(Though I feel differently about Stein Herself.)
By Steven Johnson
“Let this election be about Gaza,” Jill Stein said in the following interview, on the podcast The Thinking Muslim:
The above interview of Jill Stein was, in part, a response to the following earlier, and very intense, interview of Stein and Butch Ware by Mehdi Hasan:
Now my position, as set forth in other articles in this series, is that voting for Jill Stein, or any other candidate who cannot win, will not do anything to help the Palestinians. And I think it is highly likely that a second Trump term, which can only be stopped if enough people vote for Harris in the swing states, will be significantly worse for Palestinians and many others than a Harris administration. And that is really an ENORMOUS understatement. And I think there is a much more effective way (see here and here) to end the grip of the dominant factions of the Republican and Democratic parties, and of the sectors of capital whose interests they serve, over politics in the US.
And so I disagree with the strategy that some are pursuing, to either stay at home, or vote for Stein or another third party candidate, in order to punish the Democrats. And I advocate voting for Kamala Harris, for purely tactical reasons amid the extremely complicated circumstances that have been imposed on us, in spite of her heinous crimes and the unspeakable harms that she is contributing to in the Biden administration.
But this, in my view, concerns honest disagreements among deeply concerned and thoughtful people over strategy, differences of opinion that should in no way be allowed to hinder effective cooperation in the ongoing task of raising awareness of, and building popular opposition to, Israel’s genocide against Gaza and other crimes, that should occupy us before, during, and after any election. And, thankfully, at least from the voices I have been hearing, there seems to be a wide consensus to this effect among Palestinian resisters and their allies.
A crucial point of agreement
And, while I disagree with their practical conclusion (to abstain, or to vote for a third party candidate), one of the REASONS why some (though very far from all) Arab and Muslim and other pro-Palestinian voters want to do this is one that I think merits being deeply reflected on by all, no matter how we are voting in this election. It is one that I would especially wish that regular supporters of Harris, the kind who actually like and trust her, would reflect on. (Though they, being the ones who most NEED to reflect on it, may often be the least likely to do so, as is so often the case with people.)
Because beyond the intense emotional punch in the gut that many may feel when they hear people like me urging people to vote for Harris, who has supported the mass murder and displacement of their own friends and relatives…
And beyond what I consider to be a dubious hope that causing the Democrats to lose to Trump will somehow lead the Democrats to take the interests of Arab and Muslim and other pro-Palestinian voters more seriously in the future…
And beyond what I consider to be a no less dubious notion, that third party challenges in general elections, rather than challenges in Democratic primaries, are the best way, within the current political and legal environment, to unseat establishment Democrats and oppose the military-industrial-complex-beholden politics that they champion…
And beyond what I consider to be the specious arguments that third partyists like Jill Stein have been touting for decades, like “the lesser of two evils is still evil”, that effectively helping the greatest threat to win is somehow a vote of “conscience”, and so forth —arguments that in my opinion ignore the actual legal and other conditions of our electoral system, but that some Arab and Muslim voters in the current election have begun to express, not, as far as I can tell, because these arguments have been integral to the worldviews that they have held all of their lives, and not because of their inherent appeal, but because of the extreme circumstances of this moment…
Beyond all the above, there is one concern (among others) that I think is unquestionably valid. It is grounded in reality, and not, as I think is the case with the dogmas of the third parties, in the electoral mysticism of the national mythology of the US. And it is crucially important:
A GENERALIZED APATHY TOWARDS, OR NORMALIZATION OF, A GENOCIDE IN PROGRESS, IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF PEOPLE IN THE US, IS *EXTREMELY* DANGEROUS.
It literally kills. It facilitates the furthering of the genocide. And it encourages more US-supported genocides.
AND THE HARRIS CAMPAIGN HAS BEEN CONDUCTED IN SUCH A WAY THAT IT *PROMOTES* SUCH A DANGEROUS APATHY OR TACIT NORMALIZATION.
By failing to call for a halt to arms shipments and funding to Israel, which would effectively stop the carnage; by refusing to let Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian Democrat, speak at the Democratic National Convention; by failing to meet with and listen to the concerns of Palestinians and their allies; by failing to condemn, but being complicit in, the punishment and suppression of free speech on college campuses; by tolerating and furthering the dangerous and slanderous conflation of opposition to Zionism with antisemitism; and in countless ways; Harris and her campaign have made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that they care more about maintaining the flow of MIC and Zionist connected money to them than they care about Palestinian lives.
