In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Jill Stein garnered 1.5 million votes as the Green Party's candidate, weakening Hillary Clinton and even perhaps helping to clinch Donald Trump's victory. Today, polling at 4 percent, she might again be a spoiler. But now, after October 7, the rallying cry of the Jewish physician from Harvard is the fight against Israel.
Hillary Clinton was gearing up for victory celebrations as polling places closed on November 8, 2016. Donald Trump was already thinking about how to leverage the publicity he had gained to launch new commercial projects. Both were wrong. The polls were wrong. The journalists were wrong. Just about everyone was wrong.
Mountains of words have been written about the failures of the polls, of the media coverage and of Clinton's campaign. Even more words have been expended in an attempt to decipher the secret of Trump's success in that election. However, there are still people on both sides of the aisle today who are convinced that Trump would not have become president if a third candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, to the left of Clinton, had not run.
Stein, the candidate of the Green Party, garnered 1.5 million votes across the United States, including 51,000 in Michigan, 49,000 in Pennsylvania and 31,000 in Wisconsin. In the eyes of many perturbed Democrats, in particular, the Green votes may have tipped the scales. In that same vein, one might ask: Could Stein – who is running for that party again this year – be a deciding factor this November as well?
A national poll conducted on March 27 by Quinnipiac University found that President Joe Biden and Trump were running nearly head to head, at about 40 percent. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a supporter of conspiracy theories who is running as an independent, garnered 13 percent. Stein isn't drawing the same level of media interest as the scion of the Kennedy dynasty who, for example, claims that the CIA both assassinated his father and his uncle, and engineered the coronavirus outbreak, but she is scoring 4 percent in the polls – a personal record for her.
Kennedy is stirring concern in both major parties, because his provocative political approach appeals to certain voters on the right and the left alike. In contrast, Stein is primarily a threat to Biden, particularly after the dramatic shift in the Green Party's campaign after October 7. In her campaign, launched about a month after the Hamas massacre of some 1,200 Israelis in southern Israel, she chose to co-opt members of the pro-Palestinian movement across the United States, and came out with a slogan aimed straight at Biden's soft underbelly: "As Gaza goes, we all go."
While the Biden campaign grapples with a possible boycott by young and Muslim voters in swing states, especially Michigan with its large Muslim population, Stein is drawing fire from the president's party. She hadn't intended to focus on the Palestinian issue, she says in a zoom interview with Haaretz, but in the last six months, the war in the Gaza Strip has become the heart of her campaign. "All these people are going to die unless we do something," she says. "It became intolerable for me to do anything but focus my full time and energy on trying to stop this genocide. Being a mother and being a Jew made this issue really important. Being a doctor, I don't need to wait and see."
Asked what she thinks about the possibility that she and Kennedy might unwittingly pave the way for a second Trump term, Stein refuses to accept the premise of the question. "In the last race I was in, there were 100 million Americans who did not vote," she says, referring to 2016. "These are eligible voters who chose not to vote because the options, the alternatives, to the two corporate parties were not really evident. So we answered that deeply felt need for a politics of integrity… People who voted Green in 2016 are people who otherwise would not have voted. These are not votes that are taken from another candidate. These are votes from the non-voting bucket. Who has the right to tell them that they don't deserve the vote?"
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Born in Chicago in 1950, Stein received a Reform Jewish upbringing until the age of 15. "My grandparents were refugees from pogroms," she notes. "And this was [just] after the Holocaust. I was really taught very intensively by my family that genocide should never happen again, not to anyone. I was raised in a community that to me represented the best of Jewish values, including the sense of not standing by when something terrible is happening."
Like other Jews of her generation in the United States, Stein took an interest in political activism. In the late 1960s she entered Harvard College, majoring in sociology and anthropology. She went on to medical school and also lectured in medicine at Harvard, in addition working as an internist at several medical centers in the Boston area. In addition to medicine, she became involved in environmental activism, in campaigns against industrial plants in Massachusetts. She has written two books about the health hazards posed by pollution and has received awards for her activity on behalf of the environment.
In American politics, with what she calls its "failed two-party system," the Democrats seemed to be Stein's natural home. But decades of activism had pushed her toward the worldview of the Greens. "In this country we have a rigid two-party system," she explains. "And both parties are widely regarded as sponsored by and serving the economic elites, and share their core interests. They're both parties of war and of Wall Street. They may differ on social issues, but on core policies they're very much the same. There is a great hunger for political alternatives, and that's very much reflected in our polling. And the Green Party is one of those alternatives."
