The well-organized Palestine conference in Detroit brought more than 4,600 there, with a heavy Palestinian presence.
Most of the speakers in the plenaries were genuine Palestinian activists tested in battle, not well-known writers or professors.
The over 270 journalists who have been targeted and murdered for informing the world of the endless U.S.-Israeli slaughter of civilians were honored throughout the three days, that included more than 20 sessions and plenaries, exhibits, including Palestinian cultural performances, a grand vendor fair and art exhibits.
It was made clear that Israel is the U.S. garrison state in the Middle East, out to break the Palestinian people’s resistance.
U.S.-Israel aim to destroy their confidence in the ability to resist and fight back, and as the Final Solution, to wipe Palestinians off their homeland.
The U.S.-Israeli military operations, through relentless carpet bombing, mass shootings of civilians and starvation, aim to kill Palestinians until they decide to flee.
If this is a war, then so are the mass shootings in the U.S., with the perpetrators shooting school children and civilians presented as an army of snipers in an armed conflict against their recalcitrant enemy.
Dr. Mohammed Mustafa, a Palestinian emergency doctor now living in Australia who has done medical missions to Gaza, spoke in the plenary Gaza is the Center of the World: “Health care in Gaza is not a failure by accident but sabotage by design with doctors killed and aid blocked. That is the reality of Gaza. It is a mirror that is being held up to humanity. Why is it that baby formula is banned from Gaza? Why is it that feeding a child is considered a threat? Why are ambulances and hospitals turned into targets of war? When did bread and milk become weapons? When did saving lives become a crime? Gaza is the only place on Earth where nourishing a baby is an act of resistance. It is the only place where life itself is viewed as a weapon of war.”
The plenary No Weapons for Genocide: The People Demand an Arms Embargo referred to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese’s report on “the corporate machinery sustaining the U.S.-Israeli genocide’s settler-colonial project.”
In the plenary, Aisha Nizar gave an excellent review of the worldwide grassroots campaign to disrupt the Maersk shipping company’s weapons deliveries to Israel.
More than $19 billion in military material has gone to Israel since the genocide began, mostly by commercial shipping companies.
Maersk makes up over 50% of this shipping fleet. Aisha explained the work involved in organizing against Maersk, and having Spanish and Moroccan dock workers strike over servicing its ships.
In the workshop entitled “Unmasking Genocide Enablers in the United States,” Writers Against the War on Gaza presented their campaign against The New York Times, condemning its apologist reporting of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.
One demand of the campaign is making the newspaper retract the December 2023 article “Screams Without Words,” which claimed rape and sexual violence by Palestinian resistance fighters. This has been dubbed “the most dangerous piece of propaganda published since the Iraq War.”
The plenary Documenting Genocide: Gaza, Before and After October 2023 outlined the process of the systematic U.S.-Israel genocidal campaign.
Even before October 2023 the Palestinians in Gaza were corralled in an open-air prison. Gaza is surrounded by 100 kibbutzim, originally set up under the cover of being socialist communes, as military outposts outside Gaza.
Since October 7, Israel has weaponized and targeted all aspects of life in Gaza: food, health care, water, sewage, energy, education, shelter and infrastructure. To cut off the people’s own Gaza-grown food, Israel bombed and chemically sprayed the agricultural lands (46% of the Strip).
Israel controls access to much of Gaza’s water, though Gaza does have aquifers. Gaza’s desalination plants have all been targeted and bombed, as have the water treatment plants; water wells have also been bombed.
Israel flushes sea water into the Strip to pollute the freshwater aquifers. Israel bombed the only Gaza electrical power plant Israel a week after October 7.
U.S.-Israel cut off fuel, electricity, Wi-Fi, lighting; every hospital—36 of them—were bombed, one with white phosphorus, which burns right through the human body.
To date, 1,600 health workers have been killed. Israel has bombed every school in Gaza, from pre-school through university.
Israel bombed food aid sites, bakeries, and markets in the mornings, when people go there. In the evenings they bomb residential areas, when families gather for dinner. The more than 400 food and aid sites, U.S.-Israel shut down in May 2025. There are now only four, each a sniper death trap operated by U.S.-Israel. Several hundred Palestinians have already starved to death.
