Detroiters demand Israeli ceasefire

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Metro Detroit Jews gathered in downtown Detroit on Monday to call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to Israeli apartheid.

The Israeli military is on a war crimes-filled rampage in the Gaza Strip, incinerating Palestinian civilians by the thousands and pounding their communities to dust.

International human rights observers have called it a “humanitarian catastrophe.” For Gazans, who are hostages to Israel’s illegal 16-year air, land, and sea blockade, the label must feel like a massive understatement. The scenes are apocalyptic. Neighborhoods have been decimated and cut off from food, water, fuel, and electricity. More than one million people have been driven from their homes with nowhere to go. The hospital system has been at its “breaking point” for days, and that was before, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, the Israeli military obliterated the al-Ahli Hospital and the hundreds of civilians inside. Israel and the U.S. deny the Israeli military’s responsibility for the explosion, though any media outlet reporting that claim must also mention that both countries have a long history of shamelessly and relentlessly lying about their war crimes, and in fact, analysts are already calling Israel’s audio tape clearing its name an obvious fake.

While the White House, mainstream press, and Israeli officials accelerate us further down a decades-long path to what Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal calls “a textbook case of genocide,” it’s easy to forget that the solution to this horror show is obvious and has been for decades.

In metro Detroit, the path to peace was recently made plain at separate rallies, one held in majority-Arab Dearborn and another in downtown Detroit led by “a broad community of Jews unified through moral outrage at the violence in Gaza,” according to a press release.

In both instances, the message was extraordinarily simple: Intensifying the violence will only push the people of Gaza closer toward annihilation, an outcome several prominent Israelis clearly desire. What Gazans need now is an immediate and complete ceasefire, and an end to the underlying cause of this catastrophic violence: Israel’s harsh and sprawling system of apartheid.

Two rallies, one message for peace

Approaching the pro-Palestine rally at Dearborn’s Ford Woods Park on Saturday, Oct. 14, you could hear the chants roar over the top of a nearby building before you even see anyone. First, a voice bursts out over a megaphone. Then the crowd thunders back.

The park spills onto a lot, where thousands gathered for a Palestinian solidarity rally and march. A sea of black and white keffiyehs and Palestinian national flags stretch out in every direction.

“You will never find peace until the occupation is over!” one speaker thunders near the end of the rally.

And this really does cut to the heart of it all. If you want peace you need to address what makes the region so combustible to begin with.

Two days later, this message was echoed at the Jewish-led rally in Detroit, which demanded that “President Biden and Sens. Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow call for an immediate ceasefire to stop the genocide of Palestinians, and an end to Israeli apartheid.”

“As Jewish people we refuse to let genocide unfold in our names,” says Lex Eisenberg, an organizer who attended the second demonstration. “As an anti-Zionist Jew, I know that we will only find safety in solidarity with Palestinian liberation and by ending 75 years of Israeli apartheid.”

Thousands more people with progressive American Jewish groups also mobilized outside the White House on Monday to demand an immediate ceasefire.

Supporters of Israel have staged their own rallies, following what they see as a totally unprovoked attack from the Gaza Strip against communities along its border.

The argument is persuasive if you start the clock at 6 a.m. on Oct. 7, when Hamas, the militant group that runs the Gaza Strip, launched a gruesome attack on Israel, targeting military bases as well as civilian communities, killing more than 1,400 people and taking hundreds of hostages.

You can see why someone would start there. By zooming in narrowly on the Oct. 7’s painful hours, and recycling the most aggressively racist myths about Arab savagery, it’s much easier — depraved, but easier — to pretend that the entire strip just needs to be bombed to smithereens. Much easier to pretend that decades of injustice and mass cruelty inflicted on the Palestinians never happened. To pretend that Gaza isn’t a concentration camp where Palestinians have been held hostage for 16 years.

“Human animals must be treated as such,” one bluntly genocidal Israeli general said. “You wanted hell, you will get hell.”

For the last two weeks, they’ve delivered.

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The latest from the ground

Israel is currently bombing Gaza mercilessly, dropping more than 6,000 munitions on the narrow strip, and killing more than 4,000 people, 1,030 of them reportedly children. Following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow to “act everywhere with all our force,” the military has flattened residential buildings, schools, refugee camps, and hospitals. All the basic infrastructure people need to live and will continue dying in grotesque numbers without.

