While North Country Rep. Elise Stefanik has been supportive of Israel’s war in Gaza, recently asking U.S. officials to impose “severe consequences” on anyone who pursues arrests of Israel’s leaders for alleged war crimes, her opponents in the race to represent NY-21 say they are calling for a cease-fire and called the offensive in Gaza a “genocide.”

Democrat Paula Collins, and Scott Lewis, who is collecting signatures to try to land an independent party line, say they also disagree with Stefanik calling protestors on college campuses “pro-Hamas” and “antisemetic.”

Both candidates said they would not have voted for the $26 billion military aid package for Israel which Congress approved last month.

“I am certainly not antisemitic but I do believe that it is time to demand a cease-fire,” Collins said. “Because I value human life. … It’s the moral thing to do.”

She said she wants Israel to put aside its weapons to let humanitarian aid into Gaza.

“We’re really watching a genocide unfold before our very eyes,” Collins said.

Collins said she had to clarify that she is not antisemitic, because she feels calling for a cease-fire leads to those allegations.

“In this current moment, if I say I am calling for a cease-fire, my Republican opponent is in this category that will say ‘If you’re calling for a cease-fire you must be antisemitic,” Collins said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Collins said she is supportive of Israel, but she’s not comfortable with the decisions of its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Human lives are just being wasted and we don’t see any end in sight,” Collins said. “We’re looking at an entire group of people in Gaza just being obliterated.”

She also disagreed with Stefanik’s statements to U.S. officials that “Israel has attempted to allow as much well-vetted humanitarian aid in as possible.”

“There’s not evidence of that,” Collins said, citing the Israeli Defense Force’s drone strike killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers last month.

She said the evidence she sees is that Israel is blocking aid, adding that it is hard to sort out because peacekeeping forces cannot even get into Gaza to assess.

“While Israel has a right to defend itself, I think in a lot of ways, they have been an aggressor,” Lewis said.

Lewis said he wants Israel to release more information on how its military determines if a dead Palestinian is a member of Hamas or a citizen. How that is determined is important and informs statistics, he said. He said he’s seen that many women and children have been killed, approximately two-thirds of the 34,000 dead in Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials.

“I’m just concerned that they’re using Hamas terrorists as a right for genocide of the Palestinians,” Lewis said.

Lewis said he supports a cease-fire because “peace is the ultimate goal.” But he’s concerned Israel has goals of taking control of the land outside of defending itself from Hamas terrorists.

He said, in 1948, when the state of Israel was created, Palestine also called Jerusalem its capital, and the “manufactured conflict” has been ongoing ever since.

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Campus protests

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Lewis said he’s been asked why these student protesting the war aren’t pro-Israel. He doesn’t see it that way. He says they are pro-Palestine.

“It seems like a lot of our politicians are going with talking points that ‘We stand with Israel.’ I think our younger generations are going ‘Hey, wait. We stand with Palestine as well,'” Lewis said.

He believes Stefanik’s description of the protestors as “antisemitic” and “pro-Hamas” is a “mischaracterization.”

Collins, a cannabis lawyer who has offices in Manhattan, said she’s been meeting with clients in New York City and said the city is “on pins and needles” with campus protests all around. She said the breaking up of these protests by police is “tragic.” Columbia is known for protests in the building students occupied, she said, adding that protesting is a part of university life.

“Just allow the peaceful protests,” Collins said. “I think they should be allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights.”

“Illegal encampment and violent riots go far beyond any right to free speech protected under the First Amendment,” Stefanik said in a letter to trustees at Columbia University on Tuesday.

Collins conceded that some of the vandalism on Tuesday night was outside of First Amendment rights. But she said when the encampments started, they were all peaceful and common on college campuses, and did not merit NYPD coming in to break them up.

She said the students are asking for financial divestments from their universities in support of a more peaceful world for them to graduate into.

Collins believes that Stefanik had a role in the protests. Her questioning of the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and M.I.T. during hearings in December and April in a “dramatic and uncomfortable way” inflamed tensions, she said. While she said Stefanik is not responsible for individual actions, she believes the hearings — especially the recent one with Columbia University’s president, created a hostile environment.

“What’s her motivation exactly? Because I don’t think it’s to address antisemitism,” Collins said.

Asked to respond to this, Stefanik Senior Advisor Alex DeGrasse alleged that Collins is aligned with antisemites.

“It’s so totally untrue that I can’t even articulate a response,” Collins said.

Collins has been endorsed by the Working Families Party, which DeGrasse called a group of “pro-Hamas terrorists” and pointed out that the party is helping organize some of the university protests. He linked to a photo of a NYWFP protest where the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” could be seen on a flag.

“From the river to the sea is the call to wipe israel and the jewish people,” DeGrasse wrote.

He also pointed to a tweet from a voter that Collins reposted. The tweet said the voter wanted her to beat Stefanik because Stefanik “did all those congressional hearings with college presidents claiming ‘From the River to the Sea’ is antisemitic.'”

“Earlier this week, Democrat Paula Collins said she felt ‘energized’ after sitting down with a group that called the October 7th terrorist attacks a ‘historical rupture,'” DeGrasse wrote in an email.

The New York Progressive Action Network that Collins sat down with did publish an opinion written by a person who argued that a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine would not be just. In it, the writer refers to the Oct. 7 attack as a “historical rupture.”

“We are a country based on the free exchange of ideas,” Collins said. “It is tragic that we live in an era in which we’re so polarized that empathy for one group means putting one’s self in a certain trench of ideology.”

She said she thinks it is “silly” that politics is a “zero-sum game” where supporting pro-Palestine protests gets one deemed antisemitic.