‘Fascism is Already Here:’ Palestinian-American Senate Candidate Leila Hazou on the Urgency of Legitimizing Third-Party Voting

Lauren Abunassar

There’s a video floating around online of Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey’s April 1st visit to the small Pocono Mountain town of Milford, Pennsylvania. In the video, he can be seen at Milford Mayor Sean Strub’s house, standing beneath the glow of an ornate chandelier, pleading his case to a healthy crowd of swing state voters gathered to hear him speak. Just off to Casey’s left, you can catch a glimpse of a woman with bright green hair and a floral jacket. She listens patiently and waits for him to conclude his remarks. As he starts shaking hands, she asks him a question: “Have you changed your position on Palestine at all?”

Casey asks for clarification, looking almost surprised at the woman’s boldness. She pushes on: “Are you calling for a ceasefire or humanitarian aid?”

“I am not,” he tells her. The woman is Leila Hazou, a 56-year-old Pennsylvania resident and former Wall Street project manager turned small business owner. “I am a Palestinian woman,” she tells Casey. “And that’s why I’ll be running against you in this election. So, you will see an Arab woman on the ballot.”

Leila Hazou is a Green Party candidate running for United States Senator in Pennsylvania. She is Palestinian-American. Photo credit: Lauren Abunassar.

The video was published by Direct Action United, a newly formed grassroots organization devoted to amplifying social movements through video. And as far as campaign announcements go, it’s a provocative one. But it’s also emblematic of what Hazou, a Green Party candidate, now describes as a cultural shift away from silence in the face of Republican and Democratic disregard of Arab suffering.s as a cultural shift away from silence in the face of Republican and Democratic disregard of Arab suffering.

U.S. Senate candidate Leila Hazou (Green) questions Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey (Democrat) at an event in Milford, PA back in April. Video courtesy of Direct Action United.

“I believe that most of us in the [Palestinian] diaspora kept our heads down for a long time and tried to fly under the radar,” Hazou said when she sat down for an exclusive interview with Al-Bustan News. “I think those days are over now. We are saying: ‘No. We are not going to make ourselves smaller anymore. We’re not going to be quiet. We’ve been uncomfortable our entire lives. It’s time for you to be uncomfortable now.’”               

Today, six months after that intrepid debut, Hazou is frank about her ongoing campaign.

Her team is lean, and the money is as illusory as the manpower. She doesn’t even believe she can win. But winning is not the point. At least not entirely. “I said to myself, maybe we can take some votes away from [Casey]. Maybe we can punish [the Democratic establishment] somehow. Because they can’t just take it for granted that they can do whatever they want, not listen to voters, and still get the votes,” Hazou said.            

Protest voting is out; protest running is in.

But Hazou is not a native contrarian. She is not driven solely by the desire to punish or sabotage. Instead, her campaign is seeded to a deep desire to legitimize third-party voting in the face of what she sees as an increasingly apathetic bipartisan system. “The hope is that the more we normalize third parties, and the more people vote for third parties and make them legitimate, the more we can break through the duopoly. That’s the main thing for me: planting the seeds to change the system,” said Hazou. 

She’s quick to confess that, as a lifelong Democrat, she once found herself among the throng of voters who believed a third-party vote was a waste. Though she’s casting her vote for Jill Stein in the presidential race, she admits she didn’t consider voting for her before Hazou herself decided to run. Now, however, the genocide in Gaza has sparked what she calls a moral reckoning that has forced her to take inventory of liberal complacency. “I am the first to admit that we the people let it get this far. Get this corrupt,” Hazou said. “Now all we can try to do is atone for it.”

Candidate Hazou moved to Pike County, Pennsylvania from Staten Island, New York nearly a decade ago. She opened her store in Milford in January 2023. Photo by Lauren Abunassar.

Hazou works from an unconventional war room: a small but picturesque soap and candle shop she opened in Milford in 2023. Her desk is scattered with tatreez projects, crystals, a cup of takeout coffee, and a vape pen. The green hair is gone but the righteous anger abides. She wonders how long we can ask voters to wait just four more years for a different race, when asking for change will magically become a less risky proposition.