Early on, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Defense Minister, ordered “a complete siege of the Gaza Strip,” promising that “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel.” International law experts were quick to point out that this type of collective punishment is a war crime that borders on the genocidal. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The imposition of sieges that endanger the lives of civilians by depriving them of goods essential for their survival is prohibited under international humanitarian law.”

Gallant just hit the gas on the genocide talk: “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” Then the ethnic cleansing came. Israel ordered more than one million Gazans to evacuate the territory’s north in 24 hours, most likely so they could further pulverize the area in a bloody ground invasion. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric warned this would have “devastating humanitarian consequences,” and would “transform… a tragedy into a calamitous situation.”

The ongoing tragedy in Gaza is well known: 2.2 million Palestinians are packed into the strip, nearly half of them children and 80% of them poor. Since 2006, Gazans have lived under an illegal Israeli blockade on all sides, leaving them no way out of a territory U.N. officials have called “unlivable,” and earning it the horrific title of the world’s “largest open-air prison.” Most of the water is “unfit for human consumption.” And Israeli officials have talked openly about placing trapped Palestinians “on a diet” without letting them “die of hunger,” and needing to “mow the lawn” there every so often, a euphemism for blowing them away by the thousands.

While all of this is happening, Israeli settlers illegally occupying the West Bank, the other Palestinian territory in the region, are using the chaos to intensify this year’s vicious run of pogroms of Palestinian towns, killing dozens and depopulating entire villages.

In his piece, Raz Segal calls this “yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel.”

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Viola Klocko

Metro Detroiters rallied in support of Palestine in Dearborn on Saturday.

It’s simpler than it looks

Israel was founded in 1948 as a Jewish state, in the shadow of the Holocaust’s unimaginable horrors against the Jewish people. The problem was that there was already an indigenous Arab majority on the land. In order to become a Jewish ethno-nationalist state, the Palestinian majority couldn’t be given full and equal rights as citizens. Instead, Israel’s British-sponsored militias carried out a massive ethnic cleansing, driving more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in what Palestinians call the “Nakba,” or catastrophe.

Instead of doing the obvious thing and allowing the Palestinians to create their own state, Israel placed them under a brutal occupation in the West Bank and an illegal blockade in Gaza. Everywhere, Palestinians are only granted limited freedoms, and face an entire ecosystem of discrimination. The miseries of that system have been well-documented by the world’s most respected and cautious human rights organizations, including Israeli ones, all of which have carefully concluded that Israel indeed runs an apartheid state. The list of people who agree includes a former head of Israeli intelligence and a former Israeli defense minister, among others.

Because Israel refuses to change any of this and won’t stop moving settlers into Palestinian territory, the West Bank looks more like Swiss Cheese than it does a viable state.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has made his position clear: He wants to “crush” any Palestinian hope for statehood, which he’s promised will never happen on his watch.

Since the beginning, honest Zionist thinkers have been equally clear about their colonial aspirations. Theodore Herzl, modern Zionism’s founding father, described the future Israel as “something colonial” in a 1902 letter to Cecil Rhodes, one of the most ferocious imperialists of his day. In his brilliant book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, historian Rashid Khalidi quotes Herzl’s diary, where he writes about the need to “expropriate gently” and “spirit” the country’s poor population “discreetly” “across the border.”

​​Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the godfather of Revisionist Zionism, Israel’s main political trend for the last 50 years, was even more blunt in 1923, arguing that “Zionist colonization” must be “carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.”

In a nutshell: Palestinians have spent the better part of a century struggling fiercely against an old school European-style settler colony for the basic freedom to govern themselves. Israel and the United States have blocked them at every turn.

The right to resist

There are two key things to know about Palestinian resistance broadly: first, Palestinian resistance is completely legitimate under international law. And second, as Jabotinsky noted, it is entirely predictable.

The U.N. has repeatedly affirmed the rights of people to determine their own futures, most strongly in a 1982 resolution. That resolution singles out the Palestinians specifically, who have the right to resist any occupying force “by all available means, including armed struggle.”