Gaza is now 90% destroyed.
When the people of Gaza are told to move from one area to another, they have to go through checkpoints which register their photos and IDs, for Palantir, which are then used for the murder program “Where is Daddy?” When Israel wants to murder particular Palestinians, it tracks them to their homes, using U.S. tech company tools, then wipes out whole families.
The Sunday plenary delved into the obstacle of the Palestinian Authority, now kapos for the Israeli occupation. The PA is like a little brother of the regimes that rule the Arab countries, forces for keeping the people under control and beaten down.
These regimes know any liberation for the Palestinian people will set off popular earthquakes throughout the Arab World and destabilize their own rule.
The conference ending was highlighted by an excellent closing speech by Palestinian U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who now faces congressional censure for it.
The conference would have benefited by having reports on the work of Jewish Voice for Peace, the BDS Movement (Boycott, Divest and Sanctions), and the Freedom Flotillas to Gaza, especially since the largest one is en route.
The conference organizers called for a massive demonstration at the United Nations on September 26 when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to address the General Assembly.
The Palestine NGO Network called a Global Day of Action and Strike for September 18th.
This Palestine conference invigorated the movement against the U.S.-Israeli genocide. It made clear the U.S. empire is heavily invested in maintaining Israel as its imperial weapon against the people of the Middle East, as the neighborhood cop protecting U.S. oil interests in the region.
But today, for the first time, there is now widespread—and outspoken—sympathy within the U.S. population for the suffering of the Palestinian people inflicted by U.S.-Israel. Dislike for Israel has risen to new heights.
The conference also explained that the U.S. government and corporations invest in Israel because, in essence, it is a lab with actual human subjects, not just rats or guinea pigs, where it can experiment with new methods of control, manipulation and mass murder.
As Rashida Tlaib wisely warned in her speech, “what our government is willing to do to Palestinians, it is willing to do to all of us.”
For instance, the U.S. government has already used some of its citizens in gauging the deadly impact of nuclear fallout, in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program, and in the decades-long Tuskegee experiment.
By the end of the conference, it was easy to comprehend that this genocide was planned in advance of October 7.
Planned out in U.S.-Israeli research institutes and think tanks. In “the Academy,” the Ivory Tower, institutes exist to develop the most efficient manuals for mass murder of populations.
And how to carry this out in the public eye while hiding it from them, while talking about freedom, democracy and human rights. The manuals await the pretext and the sadistic politicians, like October 7 and Netanyahu, to put one into practice.
U.S. Genocides
U.S. history is full of genocides, against the Filipinos, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the East Timorese, the Guatemalans, the Iraqis. It was the U.S. and Britain which carpet-bombed German civilian centers in cities, killing many tens of thousands—the Soviet Union did not, it fought German troops. The U.S. is the only country to use the atomic bomb on civilian centers, at a time when Japan was surrendering.
The struggle against the other apartheid settler regime, South Africa, long and hard, took many decades. It was ultimately aided by revolutions and solidarity from neighboring Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe.
Unfortunately, this situation hardly exists with the Arab neighbors of Israel. A turning point for South Africa came with Cuban troops defeating the apartheid occupation army in Angola. This is not on the horizon for Palestinians either. These key factors in the defeat of South African apartheid do not exist to help us.
The struggle against the even more barbaric U.S. slave system likewise took nearly a century, if we start when Vermont first abolished it in 1777. It was not defeated by African slave resistance and the Abolitionist movement, forebears of our Palestine movement today, but by outright war provoked by the slaveocracy.
And yet, the victories in the U.S. and South Africa have remained partial victories, unfinished. Unfortunately, the arc of justice in history progresses two steps forward, one step back.
The model for U.S. genocidal operations comes from the wiping of Native Americas from their lands, and the enslavement of Africans, breaking them and stripping them of their humanity.
The entitled, genocidal attitude of white “civilization”—that it owns the world and will civilize it with the sword and Bible—has continued for 500 years. The astounding hypocrisy of the U.S. rulers, committing mass murder while talking about freedom and human rights, goes back centuries.
