Protest against Israel’s founding

On Aug. 21, about 70 protesters challenged the “Fair to Remember” event at the Michigan State Fairgrounds in Detroit that marked the 60th anniversary of the founding of the U.S.-backed Israeli settler state, an event known in Palestine as the Nakba or the catastrophe.

Protest sponsors and endorsers included the Middle East Task Force, the Michigan Peace Team, Ann Arbor Middle East Film Society and Jewish Witnesses for Peace. In an article entitled “Demonstrators protest apartheid at State Fairground,” the Arab American News quoted an organizer who was “enraged at the idea of holding a celebration of what she calls ‘the violent ethnic cleansing and colonization of Palestine in 1948,’ in a poor neighborhood in Detroit.”

Members of the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice held a banner with the message: “Israeli terror paid for by U.S.A. Money for our cities, not for war.”

–Report and photo by Cheryl LaBash