As genocide continues, Minnesota Labor for Palestine tells SBI: Divest

MN Labor for Palestine

Mar 5, 2025

For almost a year and a half, Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to livestream their own genocide as the United States invested billions in human rights violations and mass death. Since October 2023, the United States has sent over $22 billion to Israel’s military. Public sector union members across Minnesota who are invested in the state’s pension system have been unwittingly supporting this genocide, as $5.4 billion of our pensions and Minnesotans’ taxes are invested in Israeli bonds and companies complicit in Israel’s genocide. Minnesota public sector union members are joining the international working class in organizing and fighting for a better world, one that upholds measures of international accountability, that values human rights regardless of race or religion, and acts in solidarity with Palestinian trade unions who have called for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions in response to the genocide Israel is conducting across Palestine.

Union members across the state have successfully organized within their locals and communities in solidarity with Palestine in a variety of ways, including calling for a ceasefire, arms embargo, and divestment of the state’s pension funds from Israeli government bonds, weapons manufacturers, and banks which fund illegal settler expansion efforts. Minnesota Association of Professional Employees (MAPE) passed a resolution at their annual delegate assembly last fall calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment of pension funds from countries engaged in human rights violations. The Saint Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE) passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in November 2024. Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT59), has passed multiple resolutions in support of Palestine, and Minnesota Educators for Palestine hosted a successful teach-in for members at the end of 2024 to further education and provide deeper historical context for the occupation. These are a few examples of actions union members have taken to end the genocide in Palestine.

In Minnesota, we are not new to organizing against apartheid and atrocities. Our state government previously engaged a divestment task force in 1985 to divest from apartheid South Africa. It is with this same commitment to humanity and international human rights that union members and workers across the state have been calling for divestment from Israel. The world’s most prominent human rights and aid organizations, including the United Nations Human Rights Council and International Criminal Court have named the internationally recognized crimes of forced displacement, use of chemical weapons and targeting of civilians, apartheid segregationist policies, and the violation of countless international laws for what they are: the most well-documented genocide in history. How can we allow our hard-earned money to further fund the destruction? Our investments and pensions have been leveraged as financial support for Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine, with overwhelming support from many of our state’s elected officials.

Is your rent or home-ownership out of reach for you? How unfortunate, we need to send bombs to Israel to destroy tents, homes, mosques, and churches in Gaza. Are your school districts closing? That’s too bad, we need to send tank shells and 2,000 pound unguided bombs to murder children, pregnant women, the disabled, and the elderly across Palestine, creating the largest cohort of child amputees the world has ever seen. Is the healthcare system bankrupting your family? You can create your own Go Fund Me and plead with your health insurance to cover your services, while we provide Israel with enough artillery to demolish hospitals, schools, universities and burn patients alive in their displaced tents.

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Our elected officials have revealed their political priorities through continued support of aiding a genocidal Israeli government over improving conditions for working families across Minnesota. The depravity of inhumanely prioritizing “return on investment” is laid bare for everyone to see, as politicians use our money and our labor to support the atrocities Israel commits daily across Palestine. Our safety and security, our freedom and rights, our self-determination will never be worth more than that of the Palestinian people. Our elected officials claim that investing in Israel is necessary to fund our retirement–this is a grotesque and immoral proposition which we will continue to reject in its entirety.

For those committed to working in the public sector, the wholesale destruction of Palestinian society in Gaza and across historic Palestine is in direct contradiction with our professional code of ethics and our commitment to equality and justice in our state. There can be no calls for equity while we remain committed to funding the forced displacement and murder taking place across Palestine. Union members and working class people of Minnesota can not look away from this. On this land we call home, taken violently from the Indigenous people of Turtle Island, we must reckon with the reality of our state’s history with settler-colonialism, displacement, and genocide.

The intentional obfuscation or denial of these truths contributes to various forms of societal apathy towards the suffering of Palestinians and other oppressed nations today. Land acknowledgements, the bare minimum for addressing atrocities committed against Indigenous Ojibwe and Dakota communities in Minnesota, sound hollow while our state is complicit in the humanitarian catastrophe Israel has perpetrated in Gaza. If we recognize the historical and ongoing harm caused by settler colonialism in this land, then we must acknowledge the truth of what is taking place in Gaza. Systems of settler colonial violence and dispossession will repeat until they are stopped.

Funding a genocide isn’t a value we hold as union members and members of the international working class. Our elected officials have failed to uphold American and international human rights laws as they continue to fund and support the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. They are unable to articulate how billions of dollars invested in a racist government benefits working class families in Minnesota. A recent poll found that over 60% of American voters would support withholding arms from Israel if the ceasefire is violated; among Democrats, over 70% of voters support withholding arms. Israel has continued to murder Palestinian civilians in direct violation of the ceasefire. As Minnesotans struggle with rising healthcare costs, as workers’ wages lag behind inflation, and our climate’s pain goes unaddressed, how much longer will our elected officials continue to fund the crimes of the Israeli occupation? How much more will the government continue to loot from our labor?

It is long past time for Minnesota’s State Board of Investment (SBI) to divest workers’ pensions from Israel, and for elected officials across the state to facilitate and expedite this process. As demonstrated with the examples above, Minnesota’s labor unions, in solidarity with the international working class, have shown principled leadership in upholding these shared values based in humanism and a vision for a better world–a world free of genocide where every child from Minnesota to Palestine has the right to thrive. We stand in solidarity with Palestinians, public sector workers, and the working class on the threats facing our communities. As public sector union members and working class Minnesotans, we cannot and will not accept a genocide conducted in our name. Join us in demanding our state divest public workers’ pensions from genocide. None of us are free until all of us are free.