The philosophy scholar and activist says voters need 'candidates that would speak to the needs of poor and working people,' linking his pro-Palestinian advocacy to key campaign issues seemingly unrelated at face value.
West is now running for the Green Party’s nomination after an initial launch with a fringe movement, the People’s Party.
He's no stranger to nontraditional presidential campaigns – he advised Al Sharpton’s 2004 bid for the Democratic nomination and endorsed Jill Stein (his current campaign manager) as the Green Party's nominee in 2016, among other efforts. His current bid comes as concerns multiply about outside efforts coalescing to weaken Joe Biden.
“I enter in the quest for truth. I enter in the quest for justice,” the 70-year-old West said in his campaign launch. He later defended running outside the two-party system, telling NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo that the Democratic Party has no place for “candidates that would speak to the needs of poor and working people.”
West's campaign has highlighted Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians while also linking it to other issues central to next year's election.
This tactic mirrors his established pattern of connecting Israel to other ostensibly unrelated issues – notably during his feud with author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, who West claimed “reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people."
West has previously described himself, the late Palestinian American comparative literature professor Edward Said and the renowned linguist Noam Chomsky as “voices in the wilderness” as early public figures protesting Israeli actions.
He is one of the first national figures to promote the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and has consistently attacked the Democratic Party establishment for treating the matter as a “taboo” and a “third rail.”
“BDS is not a homogenous movement,” he told Haaretz in 2017. “There are a lot of different voices, but it is the only nonviolent response I can see to the very ugly occupation, and I would do exactly the same if there was a Palestinian occupation of Jews. It’s a moral issue, a spiritual issue.”
He has also accused the party of “being beholden to AIPAC” and decried Barack Obama as a “war criminal” over the 44th president's support for Israel during the 2014 Gaza war.
This approach continued into the 2016 committee hearings for the Democratic platform, where West, an ally of Bernie Sanders, unsuccessfully led a charge to change the party’s discourse on Israel.
While campaigning for Sanders again in the 2020 Democratic primaries, West dismissed Biden as a “neoliberal disaster” but eventually (almost) endorsed him over Donald Trump. “I am not crazy about Biden,” he told The Guardian that year, “I don’t endorse him. But I believe we gotta vote for him."
West has since been denied tenure by Harvard, telling Haaretz that his outspokenness on Israel was behind the university’s decision. In 2021, the Harvard Hillel executive director at the time, Rabbi Jonah C. Steinberg, accused the “shameful” West of “egging students on” in “scapegoating and demonizing” Jewish people.
West told Haaretz in 2021: “I told the rabbi, ‘It’s clear you don’t understand me. Let’s have a jam session. You bring your ax, I’ll bring my ax, and we’ll have a serious exchange. It’s going to be intense, we’re talking about life-and-death issues here.
“But we can still understand each other, and we can have drinks together and talk about our disagreements. Let’s go at it, that’s what students need. Not just at Harvard, but anywhere and everywhere.”
Now that he’s running for president, West’s potential role as a spoiler (à la his current campaign manager) is bringing his Israel rhetoric and its effect on his other policy positions to the forefront yet again.
These fears are all the more relevant now that he switched to the Green Party from the People’s Party, a fringe movement led by a former Sanders staffer, Nick Brana. The People's Party shares West’s sharp critiques of the U.S.-Israel relationship but has never launched a national campaign before.
West’s supporters immediately raised concerns about the party’s lack of a track record, its inability to make the ballot nationwide, and the sexual harassment allegations against Brana by the party’s former executive director.
West said he switched to the Green Party “in the spirit of a broad United Front and coalition strategy,” thanking the People’s Party for the initial launch.
“The presidency is just one vehicle to pursue that truth and justice – what I’ve been trying to do all of my life. Neither political party wants to tell the truth about Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about Big Tech,” he said when launching the campaign.
Though he didn’t
detail what “the truth” on Ukraine entails, West has
charged the United States with moral hypocrisy for its
positions on Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine.
“Ukraine, the Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian situation,” West told “The Chris Hedges Report” after his campaign launch, “It’s very clear that there’s no commitment to the suffering of the least of these, be it Palestinians on the West Bank or be it precious Ukrainians who deserve a central focus but who are bearing such a brunt, in part, not just because of Russian imperialism, but because of American imperialism.
“The NATO expansion is a fundamental factor here, and it’s been downplayed by the rationalizers of the war. So we’ve got to bring that war to a stop in the name of the suffering of our precious Ukrainian brothers and sisters.”
West further compared Russian dissidents who criticize the invasion of Ukraine to Israeli critics of the occupation.
“Russia is a wounded empire, got its own forms of repression. I’m in deep solidarity with the oppression of the Russian brothers and sisters who are going to jail against the invasion. See, that’s a serious moral witness. That speaks deeply to me. So I don’t view Russians in any homogenous way, there’s always a variety of different voices. Same way in Israel,” he told Hedges.
“You’ve got some Jewish brothers and sisters who are in solidarity with the Palestinians – not their government, but you never view the Jewish community as a homogenous community. There’s always a variety of different voices.”
West also revived his acute criticisms of the Democratic Party’s aversion to engaging with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, charging the party with being motivated by fear and hypocrisy.
“They can never ever come to truth, come to terms with the truth of the suffering of precious Palestinians,” West argued. “But the point is this: if there were a Palestinian domination and occupation of precious Jewish brothers and sisters, then divestment, sanction, boycott of a Palestinian occupation of Jews would make you a moral hero.”
West also decried the treatment of Roger Waters amid the Pink Floyd co-founder’s own embroilment in antisemitic controversies. He has also repeatedly defended his insistence on dialogue with Louis Farrakhan, saying the Nation of Islam leader was misunderstood when he was quoted saying that "Hitler is great" and despite Farrakhan's "obsession with connecting black social misery to Jewish power, including his ugly characterization of Judaism as a 'gutter religion'."
“People say, well you can’t even begin to compare Israeli occupation to Nazi Germany,” West has said. “Well it’s true, there’s no doubt that they’re in no way identical in terms of scope and range, but apartheid-like conditions are on a continuum with fascist treatment of people, and they are crimes against humanity. That’s what brother Roger Waters is talking about, and it’s sad he has to undergo this kind of vicious attack.”
West has set his sights on another outsider challenger, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently denounced his own defenses of Waters and tried to shore up his pro-Israel bona fides after repeatedly invoking the Holocaust in his anti-vaccine screeds.
"You want a presidential candidate, and I think you just want this in any human being, to have backbone, to have integrity, to have consistency, not to check what you deeply believe after you've had some dialogue or discourse with a group of people or community that's going to be shaping and molding how you perceive the world," West said on the "Bad Faith" podcast.
"If [Kennedy] thinks somehow that each [Palestinian] baby who was killed somehow was never in any way, intentional, deliberate, they didn't know what they were doing. … He needs to really get off the crack pipe."
An Emerson College survey released after West’s announcement showed Biden and Trump in a statistical tie, 44 percent to 43 percent, though when West was included as an option, his 6 percent put Trump at 41 percent and Biden at 40.