Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein suggested she would end all military aid to Israel if elected president in the fall.
Stein also blasted Sheldon Adelson, claiming that he “contributes a huge amount of money to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu” to mess with Israeli politics. “If I was living in Israel, and I knew that one of the major funders of a very oppressive right-wing government was coming from outside of my country, I would be up in arms about it,” she told the weekly magazine.
Hoping to pick up the mantle of Bernie Sanders’s leftist revolution in the Democratic Party, Stein said she would go to Israel “with all humility” because “nobody has been a bigger violator of these rights and values than our own country.”
Sanders, during the Democratic primary, criticized Israel for using ‘disproportionate” force against Hamas in the 2014 war in Gaza. “I do believe that Israel was subjected to terrorist attacks, and has every right in the world to destroy terrorism. But we had in the Gaza area, some 10,000 civilians who were wounded and some 1,500 who were killed,” he said during a televised debate in April. “Now, if you’re asking not just me, but countries all over the world was that a disproportionate attack, the answer is that I believe it was.”
In an interview with Haaretz during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last month, the Green Party candidate dodged questions about her views on the two-state solution. Instead, she said it’s up to the people of Israel and the Palestinians to decide on bringing an end to the conflict. “The good people of Israel and Palestine are getting together, in grassroots groups, for human rights, and we should support them in their attempt to get past this horrible gridlock that the United States has enabled,” she was quoted as saying. “This is upon the people of Israel and Palestine, on the basis of human rights, to continue building confidence and find the way out of this.”
Stein is polling at 4 percent in recent national polls.
