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Palestine Rising:

Solidarity with a People Fighting for Survival

The world witnesses as a colonial, occupying force, backed by Western munitions and money, massacres the people of Palestine, while extending the longstanding apartheid practices of weaponizing supply cutoffs of water, electricity, fuel/gas, and food against the Palestinian people.

Still, Palestine fights back. The people of Palestine—rising once more, with an overwhelming desperation, fighting against the odds, facing the stubborn backs of Western powers turned on their cries for recognition—defend not only themselves, but all oppressed people, all stateless people, all internally colonized, all imprisoned, ghettoized, deliberately starved, and systematically silenced people. Today, we turn our eyes, ears, and our hearts toward Palestine; we join their outcry.

East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC) extends solidarity to the people of Palestine who fight against genocidal terror from the brink of total annihilation and destruction at the hands of the world’s richest and most advanced militaries and military industrial complex. This is not a religious or ethnic issue, nor a “complex” issue, but a concrete question of human rights, and whether the world will recognize and assert the rights of the people of Palestine to thrive on their land.

East Michigan Environmental Action Council, without hesitation or equivocation, joins the calls echoing the worldover to FREE PALESTINE, to return stolen homes and homelands, to end military aid to the occupation forces, and to assert the human right to recognition, self-determination, and statehood for the people of Palestine.

Who Defends the Trees

The world witnesses as a colonial, occupying force, backed by Western munitions and money, massacres the people of Palestine, while extending the longstanding apartheid practices of weaponizing supply cutoffs of water, electricity, fuel/gas, and food against the Palestinian people.

Continually, in all of our communications and in our education programs, we repeat the basic statement of environmental justice principle:

“We struggle successfully for environmental justice, only when we fight against the systems and structures that cause environmental injustice. As we look around at the world’s major polluters, we find that they are the same corporations that exploit our labor, they are militaries who destroy communities and natural resources, and they are settlers and colonizers who view land as something to squeeze dry for pleasure and profit. The same forces that are causing environmental injustice are also causing social and political injustice– our crisis is multifaceted.

As we know that the same systems and the same forces who exploit the people also exploit the planet, our fate as working class and common people is directly tied to the fate of our environment.”

So when we look at the 80 years of brutal ethnic cleansing and land theft of the people of Palestine by imperialist and capitalist forces, we see clearly a war on the people of Palestine and a war being waged against the land and against the waters. Who defends the land, who defends the trees, who defends the water, not as a resource for profit, but as a site of survival, a place that generates life, an ecosystem, a home, something sacred in and of itself?

The people of Palestine fight for their lives, day after day, month after month, year after year. Many in the richest nations and neighborhoods sit by watching as, yearly, mosques are raided and desecrated during Ramadan and other holy seasons. In Palestinian funeral processions, mourners are attacked and beaten in broad daylight by soldiers and police. The blockade is strangling a people in need of medical supplies and humanitarian aid. The occupying forces use contamination and water shutoffs to render Palestinian lands unlivable and susceptible to capture. Just as quickly as homes and farms are bulldozed, makeshift housing is occupied, sheep and crops are replaced by dumping sites and artificial water pumps and reservoirs contributing to desertification. Such is the environmental cost of apartheid. Palestine’s defenders fight against a regime of bulldozers and concrete crushers as well as tanks and fighter jets.

We understand who defends the trees.

Whoever defends themselves against the war-machines and the war-mongers of the wealthy nations, those driven by greed who crawl the earth in search of profits to extract and populations to exploit; whoever speaks up for themselves against colonial domination and capitalist extraction, against those who drop bombs from the sky to decimate the land, they also mount the greatest fight against pollution, and they, more than any, defend the trees, the soil, the air, the water. Whoever fights back against the earth’s greatest polluters must be the earth’s greatest defender, and our undying solidarity is the least we could lend to one another in such efforts.


Nothing could be more destructive of the environment than militarism, than hyper-industrialized militaries commanded by war-mongering politicians and lobbyists calling for the erasure of a people already trapped in an open-air prison in Gaza. The people of Palestine defend their humanity and their homes and in so doing, they defend the land, the soil, from bombs, shells, mortar, from pillage, from pollution, from devastating extraction. Palestine fights to defend regenerative ways of grazing and farming, in defending unlikely and unwilling frontline fighters, nomadic herders, fighting for their lives, their livelihoods, and their ways of living.


