600 Days of Hell: Israeli Genocide and MN Labor’s Role in Palestine’s Struggle for Liberation
A brief update from the Minnesota Labor for Palestine editorial team:
The op-ed below was written in the spring of 2025, with the intention that it would be released ahead of the Minnesota State Board of Investment’s (SBI) May 2025 (Q2) meeting. This meeting was abruptly rescheduled to June 18th. Days before this rescheduled meeting was to take place, the SBI made the decision to cancel it altogether.
The August 20th (Q3) meeting was also rescheduled to October. These actions present a shameful and demonstrable pattern of evasion and continued complicity in the crimes being committed by the Israeli occupation. The board members of the SBI (Tim Walz, Julie Blaha, Keith Ellison, and Steve Simon) are robbing Minnesota’s public sector workers, taxpayers, and activists of the opportunity to demand, yet again, answers to a very simple question:
Why does the SBI continue to silence dissenting voices, deny Minnesota public employee calls for divestment, and sidestep accountability by continuing to invest in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people?
Minnesotans will not be silenced. We have watched in horror as the Israeli military, in collaboration with the American mercenary-led “Gaza Humanitarian Fund,” has murdered over a thousand starving people in recent months at what are now infamously known to Gazans as the “American aid sites.” Palestinians walk tens of kilometers daily through Israel’s established “kill zones” where they are forced to crawl to avoid a tank shell or sniper’s bullet. They face a hundred forms of death to try to receive a meager portion of food, insufficient for one human being, let alone an entire family. Even if hundreds of thousands of starving people were to immediately receive food and medical aid, countless more will still die from organ failure caused by acute malnutrition and the blockade on medical supplies being upheld by the occupation and its co-conspirators.
We will continue to fight for divestment and demand the members of the SBI end our complicity in genocide. Everyone must speak up now and take action to divest from Israel. We must mobilize on all levels to stop the Palestinian Holocaust. This cannot wait, and all of our futures depend on what we do in this moment.
Please stay tuned for future editorial pieces, events and actions planned by MN Labor for Palestine and other local organizations committed to ending this genocide. Email us at mnlaborforpalestine@gmail.com if you are interested in joining us and working towards a future free of the horrific crimes being committed in our name.
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“600 Days of Hell: Israeli Genocide and MN Labor’s Role in Palestine’s Struggle for Liberation”
May 25th, 2025 marked the 5-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. In a city yet to effectively reform a police force which has been called out at the highest level for abuses against Minneapolis’ Black and Indigenous communities, we see that the systemic racial prejudice which led to Floyd’s murder on a street corner in south Minneapolis is ever-present and is being raised to new extremes under the Trump administration.
Now, in front of our eyes, immigrant communities across the United States are being subjected to intensified waves of mass arrests, deportations, family separations, and other forms of direct violence and oppression. This paramilitary level of violence was on clear display in the June 3rd multi-agency raid in south Minneapolis. In an assault that featured dozens of heavily armed agents from a novel federal ‘task force’ and the use of violent crowd control and dispersal methods, Trump’s assault on sanctuary cities came to Minneapolis with the direct involvement and support of the Minneapolis Police Department and other local agencies.
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