Dearborn Speaks: Divestment, Democracy, and a Displaced Grandmother

By Dearborn Blog writers

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Mayor Hammoud and the Dearborn Divestment Blueprint

When Mayor Abdullah Hammoud stepped forward to address the gathering, he did not speak in abstractions. He spoke in the language of municipal governance — portfolios, investment managers, fund guidelines — and in doing so, he transformed a global moral crisis into a practical act of local power. His message to the room was simple and direct: Dearborn divested from companies shipping arms to Israel, and any other city can do the same.

“We divested from any company shipping arms to Israel. You just screen them out of your portfolio. If you are from another city and your leaders say it will wreck your portfolio or it can’t be done, have them call us. It’s easy.”— Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, as reported by Professor Ronald Stockton

This was not an empty boast. In October 2024, the Dearborn City Council voted unanimously to adopt new investment policy statements directing its financial managers to exclude companies that “knowingly and directly enable or facilitate human rights violations or violations of international law.”² The policy applies to the city’s post-employment health care fund and its police and fire retirement system, both managed by the Southfield investment firm DeRoy & Devereaux.³ The language is deliberately broad enough to apply beyond Israel alone — grounded in principle, not in the geopolitical winds of the moment.

Hammoud, who was re-elected in November 2025 with more than 70 percent of the vote,⁴ has made the connection between Dearborn’s Arab American majority — which comprises more than 55 percent of the city’s population according to 2020 census data⁵ — and the city’s institutional responsibilities as clear as any elected official in the country. He has lost extended family to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and has described the climate in the city as “a blanket of grief.”⁶ Yet his grief has not paralyzed him. It has sharpened his governance.

The ripple effect of Dearborn’s action has already been felt statewide. In November 2025, the State of Michigan Retirement System (SMRS) declined to reinvest a $10 million Israel Bond upon its maturity — a watershed moment achieved after a year-long campaign by Michigan Divest, backed by over 2,200 petition signatures and resolutions passed by multiple public school employee unions, including the Dearborn Federation of Teachers.⁷ Dearborn didn’t just lead its own city. It helped move an entire state.

📊 The Scale of U.S. Arms to Israel Since October 7, 2023

• $16.3 billion in direct U.S. military aid to Israel authorized by Congress since October 2023⁸
• 90,000 tons of arms and equipment delivered on 800 transport planes and 140 ships, per the Israeli Defense Ministry⁹
• $20 billion in arms sales approved by the Biden administration in August 2024, including F-15 fighter jets¹⁰
• $6.67 billion in additional arms sales approved by the Trump administration in early 2026¹¹
• $3 billion fast-tracked by the Trump administration in March 2025, including 1,000-pound bombs and armored bulldozers¹²

Rashida Tlaib: Every Call Counts, Every Vote Is Watched

When Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib addressed the gathering, she brought with her the precision of a legislator who understands exactly how power moves in Washington. Her message was not about hope — it was about mechanics. She reminded the room that elected officials are not as removed from public pressure as people assume. In fact, they track it, they count it, and they respond to it.

“Call your representative or senator. They pay attention. Every Friday, my staff gives me a report on how many people called about an issue. I was not aware that there were so many people who were concerned about animals. Those messages made me alert to that issue. Call your representatives about my proposed motion on arms to Israel. Between now and the vote, you can flood their phones with messages.”— Rep. Rashida Tlaib, as reported by Professor Ronald Stockton

That anecdote about animal welfare calls — seemingly small — carries a profound lesson about democratic participation. If constituent calls about animals can shift a congresswoman’s awareness, imagine what a sustained, coordinated campaign of phone calls demanding an arms embargo on Israel can do. Tlaib was not speaking abstractly. She was issuing a field operation directive.

Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman ever elected to Congress, has been the legislative tip of the spear on arms embargo legislation for over a year. In November 2025, she introduced a historic resolution — co-sponsored by 20 members of the House — formally recognizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and calling for an arms embargo and targeted sanctions. It marked the first time a resolution in Congress explicitly invoked sanctions on Israel, a standard long considered too politically toxic to touch.¹³

In March 2025, alongside Representatives Ilhan Omar and Summer Lee, she demanded an immediate arms embargo following the resumption of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza that killed hundreds of civilians.¹⁴ And in April 2025, she co-introduced Joint Resolutions of Disapproval alongside Rep. Pramila Jayapal specifically to block the sale of offensive weapons to Israel — weapons that, as Jayapal noted, “have been used to wage this war, which in addition to killing thousands and displacing millions, has razed entire communities, destroying hospitals, schools, and homes.”¹⁵

“The Israeli government will never stop until we make them with an arms embargo.”— Rep. Rashida Tlaib

That determination, expressed in bare, urgent language, captures something larger than policy. It captures accountability — the insistence that a government which arms another government in violation of its own laws must be made to answer for it. The Arms Export Control Act prohibits the transfer of U.S. weapons to countries credibly accused of human rights abuses. Tlaib and her allies are demanding that U.S. law apply equally to all recipients of American weapons — not just America’s adversaries.

Abbas Alawieh and the Grandmother Who Said: Stay

Of the three voices at the gathering, none landed with more quiet devastation than that of Abbas Alawieh. Where the mayor offered a policy model and the congresswoman offered a legislative roadmap, Alawieh offered something harder to quantify: witness. He told the story of his grandmother, a woman in her nineties living in southern Lebanon. He had lived with her as a child, before his family made the journey to Dearborn. For years — every year on his birthday — she would call and say the same thing:

“Come and live with me.”— Abbas Alawieh’s grandmother, as recalled by Abbas Alawieh

Year after year. Over and over. The refrain of a grandmother who loved her grandson and wanted him close. Then, as Israeli airstrikes devastated southern Lebanon and displaced more than one million civilians,¹⁶ everything changed. The call came again. But this time, the words were different:

“Abbas. Don’t return to Lebanon. Stay in America. They need you more than we do.”— Abbas Alawieh’s grandmother, as recalled by Abbas Alawieh

That sentence is a universe. In it lives a woman who has survived multiple Israeli wars on Lebanon, who has watched her home reduced to rubble — literally: his grandmother’s home was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, leaving her displaced among more than a million Lebanese civilians with nowhere to go, crowded into a two-bedroom flat with some 20 other displaced people.¹⁷ She is in her nineties. She poses no threat to anyone. And yet she has been bombed out of her home by weapons manufactured in the United States of America, approved by a succession of U.S. administrations, funded by American taxpayers — including the taxpayers of Dearborn, Michigan.

Alawieh grew up in Dearborn. At 15, while visiting his grandmother in Lebanon, he lived through another Israeli war on the country — spending days in a basement as American-made bombs fell around him. That experience, he has said, set him on a political path.¹⁸ He went on to become a Capitol Hill chief of staff, then co-founded the Uncommitted movement that mobilized more than 100,000 Michigan voters in the 2024 Democratic primary — turning Arab American political frustration into a national political reckoning.¹⁹ He is now running for Michigan State Senate in District 2, representing all of Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, and parts of Allen Park and Detroit, in the 2026 election cycle.²⁰

“Our family home. Her home was destroyed and gone are all of our memories under the rubble.”— Abbas Alawieh

His grandmother’s changed plea — from “come home” to “stay away” — is perhaps the most precise political statement of the night. It encodes the full tragedy of the diaspora condition: the moment when a homeland tells its children to stay gone, not because it no longer loves them, but because it can no longer protect them. And it issues a charge — stay, organize, fight, make it matter.

The Moral Architecture of Municipal Power

What makes the gathering remarkable, viewed through the lens Professor Stockton has provided, is not any single statement but the layered architecture of resistance on display. A city government that controls its own pension investments divests. A sitting congresswoman drafts legislation and mobilizes her constituents to flood the phones. A community organizer carries the human story from the ruins of a grandmother’s living room to a public gathering in Michigan.