The writer of “all men are created equal,” who referred to “the merciless Indian Savages” in the same Declaration, owned other humans, as if they were cows or pigs.
The same Jefferson wrote these genocidal words ten years later: “Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South is to be peopled…My fear is that they [the Spanish] are too feeble to hold [their colonies] till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece.”
In Mein Kampf, Hitler noted the U.S. was “the one state” that created the racist society the Nazis wanted. He praised the “Aryan” U.S. conquering “its own continent” by clearing the “soil” of “natives” for more “racially pure” occupiers.
In 1937 Winston Churchill, of similar mind, said of the Palestinians: “I do not agree that a dog in a manger has the final rights to the manger, even though he may have lived there for a very long time.”
Israeli prime ministers continued this racist genocidal thinking, saying Palestinians “do not exist,” another calling them “two-legged beasts,” and a third “grasshoppers to be crushed.”
They treated the two-state solution in the same way the U.S. did with treaties with Native Americans.
European Union leader Josep Borrell embodies the same entitled white racism when publicly describing Europe as a “garden” and warned that “most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.”
This Palestine conference invigorated the movement against the U.S.-Israeli genocide. It emphasized “Palestine is the Compass,” a key class struggle for opponents of the U.S. empire to organize around.
Winning this struggle against this white chauvinist U.S.-Israeli destruction of the Palestinian people, has been and will be a long arduous struggle.
Today the U.S. empire may be in economic decline, but it still remains an overwhelming foe. It knows its losing this struggle will be another nail in its coffin.
CovertAction Magazine is made possible by subscriptions, orders and donations from readers like you.
Blow the Whistle on U.S. Imperialism
Click the whistle and donate
When you donate to CovertAction Magazine, you are supporting investigative journalism. Your contributions go directly to supporting the development, production, editing, and dissemination of the Magazine.
CovertAction Magazine does not receive corporate or government sponsorship. Yet, we hold a steadfast commitment to providing compensation for writers, editorial and technical support. Your support helps facilitate this compensation as well as increase the caliber of this work.
Please make a donation by clicking on the donate logo above and enter the amount and your credit or debit card information.
CovertAction Institute, Inc. (CAI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and your gift is tax-deductible for federal income purposes. CAI’s tax-exempt ID number is 87-2461683.
We sincerely thank you for your support.
Disclaimer: The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of the author(s). CovertAction Institute, Inc. (CAI), including its Board of Directors (BD), Editorial Board (EB), Advisory Board (AB), staff, volunteers and its projects (including CovertAction Magazine) are not responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. This article also does not necessarily represent the views the BD, the EB, the AB, staff, volunteers, or any members of its projects.
Differing viewpoints: CAM publishes articles with differing viewpoints in an effort to nurture vibrant debate and thoughtful critical analysis. Feel free to comment on the articles in the comment section and/or send your letters to the Editors, which we will publish in the Letters column.
Copyrighted Material: This web site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a not-for-profit charitable organization incorporated in the State of New York, we are making such material available in an effort to advance the understanding of humanity’s problems and hopefully to help find solutions for those problems. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. You can read more about ‘fair use’ and US Copyright Law at the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School.
Republishing: CovertAction Magazine (CAM) grants permission to cross-post CAM articles on not-for-profit community internet sites as long as the source is acknowledged together with a hyperlink to the original CovertAction Magazine article. Also, kindly let us know at info@CovertActionMagazine.com. For publication of CAM articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: info@CovertActionMagazine.com.
By using this site, you agree to these terms above.
About the Author
Stansfield Smith is a member of Chicago ALBA Solidarity, formerly the Chicago Committee to Free the Cuban 5.
He has published in Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Monthly Review online, and other websites.
Smith is a long time anti-war activist, and opposed U.S. interference over the years in Latin America.
He produces AFGJ’s Venezuela & ALBA Weekly News.
Stan’s website is ChicagoALBASolidarity.org and he can be reached at Stansfieldsmith100@gmail.com.