Her first foray into politics was in 2002, when she ran for governor of Massachusetts on behalf of its local Green-Rainbow Party. Not surprisingly, the two-party system triumphed, even in that liberal state, and Stein lost, ending up with 3 percent of the votes and finishing third among five candidates. The winner, by a large margin, was the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney. In subsequent years Stein became even more involved in her party and ran, and lost, again in the gubernatorial election of 2010.
Two years later, she became the Greens' presidential candidate in the race between the incumbent Democratic president, Barack Obama, and then – former Massachusetts governor Romney. Against the backdrop of the economic crisis and the two parties' support for bailing out the banks, Stein described her rivals as two sides of the same coin – "candidates of Wall Street." In her eyes the difference between them was cosmetic at most, as she put it. "Obama is a wolf in sheep's clothing and Romney is a wolf in wolf's clothing."
Today Stein views that campaign as a success, in the sense that the some of the initiatives the Greens promoted have since become cornerstones of the Democratic Party. "The progressive agenda that's been embraced by the Democrats was really derived from the Greens. That starts all the way back with Medicare for all with Ralph Nader in the 2000 campaign. In my campaign in 2012, we introduced [demands for] free public higher education, canceling student debt, the need for a green new deal and an emergency program for our energy and our economy."
The Greens' original candidate for 2024 was not Stein but philosopher-activist Cornel West, but after he withdrew, she bowed to the party's will and agreed to run again. She launched her campaign on November 22. "By the time that [my official entrance into the race] had been decided," Stein says, "the issue of the war on Gaza really came to the fore. And it struck such a deep chord in me that I was really grateful that we would be able to provide a point of view that many Americans shared that otherwise would not be part of the election."
The turning point in the party's campaign was felt with the mass recruitment of a new generation of activists, including an impressive number of pro-Palestinian activists, which was seemingly born all at once on October 7. Among them are the young progressives who are taking part in anti-Israel protests on campuses and political rallies elsewhere. "I have to say that the mobilization around our campaign came a lot from the peace community and the anti-genocide community," she notes. "And it's still to this day the most impassioned issue. We just came back from a three-week tour of 21 cities – and the thing that's really bringing people out across the political spectrum is the issue of Gaza and the slaughter of children in particular."
Stein's deep roots in the Green Party have provided her with a lexicon and a systematic ideology which she draws on to analyze the war in the Strip. "As far as I'm concerned, foreign policy just gets more wrongheaded and dangerous by the year. And arguably U.S. foreign policy is catastrophic. That has certainly been so since the Vietnam War, but especially since 9/11. Gaza in many ways is the latest _expression_ of that. And it doesn't stand alone at all."
She recalls that as early as 2012 the Green Party under her leadership came out against the occupation in the West Bank and called for an Israeli boycott. The party also accused Israel of being an apartheid state, she points out. "And so on October 7, when the massacre happened, that was of great concern to me. I really started tuning in to what the background is [there]. What's the context for this? I wasn't sure about the word 'genocide' at the outset. In fact, I was reading Israeli genocide studies and the opinions of some of the world's leading experts on genocide. And that persuaded me."
Her first suspicion that Israel was carrying out such a program in Gaza came on October 9, when she heard Israel's Defense Minister Yoav Gallant say, in response to Hamas' brutal assault, "I have ordered a full siege of the Gaza Strip. No power, no food, no gas, everything is closed."
Stein: "Knowing what I know as a medical doctor about public health and epidemic disease, I just began to feel like, oh my God, I'm on a deathwatch. How are people going to stay alive when they don't have nutrition, when they don't have places to sleep? Everything is really conspiring here for a massive die-off."
Like many Americans, Stein also tends, to see the war in Gaza through the prism of the Biden administration's involvement. "It's intolerable and it makes me very impatient and really outraged at the Netanyahu government and at our leaders, the U.S. government, who are enabling this," she asserts. In interviews with various American anti-establishment media outlets and online publications, Stein has called for an "investigation" of those involved in the war, ranging from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to top figures in Washington.