It's this craving for change that prompted Hazou to leave her job with a New York investment bank and move to Pike County in 2016. She bought a house with her husband among the new calm that the Pennsylvania pastoral afforded. A nascent interest in soap-making bloomed into her own business. If anything could have foreshadowed her political foray, perhaps it was her ability to pivot so seamlessly — when she told her mother and stepfather about her run for Senate, they encouraged it but laughed and treated it as “another crazy thing [I’m] doing,” Hazou said.

The brief moment Hazou polled at 2% in August was a thrilling shock. Now her 0% feels like a return to normal. When she told her husband, who is half Lebanese, about running, he was deeply concerned. “He recognizes just being Palestinian is dangerous,” Hazou said. Even posting on her socials about her Palestinian identity is something she describes as “coming out.” It worried her friends and family.

Leila Hazou’s desk, featuring one of her hand-sewn tatreez projects. Photo by Lauren Abunassar.

She made a deal with her husband that if any serious threats were made against her, she would drop out. Again, it wasn’t about winning. But now, Hazou has been happy to fly under the radar, with her run seen as so frivolous that no one even contested her signature on the ballot — something that shocked her considering she’s muscling in on a tight race in a crucial swing state.

A total of 23 Democratic Senate seats and 11 Republican seats are up for re-election in November. But, if Republicans win their races and flip just two Democratic seats, they’ll win back Senate control. According to the Washington Post, the eight closest races that could determine Senate control include Arizona, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and, of course, Pennsylvania. In West Virginia, Republicans are expected to flip the seat left by retiring Democrat Joe Manchin. In Pennsylvania, three-term incumbent Senator Bob Casey Jr. (Democrat) leads his Republican opposition David McCormick by a narrow 5% lead. And though Hazou holds no illusions about sweeping in as a third-act spoiler, she does hope that a large enough number of votes defying the binary will serve as a wake-up call. “Looking at the standard model as it is just isn’t working. I think there needs to be a whole new paradigm,” Hazou said. “What we have to do is get enough legislators into power that will get rid of money in politics. We have to go back to Citizens United. Laws bound to serving corporate interests are out of control. With American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), it’s not corporate interests, it’s foreign interests. But in both cases, it’s serving interests that aren’t the peoples.” The real work, she said, will come in mobilizing Americans voting for third-party candidates and amplifying the message sent by the significant number of Democratic and Republican votes lost to third-party candidates.

“No wonder they told us to just stay small. To stay quiet.”

Hazou sees the Green Party offering an opportunity to restore a Left that she believes is no longer welcome in the Democratic Party. “Leftists have been kicked out. They’ve told us that we don’t matter, we don’t have a voice. Hazou said. “So now we need an alternative – not only in regards to Gaza — but even in seeing our government react to our protests. There’s all this fear of fascism, but students were beaten on their campuses. Professors were knocked to the ground. People are being teargassed for holding signs. This is a militant country now. We’re seeing both parties in the duopoly are fascist because this is happening in blue states, in blue cities, under a blue administration… The American public needs to see that this is not a democracy and has not been a democracy for some time.”

Turning to a third-party is an act of resisting this corruption, according to Hazou.

Still, some in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party have denounced the Green Party. Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York posted a viral video to Instagram saying, “How do I tell my friends who are Jill Stein voters they are wasting their time and effort?” She went on to say, “All you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you’re just showing up once every four years to do that, you’re not serious. To me, it does not read as authentic. It reads as predatory.”

Meanwhile, University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato called the Green Party a “story of complete failure” that has only succeeded in helping Republicans in close elections, according to The Guardian. Indeed, Stein is currently leading with Muslim-American voters in three swing states, according to Middle East Eye. 

More broadly, Stein is polling at 1%. Stein has also faced significant challenges in ensuring her name will stay on the ballot, another indicator of efforts to delegitimize third-party voting. Ohio will invalidate votes for Stein because of a late VP selection and Nevada will keep Stein off the ballot, though she’s just won a Supreme Court battle to stay on the ballot in Wisconsin. However, in an election widely predicted to be ominously close, with razor-thin margins in swing states, Hazou could be correct in predicting that third-party voters may have an impact that is difficult to ignore. The question becomes, if there aren’t enough third-party voters to ensure a third-party win, could they end up ensuring a Democratic loss?

