Cornel West speaking at an event at the Student Pavilion at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona//Flickr, Gage Skidmore

Longtime Israel critic Cornel West announced on Monday his intention to run for the Presidency of the United States as the candidate of the left wing People’s Party.

“I enter in the quest for truth. I enter in the quest for justice,” West said in his video announcement. “And 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.”

West, 70, has engendered controversy over the years for his views on Israeli-Palestinian issues while also being a popular left-wing commentator and academic known for his appearances on “Real Time with Bill Maher” and “The Joe Rogan Experience,” clips of which were included in his announcement.

In 2021, West resigned from Harvard University in part over what he described as the school’s “cowardly deference to the anti-Palestinian prejudices of the Harvard administration.” His resignation followed his rejection for tenure, which West also blamed in part on his views on Israel.

“In my case, my controversial and outspoken views about and critiques of empire, capitalism, white supremacy, male supremacy, and homophobia are tolerated, but any serious engagement around the issues of the Israeli occupation are rendered highly suspect and reduced to anti-Jewish hatred or prejudice,” West said in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, in which he also assigned blame to “the powers that be.”

A petition in support of West receiving tenure that repeated his claims was described by Harvard Hillel Rabbi Jonah C. Steinberg as promoting “an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.”

Following his resignation, West is now the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy & Christian Practice at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

West’s campaign launch video and website do not explicitly mention Israel, but he lists under the campaign platform “End the Wars” a call to stop all foreign military aid. His other agenda items include disbanding NATO, Medicare for all, ending the war on drugs, and breaking up big tech.

The People’s Party that West is running with was founded in 2017 by a former staffer of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) as a “Draft Bernie” movement for the self-described democratic socialist to make a third party run. Sen. Sanders would eventually decide to run for the 2020 Democratic nomination, and the group rebranded as the People’s Party.

During the May 2021 round of Hamas-instigated rocket fire on Israel, the People’s Party issued a statement describing Palestinian violence that consisted largely of indiscriminate rocket fire directed at civilians in terms of self-defense.

“As an occupied people on their homeland, Palestinians have a right to defend themselves against the occupying forces that aid in the blatant theft of their lands and that keep millions contained in what is often called an open air prison,” the statement said. “The People’s Party demands that the U.S. immediately stop funding apartheid and war crimes in Palestine. We also demand that President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken use all diplomatic means at their disposal to pressure Israel to end the attack on Palestine and the decades-long occupation and ethnic cleansing.”

As a third-party candidate, West will face an uphill battle for the Presidency. The last third-party candidate to garner an electoral vote was George Wallace in his 1968 segregationist campaign, and no third-party candidate has won more than 5% of the popular vote since Ross Perot’s 1992 and 1996 bids.