This is what coherent, multi-level civic action looks like. And the Green Party platform — long the moral north star for those who believe the Democratic and Republican parties have both become captive to weapons industry donors and the logic of endless militarism — has called for exactly this kind of locally grounded, people-powered divestment and accountability.²¹ When a Democratic mayor, a Democratic congresswoman, and a Democratic organizer each push policy further than the party machinery has sanctioned, they are practicing, whether they name it or not, the philosophy that undergirds the Green Party’s foreign policy platform: that U.S. military aid must be conditioned on human rights, that public funds must not finance atrocity, and that the people — not the weapons lobby — must set the terms of American foreign policy.

It is also worth noting that Professor Ronald Stockton himself has spent nearly five decades in Dearborn building the intellectual infrastructure for exactly this kind of civic engagement. As co-principal investigator of the Detroit Arab American Study — a landmark public opinion survey of 1,016 Arab Americans and Chaldeans in southeast Michigan²² — he has documented the community’s political evolution with both rigor and compassion. His decision to share his account of this gathering with Dearborn Blog is itself an act of civic witness, the kind that transforms a room full of people and their words into a record that history can hold.

The Voice of Dearborn

Dearborn is home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States, and nowhere is the intersection of the personal and the political more visceral.²³ When Abbas Alawieh describes his grandmother evacuated from her town, he is describing the lived reality of tens of thousands of Dearborn families who have spent the last year and a half watching their hometowns bombed, their relatives displaced, and their grief dismissed by the very government they vote for and pay taxes to.

But Dearborn does not only grieve. It acts. It votes uncommitted when candidates fail its moral test. It elects mayors who divest public funds from weapons manufacturers. It sends representatives to Congress who introduce the first-ever sanctions resolution against Israel in the history of the United States. It produces community leaders who turn personal loss into political mission. And it convenes gatherings where, as Professor Stockton reflected, you learn a lot listening to other people.

The grandmother who told her grandson to stay in America was not conceding defeat. She was issuing a commission. Dearborn heard it. And Dearborn is answering.