And why wouldn’t they? In the essay quoted above, Jabotinsky freely admits that, “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’”

He was right. Palestinians have kept that spark alive for generations, and resisted with remarkable determination. Along the way, Israel and the United States have rejected each non-violent option, from the peace process to the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Israel. For peacefully protesting, Palestinians often pay with their lives. Take 2018’s symbolic Great March of Return. When Gazans peacefully marched on the border wall, Israeli snipers gunned down protesters, medics, and children in cold blood, killing hundreds and injuring thousands.

“When you put people in that situation,” Palestinian American analyst Omar Badder said in a recent interview, “it is utterly unsurprising, as much as it is tragic and horrifying, that there will be Palestinians who want to commit atrocious acts of violence to exact some revenge, thinking that might lead them a little closer to freedom.”

Noura Erakat, a Palestinian American human rights attorney, notes that while the right to armed struggle is “not unqualified,” the grisly chain of events is totally predictable to anyone who’s even a little familiar with the facts.

That includes the Israeli government. It’s since come out that Israeli officials were warned of the Oct. 7 attack by Egypt. More disturbingly, as the Washington Post reports, the possibility of violent blowback from Hamas was accepted by high level Israeli security officials for years, who simply considered it the cost of running a brutal military dictatorship in Gaza.

Again, completely predictable, but all the cheerleaders for war throw a fit when you point this out. Sarah Schulman picked them apart brilliantly in a recent New York Magazine piece. The war crowd, conservatives and liberals alike, have totally accepted the twisted idea that “understanding history, looking at the order of events and the consequences of previous actions to understand” the present, is to “somehow endorse” what happened.

You could see this in the meltdown mainstream liberals had when Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush issued statements condemning the violence and calling for a ceasefire and an end to the cruel system of apartheid that that violence so obviously flowed from.

But, Schulman writes, “Explanations are not excuses. They are the illumination that builds the future.”

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Lapointe: Rashida Tlaib under right-wing attack for defending Palestine: The only Palestinian in Congress is accused of hating Israel and supporting Hamas terrorists. That’s ‘rooted in bigoted assumptions,’ she says.

The U.S. role and moral responsibility

Israel will continue to unleash hell on the people of Gaza unless we do something about it. That something is an immediate and total ceasefire.

Those of us in the U.S. are not just bystanders to this. Because our tax dollars fund Israel’s war machine, we are morally responsible for the predictable consequences of that support. And as Israel’s single largest military, diplomatic, and financial sponsor, the U.S. could throw its incredible weight around to help bring an end to the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians.

As Sarah Lazare and Adam H. Johnson write in The Nation, a growing chorus of voices around the world is calling for the bombing to stop, including humanitarian organizations, think tanks, and countless everyday people. A handful of progressive members of Congress have also called for a ceasefire, but are losing to the “Bomb Nicer” crowd of liberals calling for Israel’s retaliation “to be carried out ‘according to international law and take all due measures to limit harm to innocent civilians.’” Lazare and Johnson argue convincingly that this boils down to asking that “the Israeli government carry out its potential war crimes with more grace and charity.” This is the chicken-hearted position of the Democratic Party’s leadership and there is little chance of them singing a different song without enormous pressure.

That pressure is being brought to bear through focused activism, with millions of determined people from every corner of the globe now demanding that elites everywhere, and in Washington especially, answer for their stupendous cowardice in the face of catastrophic human loss — President Joe Biden included.

Through it all, Biden has pledged “unwavering U.S. support for Israel” with no qualifications and only the mildest criticism of its actions. His State Department is currently discouraging diplomats from mentioning dirty words like “de-escalation/ceasefire,” or an “end to violence/bloodshed,” and “restoring calm,” Huffpost reports. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre even called ceasefire advocates “disgraceful” and “repugnant.”

The human cost for this complete lack of courage is unimaginable, and the least U.S. citizens can do is turn the ceasefire demands up to a roar and haunt every powerful politician’s dreams until they decide that funding atrocities just isn’t worth it. If we want to bring an end to this very real nightmare, then the U.S. government needs to be forced onto a different path than the one it’s been on for the last 75 years.

Rally-goers made clear that a ceasefire is the absolute floor. But there is also a simple way to achieve lasting peace: for the U.S. to stop blocking the drive for Palestinian freedom by halting its sponsorship of the apartheid regime ruthlessly crushing it.

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