And many Harris (formerly Biden) supporters, including some whose social media I follow, have not helped matters either. Because, unpardonably, they have NOT SAID A WORD about the genocide since it began. Some of them had called for justice for Palestinians in the past, before October 7, 2023. (Though they did so in ways that acknowledge Israel’s “right to exist” and “right to defend itself” as an ethnostate, while looking to a “two-state solution”, all of which I have come, with the help of pro-Palestinian writers, to firmly reject.) But they went mum, at the worst conceivable moment, at the onset of the second Nakba, because their concern to avoid a second Trump term, which, in their minds, overshadows all else, made them hesitate to say anything bad about Biden or Harris. Or maybe it was also partly because they, in accordance with the talking points of the Biden administration and allied media, think, “But Hamas!” and “But Oct 7!” and thus buy into an historically ill-informed and implicitly racist narrative of both-sides-ism, of moral equivalence, concerning this “conflict”.
And, tragically, some who went mum did so under the influence of a kind of stray by-product of their lives of good-hearted service. I have in mind interfaith leaders, and civic leaders, who formed close relationships with Jewish communities in the US, in order to work in solidarity with them in opposition to the very real evil of antisemitism. And of course one seeks to listen to and learn from the people one is seeking to act in solidarity with. And so they absorbed misleading Zionist interpretations of events, just as the Jewish communities they sought to act in solidarity with had themselves also been misled by this ideology which most Jews had rejected early on but that became dominant in many US Jewish communities after the Holocaust. And so this may have been a factor impeding a clear grasp of the genocidal and territory-grabbing intent of Israel’s past and current actions, so that some well-intentioned allies in the fight against antisemitism (the real kind, not what pro-Palestinian students and faculty on US university campuses are now being falsely accused of) came to weight October 7 too heavily in their minds relative to what has been the proportionally overwhelmingly greater destruction wrought upon Palestinians before and since October 7.
Literally nearly everything that Harris and her supporters are doing and saying is reinforcing the notion that a vote for Harris means not caring about the genocide, means tolerating and promoting the genocide, means stepping over Gazan children’s dead bodies on our way to the polls. Harris and her supporters are, in effect, shouting loudly, by their actions and omissions, “You can vote for Harris. Or you can care about Palestinians. But you can’t do both!”
And, struggling to get their voices heard over the din of all this insanity, there are brave souls like the Palestinian-American Ruwa Romman who insist that Trump will be worse, and that a tactical vote for Harris is a necessary part of a long term strategy to end the genocide and to achieve the best possible outcomes on numerous fronts. I think that on this point, though I cannot endorse their strategy in toto, Romman and others like her are right, for reasons that I’ve discussed in the other articles of this series. And so I think her line of thinking actually IS a valid and credible way to support tactically voting for Harris WHILE also strenuously opposing and seeking to end the genocide. In other words, to support voting for Harris, as a tactical move, BECAUSE we are concerned to end the genocide. And so this approach does NOT have the effect of promoting apathy concerning the genocide the way that the Harris campaign and the behavior of her less critical supporters do.
But, sadly, the way in which Romman frames support for Harris is not the most common one. And, given the short time that remains, it won’t become that. The Harris campaign itself will have greater influence than people like Romman, Mehdi Hasan, and others over what people will feel that a vote for Harris “means”. And so the campaign will continue, in effect, to promote the literally lethal phenomenon that ignoring the genocide, or that de-prioritizing ending the genocide, constitutes.
What this means is that, even though I think that Trump will be worse and that our best course of action is to vote tactically for Harris to stop Trump, those who are voting for Stein or others to defeat the Democrats have a compelling reason for wanting to do so, because the tacit treatment of the genocide as if it is nothing of great concern, which support for Harris WITHIN THE DOMINANT PARADIGM OF THE HARRIS-SUPPORTING MILIEU implies, is dangerous, and must be opposed.
And so, if Arab and Muslim and other pro-Palestinian voters in the US bring the Democrats down in this election, by refraining from voting for Harris in, say, Michigan, as a number of imams and activists are urging them to do, who will be to blame for Trump’s victory?
I will not blame Sami Hamdi, Muhammad Jalal, Imam Tom Facchine, or any of the others who have energetically advocated “punishing” the Democrats in this election as the priority, even though I would have wished that they had taken something more like Ruwa Romman’s approach, which I think is more strategically sound in the long run.
The blame will lie squarely on Harris herself, the establishment Democratic machine, and the behavior of many of her supporters.
What a cruel irony it will be if what some people, concerned to stop Trump, may have intended as a “tactical” silence about the genocide, actually serves to help Trump get elected for a second term! Unfortunately, that does not appear to be a distant possibility.
Though we have honest differences of opinion as to what is the best strategy, I cannot hold any ill feeling towards those, especially those who have real skin in this game, whose loved ones and coreligionists are being killed, displaced, starved, imprisoned, tortured, etc., who have turned to Jill Stein’s or others’ campaigns in order to punish the Democrats. Even though we disagree on this matter, and even if some find my view on this election objectionable, I count them as my friends, and seek their same goal of justice, while I consider Harris to be my enemy, a perpetrator of great injustice. Harris and the establishment Democrats are responsible for great evils, and they will bear responsibility for the triumph of Trump if that happens. Indeed, if possible, I would like to see Harris (and Trump, and many others) tried for war crimes and punished (REALLY punished, not just defeated electorally, which will still leave them living very comfortably). Even though I voted for Harris, tactically, and without apologies, under the compulsion of a retrograde electoral system that lacks proportional representation, because there was no other real choice, in order to stop another enemy, whom I thought would likely be much worse, hard as that is to imagine, for all concerned.