For the freedom fighter, and for everyday people, the land is not for profit; it is a site of survival. So too the water. In fighting for their survival, the people of Palestine fight for the sovereignty of the land and the water, free from the warships, aircraft, and guns, free from the same kind of blockade used to strangle Cuba. Such a fight is fundamentally a fight for water, clean, uncontaminated, uncaptured. Such is a fight for self-determination, revealing the oneness of a people with the land.

The people of Palestine—rising once more, with an overwhelming desperation, fighting against the odds, facing the stubborn backs of Western powers turned on their cries for recognition—defend not only themselves, but all oppressed people, all stateless people, all internally colonized, all imprisoned, ghettoized, deliberately starved, and systematically silenced people. We must defend Palestine as Palestine defends us all.

We must all join the calls echoing the world-over to FREE PALESTINE, to return stolen homes and homelands, to end military aid to the occupation forces, and to assert the human right to recognition, self-determination, and statehood for the people of Palestine.

Our Team
Our Movement

Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing

Meeting hosted by Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice (SNEEJ), Jemez, New Mexico, Dec. 1996 
Activists meet on Globalization On December 6-8, 1996, forty Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and European-American representatives met in Jemez, New Mexico, for the “Working Group Meeting on Globalization and Trade.” The Jemez meeting was hosted by the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice with the intention of hammering out common understandings between participants from different cultures, politics and organizations. The following “Jemez Principles” for democratic organizing were adopted by the participants.

1.) Inclusivity

Be Inclusive If we hope to achieve just societies that include all people in decision-making and assure that all people have an equitable share of the wealth and the work of this world, then we must work to build that kind of inclusiveness into our own movement in order to develop alternative policies and institutions to the treaties policies under neoliberalism. 

This requires more than tokenism, it cannot be achieved without diversity at the planning table, in staffing, and in coordination. It may delay achievement of other important goals, it will require discussion, hard work, patience, and advance planning. It may involve conflict, but through this conflict, we can learn better ways of working together. It’s about building alternative institutions, movement building, and not compromising out in order to be accepted into the anti-globalization club. 

2.) Bottom-Up Power

To succeed, it is important to reach out into new constituencies, and to reach within all levels of leadership and membership base of the organizations that are already involved in our networks. We must be continually building and strengthening a base which provides our credibility, our strategies, mobilizations, leadership development, and the energy for the work we must do daily. 

3.) We Speak for Ourselves

We must be sure that relevant voices of people directly affected are heard. Ways must be provided for spokespersons to represent and be responsible to the affected constituencies. It is important for organizations to clarify their roles, and who they represent, and to assure accountability within our structures. 

4.) Mutuality & Solidarity

Groups working on similar issues with compatible visions should consciously act in solidarity, mutuality and support each other’s work. In the long run, a more significant step is to incorporate the goals and values of other groups with your own work, in order to build strong relationships. For instance, in the long run, it is more important that labor unions and community economic development projects include the issue of environmental sustainability in their own strategies, rather than just lending support to the environmental organizations. So communications, strategies and resource sharing is critical, to help us see our connections and build on these. 

5.) Just Relationships

We need to treat each other with justice and respect, both on an individual and an organizational level, in this country and across borders. Defining and developing “just relationships” will be a process that won’t happen overnight. It must include clarity about decision-making, sharing strategies, and resource distribution. There are clearly many skills necessary to succeed, and we need to determine the ways for those with different skills to coordinate and be accountable to one another. 

6.) Commitment to Self-Transformation

As we change societies, we must change from operating on the mode of individualism to community-centeredness. We must “walk our talk.” We must be the values that we say we’re struggling for and we must be justice, be peace, be community.

Our Ideas

East Michigan Environmental Action Council works to build a movement to produce environmental justice as a transformation of society.  We do not exercise state power and we do not have massive money wealth; we will not solve our problems with the stroke of a pen. Yet our communities have generated all of the wealth around us and the power of the state is only legitimate if it works in the interest of our collective wellbeing. So we work collectively to energize and enlighten society as a whole to act to produce justice in our environment. As such, we work to build a transformative environmental justice movement from within the broad base of neighborhoods and communities of Southeast Michigan. We analyze our community’s collective problems and work toward real solutions, those that address root causes and produce lasting change, working within our Six Pillars of Power:

 

 

    1. Science & Knowledge Production
    2. Eco-Socialism: Ecological & Economic Freedom
    3. Black Liberation: Internationalism & Solidarity
    4. People’s schools: Political Education & Organizing 
    5. Black Arts & Culture: Spiritual Grounding & Ancestral Veneration
    6. Radical Futurity: Youth Power & Intergenerational Study

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