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Sources

1. Ronald Stockton, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Michigan–Dearborn. Faculty profile: https://umdearborn.edu/people-um-dearborn/ronald-stockton  ↩
2. Michigan News Source, “Dearborn City Council Approves Divestment from Companies Linked to Israeli Military Amid Community Pressure,” October 11, 2024: https://www.michigannewssource.com/2024/10/dearborn-city-council-approves-divestment-from-companies-linked-to-israeli-military-amid-community-pressure/  ↩
3. Detroit Free Press / Yahoo News, “Dearborn to Divest from Weapons Companies Tied to Israel,” October 10, 2024: https://www.yahoo.com/news/dearborn-divest-weapons-companies-tied-100831125.html  ↩
4. WDET 101.9 FM, “Dearborn Elects Mayor Abdullah Hammoud for Second Term,” November 7, 2025: https://wdet.org/2025/11/05/dearborn-elects-mayor-abdullah-hammoud-for-second-term/  ↩
5. Michigan News Source, “Dearborn City Council Approves Divestment,” October 11, 2024 (citing 2020 census data on Arab American population of Dearborn): https://www.michigannewssource.com/2024/10/dearborn-city-council-approves-divestment-from-companies-linked-to-israeli-military-amid-community-pressure/  ↩
6. Democracy Now!, “Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud on Refusing Meeting with Trump, Not Endorsing Harris,” November 4, 2024: https://www.democracynow.org/2024/11/4/abdullah_hammoud_michigan_arab_vote_2024  ↩
7. Workers World, “State of Michigan Retirement System Drops All Investments in Israel Bonds,” December 12, 2025: https://www.workers.org/2025/12/89428/  ↩
8. Council on Foreign Relations, “U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts,” updated October 7, 2025: https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-aid-israel-four-charts  ↩
9. Council on Foreign Relations, “U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts,” citing Israeli Defense Ministry figures, May 2025: https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-aid-israel-four-charts  ↩
10. CBS News, “Biden Administration Approves $20 Billion in Weapons, Aircraft Sales to Israel,” August 14, 2024: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-approves-20-billion-weapons-sales-israel-hamas-backs-out-cease-fire-talks/  ↩
11. Times of Israel, “US Approves $6.7 Billion Arms Sale to Israel, $9 Billion Patriot Missile Deal for Saudis,” February 2026: https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-approves-6-7-billion-arms-sale-to-israel-9-billion-patriot-missile-deal-for-saudis/  ↩
12. Times of Israel, “US to Fast-Track $3 Billion Arms Sale to Israel, Including Bombs and Armored Bulldozers,” March 1, 2025: https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-to-fast-track-3-billion-arms-sale-to-israel-including-bombs-and-armored-bulldozers/  ↩
13. Truthout, “Tlaib Introduces Resolution to Recognize Gaza Genocide, Call for Arms Embargo,” November 14, 2025: https://truthout.org/articles/tlaib-introduces-resolution-to-recognize-gaza-genocide-call-for-arms-embargo/  ↩
14. Middle East Monitor, “US Lawmakers Demand Arms Embargo, End Support for Israel,” March 18, 2025: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250318-us-lawmakers-demand-arms-embargo-end-support-for-israel/  ↩
15. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, “Jayapal Introduces Legislation to Block Offensive Weapons Sales to Israel,” March 31, 2025: https://jayapal.house.gov/2025/03/31/jayapal-introduces-legislation-to-block-offensive-weapons-sales-to-israel/  ↩
16. CBS Detroit, “Dearborn Man with Family Ties in Lebanon Worries About Their Safety,” October 2024: https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/dearborn-man-worries-about-family-safety-lebanon/  ↩
17. TV20 Detroit, “‘Her Home Was Destroyed:’ Metro Detroiters Fear for Family in Lebanon Amid Israeli Strikes,” 2024: https://www.tv20detroit.com/news/voices/her-home-was-destroyed-metro-detroiters-fear-for-family-in-lebanon-amid-israeli-strikes  ↩
18. WDET / The Metro, “Abbas Alawieh on Lebanon, Loss, and Speaking Up,” March 25, 2026: https://wdet.org/2026/03/25/the-metro-abbas-alawieh-on-lebanon-loss-and-speaking-up/  ↩
19. The Hill, “Uncommitted Co-Founder Abbas Alawieh Seeks State Senate Seat in Michigan,” December 4, 2025: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5633880-uncommitted-cofounder-michigan-senate/  ↩
20. Arab American News, “Abbas Alawieh Announces Bid for Michigan’s Second Senate District,” December 12, 2025: https://arabamericannews.com/2025/12/12/abbas-alawieh-announces-bid-for-michigans-second-senate-district/  ↩
21. Green Party of the United States, Foreign Policy Platform — Peace and Disarmament: https://www.gp.org/foreign_policy  ↩
22. University of Michigan–Dearborn, Faculty Experts page: https://umdearborn.edu/external-relations/media/faculty-experts  ↩
23. Wikipedia, “Abdullah Hammoud” — Dearborn Arab American community demographics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_Hammoud  ↩

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DISCLAIMER: This article was produced by Dearborn Blog for informational and journalistic purposes only. The content reflects accounts conveyed to Dearborn Blog by Professor Ronald Stockton, who attended the referenced community gathering, and has been supplemented with information from publicly available news sources, official government documents, and published institutional reports, all of which are cited and hyperlinked herein. The statements attributed to Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, Representative Rashida Tlaib, and Abbas Alawieh are based on Professor Stockton’s recollection and are not verbatim transcripts. Dearborn Blog makes no claim that quoted remarks are word-for-word accurate and presents them as good-faith approximations based on a knowledgeable eyewitness account. Dearborn Blog is an independent community publication and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or representing the official positions of the City of Dearborn, the U.S. House of Representatives, the University of Michigan–Dearborn, or any individual referenced in this article. Nothing in this article constitutes legal, financial, electoral, or political advice. Dearborn Blog assumes no liability for any action taken in reliance on this content. All opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the positions of any institution or government body. For corrections or clarifications, please contact the editorial team at Dearborn Blog.