"You know that both the Democrats who voted in lockstep and half of the Republicans approved the bill that will cut off humanitarian aid through UNRWA [the UN refugee agency], and provided another $3.8 billion in military aid for Israel to use in this war," she says. "That's essentially a war crime. Every one of them has basically signed their confession here to being complicit."
Still, Stein has not adopted the vigorous call of some progressive activists to turn to the International Court of Justice on the war crimes issue: "You could argue that George Bush needs to be there and Barack Obama as well. They have all been war criminals and are responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths. We're calling for an investigation to get the process started but our focus really is on stopping the war."
When asked how she would act if she were president, she says she'd end the war in Gaza quite easily. The first thing would be "to pick up the phone like Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s," she says, referring to the angry conversation between the U.S. president and Prime Minister Menachem Begin during the 1982 Lebanon War. "The first priority is to stop sending the weapons."
When Stein talks about the American "war machine" (in an interview predating Iran's attack on Israel), she mentions Gaza and Ukraine in the same breath and attributes tremendous power to the White House as the one guiding the events. "It's a genocide of Palestinians but now the United States has generalized this into a Middle East war in that we are bombing three or four countries. We're bombing Iranian targets. Iran now has a military alliance with Russia. This just smacks of pre-World War I with nuclear weapons thrown into the mix."
The United States is also to blame for the war in Ukraine: "Putin's invasion is murderous and illegal," she acknowledges, but adds, "However, he was doing everything he could to stop it and it was the United States that refused to engage on that. Basically Putin wanted neutrality for Ukraine. This was an eminently solvable problem; they were very close to a negotiated solution which would have established neutrality for Ukraine, and this area is very critical to Russia."
Despite the specters of genocide, war crimes and a nuclear world war, Stein is actually optimistic when she talks about solutions to the war in the Strip: "Right now, 'Israel' and 'apartheid' have become synonymous, and this is just untenable for the future of Jews who live there. Jews deserve a future of peace and security, as do Palestinians and Muslims in that land," she says. "It's not a religious war by any means. Jews are a traumatized people, and Palestinians too. The responsible adults in the room need to step up and take the wheels of democracy in hand and demand a peaceful solution."
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The Greens' "pro-worker, anti-war, climate action agenda," as cited on Stein's website, is rooted in the party's general anti-establishment approach and suspiciousness of power and big capital. Even after the war in Gaza became a central issue in its campaign, those roots are what unite Stein's supporters.
"We are not a corporate-sponsored party, we do not take big money," she explains. "We are a small-donor party. We have the unique liberty of representing the public interest because we don't have big donors to answer to. We are the only alternative that doesn't take corporate money." In this way she differentiates her party not only from the Democrats and the Republicans, but also from Robert Kennedy Jr., who chose one of is heavy donors as his running mate: Silicon Valley lawyer and entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan.
Stein associates the malignant influence of money in politics – "institutionalized corruption," as she describes it – with what she sees as corruption of the media and of journalism, as an institution. Although her critique of politics has remained the same for decades, she sounds a bit more optimistic today vis-à-vis the alternatives to conventional media. "Our systems of communications are essentially corporate controlled. But that's less and less true now with alternative media. There are work-arounds. The question is how much [of that] we can mobilize and how far we get."
Last month, the Michigan Advance website reported on a speech Stein gave at a Muslim community center in Dearborn, Michigan, where she attacked both major parties over their approach to Gaza. "As America becomes aware that this is blood on our hands, we are not simply accomplices, we are full partners in this genocide," she said, and "Israel, enabled by the United States, is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza."
In her view, she says, "There's a politics of fear, and it's one of the great PR campaigns of the Democrats. They frighten people. They extort the vote, so they just have to be a shade better than the party to the right on some policy. They rely on fear because they've abandoned their base; they've been throwing working people under the bus. But money in politics is fixable with a publicly financed election."
Is there something important you'd like to say to Israelis?
"Sure, on the whole issue of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. There's a huge movement in this country now. We see the uprising of young people who are very anti-Zionist, and in our minds Zionism has become equivalent with occupation and apartheid. It's really important not to conflate that with antisemitism. In my view, considering anti-genocide activism as antisemitism is inherently antisemitic, by implying that Jews are okay with genocide. The driver of antisemitism now is this association of Jews with Zionism and genocide, and that makes me extremely concerned, especially about the future of Jews in Israel."