Though Hazou believes that there is not much policy difference between candidates like Trump and Harris (Harris just touts a more discrete form of fascism, according to Hazou), she does not feel completely hopeless. As a Palestinian-American, she acknowledges the sense of defeat she has had to reckon with as over 40,000 Gazans have been killed (a conservative estimate that Euromed believes could be closer to over 100,000). But her belief in change as a real possibility sounds almost optimistic. “The amount of white people wearing keffiyehs is mind-blowing,” Hazou said, crediting strength in numbers as the crucial factor distinguishing the reaction to this bombardment from past bombardments of Gaza. To watch the public tide of support shift in Gaza’s favor, even as politicians look away, has been heartening for Hazou.

To her, it also speaks to voters' refusal to be ignored any longer, whether on the issue of Gaza, fracking, healthcare rights, gender inequality, or fiscal policy. The global awareness necessitated by social media is something Hazou credits with this shift. “It’s coming down to this issue of our responsibility as the strongest nation in the world,” Hazou said. “I think the older generation hasn’t yet understood that we don’t just care about people at home now. We care about our friends in Japan. And our friends in New Zealand. American policy does affect everyone in the world. And we need to be better caretakers of that.”

Above, Hazou pores over her family album. She has never been able to visit Palestine. Photo by Lauren Abunassar.

In a soft and well-loved blue and white family photo album, Hazou often lingers on the photos of her father. He died in the beginning of 2023 and both his history and his absence have been a quiet but vital force in Hazou’s Senate run.

In Hazou’s family photo, a young Hazou is pictured at left, her brother, at right, and her father, center. Photo courtesy of Leila Hazou.

“My father was a very cautious man,” Hazou said. “He was soft-spoken. Calm.” Hazou expects that if he’d been alive to hear about her run, he may have been horrified at first. Deeply concerned for her safety and the safety of her business, he may have encouraged her not to make waves. It’s a self-enforced invisibility Hazou has come to understand more with age. “I’m just now realizing how deep the trauma was that my father had,” she said.

Born in Jerusalem, Hazou’s father was seven when the Nakba happened. Warned by close Jewish neighbors and friends, his family fled their home under gunfire. He attended high school in Bethlehem, eventually arriving in California in the mid 60s. He met Hazou’s mom, an American, and once they eventually divorced, he stayed in California for the bulk of his life. Hazou reflects on the fact that he did not raise Hazou or her brother to speak Arabic — and that she was never able to visit Palestine herself.

Pictured above is Leila Hazou’s father. Born in West Jerusalem, he fled to Bethlehem during the Nakba. Photo courtesy of Leila Hazou.

But she understands now, that the caution baked into her father’s decisions was wrought of necessity. She’s been thinking lately of a story he once told her about walking with his high school friend through a cemetery in Bethlehem. His friend, shot by Israeli forces, bled to death in front of her father’s eyes. “No wonder they told us to just stay small. To stay quiet,” Hazou said. “This was what they lived through.”

With her father and most of her extended relatives gone, Hazou considers all of the history — personal and political — that will be lost if the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues. Her work to resist erasure coincides with her work to resist invisibility, a tactic of self-preservation for people like her father. Today, survival may hinge not on invisibility but on the fight for recognition. Again, for Hazou, running for Senate is not about winning. In some ways, it’s about vying for witnesses.

“Silence is what [the Republican-Democratic duopoly] wanted from us,” Hazou said. “That’s what the propaganda aimed to do and it succeeded. We won’t let it happen any longer.”

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NOTE: This story was produced as part of the 2024 Elections Reporting Grant Program, organized by the Center for Community Media and funded by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Tow Foundation.

Lauren Abunassar is a Palestinian American writer and journalist. A Media Fellow at Al-Bustan News, she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in journalism from NYU. Her first book Coriolis was published as winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.