Some of the speakers at the People’s Conference for Palestine, held in Detroit, Michigan, during August 29-31. Photo: HonestReporting.com.
By Stansfield Smith – Sep 8, 2025
The well-organized Palestine conference in Detroit brought over 4600 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 US-Israeli slaughter of civilians were honored throughout the three days that included over 20 sessions and plenaries, exhibits, including Palestinian cultural performances, a grand vendor fair and art exhibits.
It was made clear that Israel is the US garrison state in the Middle East, out to break the Palestinian people’s resistance. US-Israel aim to destroy their confidence in their ability to resist and fight back, and as the Final Solution, to wipe Palestinians off their homeland. The US-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 US, with the perpetrators shooting school children and civilians presented as an army of snipers in an armed conflict against their recalcitrant enemy.
Dr. Mohammad Mustafa, a Palestinian emergency doctor, now living in Australia, has done medical missions to Gaza, spoke in the plenary Gaza is the Center of the World said, “Healthcare 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 US-Israeli genocide’s settler-colonial project.” In the plenary, Aisha Nizar in gave an excellent review of their grassroots worldwide campaign to disrupt Maersk shipping company’s weapons deliveries to Israel. Over $19 billion in military materials have 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 their 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 was 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 US-Israel systematic genocidal campaign. Even before October 2023 the Palestinians in Gaza were corralled in an open air prison. Gaza is surrounded by 100 kibbutzes, 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 were all targeted and bombed, as were the water treatment plants; water wells were bombed. Israel flushes sea water into the strip to pollute the freshwater aquifers. The one Gaza electrical power plant Israel bombed a week after October 7. US-Israel cut off fuel, electricity, wifi, lighting. Every single hospital, 36 of them, were bombed, one with white phosphorus, which burns right through your body. To date, 1600 health workers have been killed. Every single school in Gaza, preschool to university, Israel bombed.
Israel bombed food aid sites, bakeries, and markets in the mornings, when people go there. In the evening they bomb residential areas, when families gather for dinner. The over 400 food and aid sites, US-Israel shut down in May 2025. They are now only four, each a sniper death trap operated by US-Israel. Several hundred Palestinians have already starved to death.
Gaza is now 90% destroyed.
When people of Gaza are told to move from one area to another, they 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 US tech company tools, then wipes out the whole family.
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 US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, 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 September 18.
It made clear the US empire is heavily invested in maintaining Israel as its imperial weapon against the peoples of the Middle East, as the neighborhood cop protecting US oil interests in the region. But today, for the first time, there is now widespread—and outspoken—sympathy in the US people for the suffering of the Palestinian people inflicted by US-Israel. Dislike for Israel has risen to new heights.
The conference also explained that the US government and corporations invest in Israel since 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 US government has already used some of its citizens in gauging the deadly impact of nuclear fallout, in the CIA Program MK Ultra, 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 US-Israeli research institutes, in US-Israeli 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.
US genocides
US history is full of genocides, against the Filipinos, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the East Timorese, the Guatemalans, the Iraqis. It was the US and Britain who carpet bombed German civilian centers in cities, killing many tens of thousands—the Soviet Union did not, it fought German troops. The US is the only country to use the nuclear 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 don’t exist to help us.
The struggle against the even more barbaric US slave system likewise took nearly a century, if we start with Vermont first abolishing it, in 1777. It was not defeated by African slave resistance and the Abolitionist movement, forebearers of our Palestine movement today, but by outright war provoked by the slaveocracy. And yet, the victories in the US 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 US genocidal operations comes from the wiping Native Americans off their land, and the enslavement of Africans, breaking them, 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 US 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 US was “the one state” that created the racist society the Nazis wanted. He praised the “Aryan” US 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 US 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 is the 500 year old mentality that Palestinians and we have to face in struggling to end the genocide.
This Palestine conference invigorated the movement against the US-Israeli genocide. It emphasized “Palestine is the Compass,” a key class struggle for opponents of the US empire to organize around. Winning this struggle against this white chauvinist US-Israeli destruction of the Palestinian people, has been and will be a long arduous struggle. Today the US empire may be in economic decline, but it still remains an overwhelming foe. It knows losing this struggle will be another nail in its coffin.
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