Metro Detroit activists join thousands at DNC to protest US military support for Israel

The Gaza war protesters who arrived in Dearborn at dawn Monday to trek to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago came to the charter bus from different backgrounds.

Young, middle-aged, Black, white, brown – and mostly strangers – the group of about 40 were united by a hope to bring an end to Israel's retaliatory war on Gaza. That afternoon, they would join thousands from across the country in calling on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to end U.S. military support for Israel, marching on the convention and returning to Dearborn later that day.

The war that broke out after Hamas-led militants crossed into Israel on Oct. 7, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking some 250 hostage, has killed more than 40,000 Gazans, according to the territory’s health ministry.

After 10 months of protest and no end to the violence, the convention offered activists an opportunity unlike any they’d had yet. With the party to vote on a new platform, “uncommitted” delegates pushing an embargo on U.S. arms to Israel and for a Palestinian American to speak on stage, and a new presidential nominee in Harris, they hoped a massive protest could trigger a change in course.

As the sleepy group rolled out of the Arab American museum parking lot in the pink glow of sunrise, Sumayya Cherri, a 32-year-old Dearborn resident with roots in southern Lebanon, focused on the demographics of those onboard.

After years protesting Israel's military actions and its occupation of the Palestinian territories and, until 2000, a portion of southern Lebanon, Cherri said she was heartened to see that Arab Americans and Muslims weren’t alone. On the bus, in fact, they were the minority.

“When I came here in 2006 and protested the Lebanese war (between Israel and Hezbollah), you didn't see a lot of Americans,” said Cherri, who was raised in Dearborn but attending college at the time in Kuwait. “But the protests I've been to this year all have been less Arabs and Muslims and more of everyone else.

“It brings me hope, it takes the stress off,” she said. “I was always stressed about like – how do I make the Americans understand why they need to align with our struggle?”

Moved to activism

Many on the bus had been active for years across other social-justice issues and viewed the Palestinian struggle as another facet of the same broad system of oppression. On the four-hour ride, police accountability organizers discussed next steps in the case of Sherman Lee Butler, a Detroiter recently shot and killed by a court bailiff who’d come to evict him, while a pair of socialist organizers waxed sarcastic about Harris’ mass appeal: “She’s just having a good time, I get the vibe.”

Nova Williams, a Wayne State University sophomore studying engineering, was new to activism. Her journey began just months ago, with a move from her childhood home in New Baltimore to her first apartment in Dearborn.

Arriving Monday at the warm-up rally at Chicago’s Union Park to a sea of demonstrators clad in keffiyehs, Williams, small-framed with long braids, recalled the green, red, white and black event flyer that started it all for her. Spotted in her neighborhood coffee shop in May, the flyer advertised the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit.

Williams attended, and something clicked. By the end of the three-day event, she said, she viewed Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories as “apartheid” and the Palestinian and Black struggles as linked.

“(I was) like wow, I didn't even know any of this even happened,” said Williams, who is Black. “I was very sheltered on a lot that was happening on the outside, especially coming from New Baltimore. It’s such a small city that’s more white-populated and right wing.”

Since the Memorial Day weekend conference, the sophomore engineering student has dived headlong into pro-Palestinian and racial-justice activism. Now a member of the Detroit Alliance Against Racial and Political Repression, she’s attended numerous protests against the Gaza war, always with an older family member playing chaperone.

In June, she joined a separate bus of demonstrators for a march on the White House, with her older sister keeping watch. On Independence Day, her father, an autoworker whose Palestinian American colleague influenced his support for a ceasefire, accompanied her to a rally in Dearborn.

On the bus Monday, she was escorted by her mother, an elementary school teacher who’s taken pride watching Nova come into her own. “It’s incredible,” said Natasha Williams, 48.

“I used to be under the impression that whatever anyone else was voting for or was for, that I should just go along with it, but I didn't really think for myself then,” Nova Williams said. “(This is) also at the same time a self-discovery journey … I'm learning what I know is right and wrong and what's humane to do.

“I want to be on the right side of history.”

Leaving home changed his view

The seeds for bus trip co-organizer Jacob Smith’s own "awakening" were planted in college too.

Raised outside Flint by evangelical Christian Zionists – believers in a Biblical end-times prophecy wherein Jews must first return to Israel – Smith, 32, described having been “propagandized from every angle” until his worldview began to expand at the University of Michigan.

There, he took a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and befriended two pro-Palestinian students, one of whom went to high school in the United Arab Emirates. The friendships helped catalyze his political evolution, he said, thwarting mainstream narratives that are “broadly pro-U.S. geopolitical interests.”

A software engineer, Smith said he became politically active in 2019 because he began to see electoral participation as insufficient to affect change. While he’s since largely focused on police accountability, the war that broke out in October kicked his occasional pro-Palestinian activism into high gear.

“You kind of see it as all being connected,” said Smith, who is white. “So not only do you come out in support for things like Black Lives Matter, livable wages for working class people, but also … coming to the cause for Palestine.

“(It’s about) compassion and being a good person and understanding we’re all human beings and we should stand in solidarity with each other, but the broad causes for all of these things are kind of connected.”

Smith estimates he’s attended or helped organize approximately 20 Gaza-war protests in the past year. There was more work to be done Monday, and he hurried off to distribute signs.

What they see on social media

The thousands who marched on the convention Monday were part of a broad coalition of more than 200 activist groups. Some came by plane, train or bus, and from cities as far flung as Denver and New Orleans.

A Lebanese-American woman with the metro Detroit contingent attributed American anti-war sentiment to what she sees as the cruelty of Israel’s assault on the besieged Gaza Strip. The country has bombed and limited aid to a captive population, killing scores of civilians in its stated effort to root out members of Hamas.

Cherri, however, credited social media.

Her parents left Lebanon during the country’s civil war, but saw the significant civilian toll of Israel’s invasion and occupation of the country’s south, in the 1980s.

"What you're witnessing now, we're familiar with it,” Cherri said. “It's no different, except now there's a lens to see it with.”

As they prepared to depart Chicago, the metro Detroit demonstrators reflected on what they’d accomplished. The protest, one of the two largest expected this week, was much smaller than organizers predicted. (Despite preemptive comparisons to the 1968 convention where police and Vietnam War protesters clashed, there were scant reports of violence.)

Still, the demonstrators held out hope they’d sent a message.

“I’m never optimistic with what the Democratic party is going to do, but I’m just kind of happy to see all these people come out from across the country,” said Smith. “Maybe they come to their senses.”

By the end of the week, the party had approved a platform that did not include an arms embargo and rejected a request for a Palestinian American to address the convention. And so, the protests continued, with an "uncommitted" delegate from Michigan leading a sit in.

Violet Ikonomova is a reporter at the Free Press focused on investigations and government accountability. Contact her at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Metro Detroiters trek to DNC to protest US military support for Israel