But what about Jill Stein herself?
Personally, I do not think that Stein deserves anything remotely like the same understanding or comradely esteem, as do the Palestinian resisters and their allies, including those among them who are seeing in her campaign an opportunity to punish the Democrats.
Many things could be mentioned in this regard, but let me just say for now that I find it very difficult to respect someone who, in order to advance her campaign, could stoop so low as to say of Mehdi Hasan, as she did in her interview on The Thinking Muslim:
“While he opposes genocide, he’s all in favor of those committing genocide. He’s a lap dog to empire.”
This is, at the very least, unhelpful. But more than that, it is a vile slander. And it is patently untrue. Because Hasan has constantly and scathingly criticized Harris, the Biden administration, and the forces of the empire.
The view that to vote for a candidate, in all circumstances, “means” liking that candidate and serving that candidate’s evil bosses, whatever we may think of this view’s merits or cogency or lack thereof, DEFINES the Green Party and Stein’s candidacy. Remove that element, and the whole case for voting for her or supporting her party comes tumbling down. But even if the view were valid (which, obviously, I don’t think it is), it would still not justify her statement about Hasan. It would neither justify an assertion that Hasan was a servant of empire in his intentions, nor that he was so with regard to the actual overall effects of his words and actions.
Because that would be to assign enormous weight to the effects of his advocacy for a tactical vote, which in Stein’s view is a mistake, while failing to give due weight to the impacts of his overall reporting and advocacy as an adversarial journalist. And I don’t think that kind of assigning of weight to that side of the scales in this case can be rationally or justly sustained under any assumptions.
Nevertheless, it was EXPEDIENT for Stein to say this.
Of course Stein said it as she was licking her wounds from the intense interview of her and Butch Ware by Hasan.
And, if I may digress a bit to comment on that interview, while I thought Hasan was more cogent than Stein and Ware in his arguments throughout, and the intensity of his challenging questions and polemic was amply justified, I do wish he had interrupted his interviewees less, and let them more fully express themselves, rather than anticipate what they were going to say and assume that the audience knew what they were going to say. I wish he had let the audience really savor what his guests were saying and his responses to what they were saying. I wish, in other words, that he had “given them enough rope to hang themselves”, as the saying goes, so that the folly (as Hasan and I see it, anyway) of their third party strategy and dogmas would be all the more evident, and so that none of the viewers would be distracted from the train of thought by an impression that they were being bullied by Hasan. Which I don’t think was what Hasan was doing, but his style of debate could be perceived as such, especially by any who were predisposed to side with Stein and Ware.
But nowhere, as far as I am aware, did Hasan misrepresent Stein’s and Ware’s views, and slander them. But I think that Stein, in the later interview, did misrepresent and slander Hasan and his overall impact in the world.
And so when I hear her say, “Let this election be about Gaza”, it makes me wary. And it makes me wonder about the role that expedience may be playing in that. It makes me wonder if what she is really after is to make Gazans and their suffering about her, her campaign, her ambitions. Which of course would be profoundly abhorrent.
Some closing words
Some good people who are not convinced by the case that I have made in this series for an alternative, non-third-party-oriented strategy will vote for Stein, as a tactic in their overall plan, even if they, like me, do not hold her personally in high regard. (In fact, I have heard advocates of voting for her to bring the Democrats down make this very point.) Just as I have voted, tactically, in the light of my understanding of the overall problematic with which we’re faced, for Harris, whom I consider an enemy and want to see punished for her crimes.
I have sought to do my best in this series to make a case about what seems to me to the best courses of action in the midst of our extremely challenging, complicated, and perilous circumstances. But I could easily be wrong in some or many respects. There are just too many variables in the equation for any of us to escape the risk of being mistaken, even gravely and tragically so, as we are forced to make decisions, in the midst of a hurricane, in conditions of limited light.
I am grateful to any who have had the patience to read and consider my own fallible contributions to this debate, in this series so far.
To all who have lost loved ones, suffered injuries, been imprisoned, or otherwise experienced the brunt of Israel’s crimes, my heart goes out to you.
To all who are working to end the genocide and bring down the empire, I share your purpose and hold you in the highest regard. The questions of what to do in this election are important, as its outcome will surely impact the conditions of the struggle. But good and thoughtful people have differed in their best attempts to understand how this will be, and, in the final analysis, there is just a great deal of irreducible uncertainty about the matter. The non-electorally-centered work that we have been doing and will be doing, before, during, and after this election, is even more important.
The Practical Challenge, In Brief
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part I
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part II
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties: The Really, Really Short Version
Why We Should Expect Trump To Be Worse