look any different under a Republican presidency or do you think it’s already as bad as it can get?
How much worse can it get than the genocide that’s being conducted right now? I mean, you could nuke Palestine. Will Trump do that? Who knows? To me, it’s just such propaganda to say that one is better or worse than the other. The current administration is committing genocide right now, and Harris is a part of that. Then, you have Donald Trump saying that he’ll finish the job, but who knows what that means because he’s also trying to sell himself as a peace president right now. You’d be a fool to believe either of them. We should not be in the business of measuring genocides against each other.
So, yeah, Donald Trump did interfere with the peaceful transition of power after the last election, but the Democrats try to throw political competition off the ballot. That’s not okay either. We don’t have to wait for Donald Trump for fascism to arrive in this country when the heads of peaceful protesters are being bashed in on college campuses simply because they are expressing the will of the people and the rulings of the International Court of Justice. Making a case for Donald Trump being better or worse is absolutely nonsense. We have two greater evil candidates; there is no lesser evil.
There are Democrats such as Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar who have taken a stance similar to yours on Palestine. Do you feel an affinity with them or view their involvement with the Blue Party as still being part of the problem?
I think they’re definitely part of the solution, but they would accomplish a lot more if they weren’t encumbered by the Democratic Party, which is going to pull the rug out from under them. We have to build power at every turn, because where did Bernie Sanders go with his campaign? He headed the budget committee, but everything he did there was basically dumbed down and tossed out. You can’t create a revolution within a counter-revolutionary party. There are just too many mechanisms within — you are accountable to big money and to a leadership that will not provide you appointments, committee membership, or the money that they distribute. You’re essentially powerless if you’re trying to fight for the right thing from inside the Democratic Party, which simply isn’t based on those principles.
We don’t have time to keep shilly-shallying around and watching Bernie Sanders get savaged twice. I think it should have been enough for anybody to see that was the best they could possibly do, and even the best didn’t amount to a hill of beans. If you try to run a campaign with integrity as a Democrat or Republican, every trace of it disappears once it is over. We have a grassroots party that is not controlled by money. The Green Party doesn’t accept big money or use any of the loopholes for legalized corruption — there are a whole lot of those loopholes, but we don’t use them. We are what we say we are and we’ll do what we say we’ll do, which the other parties don’t. We’re trying to encourage people to break off this abusive political relationship that they’re in right now.
The United States is directly responsible for reducing Gaza to rubble over the past year. Do you also consider it the country’s responsibility to remedy those damages and help rebuild the Strip?
Absolutely. I mean, who else is going to do it? The parties responsible have to do it, which is the State of Israel and the US. There are also others who’ve chipped in and sold weapons to Israel. France just pledged 100 million euros in support of Lebanon. So, that’s a start. We need both humanitarian aid as well as reconstruction, and they have to happen emergently. It’s a tragedy that this magnificent and historic place has been purposefully destroyed.
What do you believe is the actual reason behind the United States’ undying support for Israel?
Ronald Reagan’s secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger said it very well: Israel is the unsinkable battleship for the US in the Middle East. Why does the US need a battleship? To control Middle Eastern oil. That is really an application of the United States’ basic foreign-policy framework, which has been described as “full-spectrum dominance”. We must dominate all resources as well as all potential areas of conflict and competition — that is our country’s foreign policy in a nutshell.
It’s absolutely disastrous, and it still applies. On that account, we are headed toward nuclear war on three fronts right now, and we’re not going to get out of here alive if that’s allowed to persist.
Do you support a two-state solution or a one-state solution?
Right now, we have one apartheid state; I think we need one democracy. As for a two-state solution, the logical question would be to ask how that would look different from what we have now. Palestine now has representation and strong support in the United Nations, but can that work when it hasn’t for so many decades? Ultimately, it’s hard to believe this is going to get solved without one democratic state that brings justice, equality, and dignity to all its citizens.
The United States government pumps billions of dollars into the Israeli military every year. Based on the plans you’ve charted out for your presidency and the data you have about these spendings, what issues within the US could that money be used for instead?
We’re spending half of our congressional budget on the endless war machine and the Pentagon. If you add up the costs of taking care of our wounded soldiers for the Veterans Administration, nuclear weapons as part of the Department of Energy, the FBI, customs, and border protection, it’s more like 60–65% of the budget. It is just like robbing us blind. So, we need to cut that budget at least in half and put those dollars into healthcare for everyone through a Medicare for All system. We bailed out the crooks on Wall Street. So, we can bail out victims of that same economy by putting an end to student and medical debt. We need at least 15 million units of quality, environmentally-sound housing — so-called “social housing”. And of course, we need a Green New Deal to combat the climate crisis.
Right now, power is held by politicians who are unaccountable to the people. They are bought and paid for by AIPAC, war profiteers, and Wall Street. So, it behooves the American people to stand up for what it is that we want and need. The genocide itself is a microcosm of our imperial foreign policy, which has left no money to treat the emergencies that Americans are dealing with. 50% of Americans right now are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and meet their monthly rent or mortgage. 50% are within one or two paychecks of being evicted, and the number of people who are subject to eviction and homelessness are absolutely skyrocketing now.
That’s just one issue. We also need rent control. We need a tenant bill of rights. There are many things that can be done, some of which need resources while others don’t, but our government is instead serving the real estate industry and private equity that is buying our homes, taking them off the market and driving the prices up. The system that is serving the war profiteers right now is also serving Big Pharma and health insurance companies.
One out of every three eligible voters did not vote in the 2020 presidential race. Who are those voters? They are younger, lower income, and of color — the people who are the most marginalized are not voting because the zombies being rammed down their throats do not serve their interests. There’s a lot of voting power out there if we can get the word out. As a grassroots campaign, we encourage people to volunteer because it’s all about phone banking, flyers, door knocking, and tabling to just get the word out and let people know that we can stop the genocide in Gaza and the endless war machine. We can stop the squandering of a trillion dollars a year that should be cut in half. So, we have the funds here at home for public higher education and to ensure that there’s a $25-an-hour minimum wage. The war abroad is also a war at home, against democracy and against working people.
MSNBC, CBS, and The New York Times are just some of the major outlets that have published alarmist articles about your presidential bid. How important a role do you think the mainstream media has played in hindering your reach across the country?
I think they’re doing us a favor. Every time they smear us, more and more people wake up. To tell you the truth, I don’t read the articles because I don’t really care what they think. They’ve been saying the same stuff about me for a long time because they’re very scared, and I consider it quite an achievement that they’re now taking out these really dumb ads against me. If you read the social-media commentary about the attacks against us, people are pretty furious for the most part … except when it’s a dedicated Democrat audience, like MSNBC. These smears really push people in the opposite direction. For example, the YouTube comments under our interview with The Breakfast Club are just off the charts. It’s thousands and thousands of people saying, “I wasn’t going to vote, but now I’m going to register Green and vote for Jill Stein and Butch Ware.”
We are at the tipping point. The uprising is going really strong, more than I’ve ever seen. Now, it’s just a question of when we get to the breakthrough point. It feels like we’re closer now than ever before.
The article first appeared on the Palestine Chronicle.