Hundreds of people gathered in Dearborn, Michigan on Tuesday, July 22 for an emergency rally demanding an end to the blockade on humanitarian aid to Gaza. Health officials and politicians have been issuing warnings about an imminent famine in the Gaza Strip after 21 months of ceaseless Israeli offensives since October 7, 2023.
The two million people who live in the Gaza Strip depend primarily on outside aid, reflecting the reality of Israel’s settler-colonial project to continuously foreclose upon any possibility for the independent development of social and economic relations. The imperialist domination of a colonial type seeks to subordinate the people of Palestine to its networks of production and distribution. IDF security checkpoints, and likewise the subjective whims of the ruling class of Israel and its major imperialist sponsor, the United States, pose significant barriers to Gaza accessing commodities on the market. The United Nations Food Program reports that malnutrition is becoming generalized amongst the most vulnerable, women and children. In some cases, people are going days without eating.
The latest horror story is about the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Since late May, the occupying army has begun issuing one cardboard card for help per father per week. The father then has to present an identity document to receive a security clearance, proving that he is not a part of any resistance faction. Before receipt of the package, its size and composition is determined by the number of persons in the family. The tenuous ground on which the operation rests created the unpredictability that on June 1 compelled the Israeli Defense Forces to fire at civilians who were attempting to retrieve provisions. Such incidents of mass slaughter reflect the strategy of any colonial power, to feed and to kill.
There have been many attempts to deliver the vital resources needed. However, the state of Israel has prevented the delivery of those services, in a continuation of its brutal policy of genocidal subjugation against Palestine. From civil society groups initiating overland convoys and sea flotillas, to the United States air-dropping supplies in March 2024, the strategy of confining Gazans to the largest open-air prison is central to the Israeli regime of oppression. The major obstacle standing between Gaza and food is the gatekeeper that stands between Palestine and the rest of the world. Israel has even cut off access to the territory from the UN agencies that would collect the data necessary to determine that famine is in fact occurring.
The message from Dearborn, a city bordering Detroit with a significant Arab-American population, is simple: we hear the call of Gaza that there is one struggle to free us all. Various speakers united around the exigency of the moment created by the confluence of right-wing forces that seek to prevent education critical of Israeli settler-colonialism; to use ahistorical definitions of “antisemitism” to attack DEI initiatives; and to attack labor unions, faculty, and students when they stand up for Palestine.
A Palestinian-American representative of the organization Doctors Against Genocide reminded the community of Dearborn and broader metro Detroit that an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. The struggle of two million in Palestine is the struggle of the world’s downtrodden: for real justice and complete democracy, for freedom from coercive economic pressures, for self-determination. An elder of the community assured the crowd that Gaza is not dying, Gaza is resisting, and we need to translate resistance into a tangible force that is capable of saving people from dying of hunger in Gaza. This is the tangible task, to show to the Palestinian people that you are not alone.
The speaker from the Yemeni Liberation Movement pointed towards how Trump and the United States have encouraged NATO leaders to back major increases in military spending. They highlighted how this occurs hand in hand with the rollback and deregulation of social programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In addition, it is critical to understand these cuts as a continuation of tendencies toward austerity and precarization, preceded for instance by the 1996 reform of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (1935). The growing international bureaucratic military apparatus coincides with the massive industry for weapons that the United States hosts for and shares with, at a very low cost, their strategic and indispensable ally in Southwest Asia. The continued reason for the existence of the state of Israel is its direct link to imperialism as a military bastion in the service of counterrevolutionary U.S. imperialist strategy in the region. The international social crisis that has emerged as a result has made borderless solidarity the order of the day, at the same time that population controllers adjust to right wing rhetoric that locates causes of inequality in individual behavior or dysfunctional families and communities, reinforcing an overall conservative drift.
We need to continue to build the movement to free Palestine, and link up this anti-imperialist struggle for liberation with the struggle for immigrant rights and the fight against Trump’s increasingly authoritarian attacks on workers and the oppressed.
To create a strategy that can realize our goals, we need political self-organization that is based on class independence aimed at utilizing the strategic power of the working class to shut down society through strikes and collective actions of the working class and oppressed. We must realize the folly of relying on the Democrats or Republicans to act in the interest of Palestine, and put no faith in bourgeois nationalist governments abroad to wage a real fight for Palestine, especially as they continue to exploit and repress their own citizens.
The rally Tuesday resounded through the city that the struggle of Palestinians against brutal Israeli occupation has a regional and international scope. Uniting under the common banner of the workers and oppressed, the slogan of the march was to make Dearborn into “a freedom zone” to demonstrate to the people of Palestine that we understand that solidarity consists in common struggle towards a common goal. The less we wait for the ruling-class to save us, the more resolute and irreconcilable our fight becomes.
The post Dearborn Has A Message for Gaza: You Are Not Alone appeared first on Left Voice.