Public Testimony from the State Board of Investment Meeting on 8/23/2023

Teacher Anne Keirstead’s speech:

My name is Anne Keirstead and I am a teacher at Irondale High School in the Mounds View School District.  My TRA pension is one of the many funds that you as the SBI control.  Next month I will turn 60 and so I am increasingly thinking about my retirement funds.  I was distressed to learn from the Anti-War Committee that you have invested over $800 million of Minnesota taxpayer money, including some of my TRA pension, into corporations that make weapons and support Israel’s apartheid state and the oppression of the Palestinian people .  

Unfortunately, as teachers we think about guns and weapons all too often.  In the US, 12 children die each day from gun violence and another 32 are shot and injured.  There were more school shootings in 2022 (46), than in any year since Columbine.  I don’t know of a single Minnesota teacher who wants our hard earned pension money being invested in weapons companies.  It actually offends me that you are using our retirement funds to financially support weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Elbit Systems.  

Additionally, in this post George Floyd uprising time period, MN teachers are engaged in conversations about how to increase racial justice in our schools and communities.  The state legislature has supported this by mandating that we complete professional development on culturally responsive teaching and by creating an ethnic studies social studies strand.  Teachers value racial justice –  now more than ever – so why are you investing our retirement funds in ways that support Israeli apartheid?  And it is apartheid.  Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 all agree that it is apartheid.  Post Brown v. Board of Education, public school teachers in the US are no longer participating in a Jim Crow system of education.  So why would we want to support segregation abroad?  Palestinians do not have the same political or cultural rights as Israeli Jews.  Our hard earned pensions should not be invested in companies that profit from the occupation of Palestine.  Apartheid was wrong in the US.  It was wrong in South Africa.  And it’s wrong in Palestine.  

Teachers across the state are gearing up for the start of a new school year and we are ready to do the hard work of educating our children.  We need you as the State Board of Investment to do the hard work of investing our retirement funds, not only for our financial benefit, but also to reflect our values.  We do not want you investing our money into things that run counter to the values of those you claim to serve.  I implore you to divest from weapons companies and from companies and bonds that support Israeli apartheid.  Thank you.

Yossi Aharoni, member of the Anti-War Committee’s, statement to the SBI

Good morning Gov. Walz and esteemed members of the State Board of Investments. My name is Yossi Aharoni, I was born in Ashkelon, Israel, formally Afridar, Palestine. I am an American and Israeli citizen and a lifelong Minnesota resident. I am here on behalf of the Minnesota Anti-War Committee to urge the State board of investments to divest 100% of all Minnesota assets from weapons companies and companies and bonds that profit from Israeli apartheid

This year alone, Israel has killed 193 Palestinians in its occupied territories, 89% of whom were unarmed civilians. To add to this there have been 6,923 reported Palestinian injuries, thus cementing 2023 as one of the most violent and deadly years for Palestinians on record, with each passing year worse than the last. Those who defend Israeli violence and apartheid would say that this is simply the result of ongoing conflict between two roughly equal but opposing forces. But there is a difference between fighting to defend your own home and fighting to seize someone else’s home. It is important to note that of the comparatively few 24 Israelis who have been killed this year, 15 of them were killed while attempting to seize Palestinian land. It is not difficult to see the heavy handed and unequal nature of Israeli violence and repression against the Palestinian people. For every bullet fired from an Israeli rifle, every bomb dropped on a Palestinian home or school, for every Palestinian death or injury, every MN taxpayer and state pension holder has a vested responsibility and is made unwittingly culpable in apartheid. A majority of MN residents I have spoken to seem to hold no knowledge of this investment. Many of the people I spoke to this summer, including teachers, firefighters, and others, were surprised to find out their pensions had been invested in such an immoral way.

The media portrays Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” but in reality Israel is widely regarded by the international community, including by US-based human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and London based Amnesty International, as being guilty of the highest international crime: apartheid. Apartheid is the antithesis of democracy. In Gaza less than 1 in 10 people have access to safe potable drinking water, meaning that 1.8 million people require some form of humanitarian aid in water, sanitation and hygiene, of which 52% are children. Meanwhile over 99.4% of the population in Israel proper have access to potable water. Why is this? I’m sure you know Gaza is besieged on all sides by Israeli military blockade, border walls, fences, checkpoints, and of course Israeli Coast Guard ships in the Mediterranean Sea, with strict controls of all imports and exports to Gaza including food, clothes, energy, medicine and of course water. Across Israel are roads on which Palestinians are forbidden from driving. Many Palestinians must pass through multiple checkpoints just to go to the grocery store and back. Of the 3 million Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank and two million in Gaza there is zero representation in the Knesset, no vote, not even the superficial formality of civilian law. Instead, these Palestinians live under Israeli military law, subject to up to 6 months of incarceration without even a formal accusation of crime. Coercion, abuse and torture are common practice against Palestinians in Israeli prisons. As of June this year, the Knesset began advancing a bill that would expand a previous 2011 bill to “Judaize” the Galili. This bill would allow small towns of under 1000 households to screen potential incoming residents, thus effectively giving almost complete discretion to choose who may live there. In practice, this arrangement is, principally, a tool for screening out Palestinian citizens and preventing their residence in these communities and constitutes a legal mechanism for residential segregation in many localities in the State of Israel.  These are the conditions which our tax dollars are maintaining.

Of the 800 million dollars that MN has invested in Israeli entities and corporations complicit in apartheid, MN SBI holds roughly 1.2 million dollars, or 10,396 shares, in Elbit Systems. Elbit Systems is an Israeli company and international leader in weapons manufacturing, including cluster bombs and white phosphorus munitions. The use of these weapons is a war crime under international law, which Israel routinely does. Elbit Systems advertises its products as “field-tested”, the “fields” with which they are tested in are against Palestinians in occupied Palestine, where the Israeli Occupation Forces deploy them against protesters, civil rights organizations, families whose homes and land are being illegally seized by the occupation, and against children in the open-air prison of Gaza. Once thoroughly field tested these very same weapons and surveillance drones are bought by US companies and states to be used here in Minnesota on Minnesota residents like they were during the George Floyd uprising.

This summer we as the Anti War Committee collected over 1400 signatures at grocery stores and various events on our petition asking you to divest MN from all supporters of Israeli apartheid. I have been sent to give these signatures to you Gov. Walz. It is our deepest hope that you will listen to your constituents on this matter and end all support for Israeli apartheid. 

Thank you for your time.

Mari Mansfield’s statement to the SBI; Mari is a member of MN Immigrant Rights Action Committee

I have been working in education for over 6 years and been a PERA contributor every year since.

In 2019 I went on a human rights delegation to the border of Tucson and Mexico with MIRAC. I heard the stories of people who crossed the border, people fleeing violence, leaving their homes and families in the middle of the night, telling no one. They travel thousands of miles to make it to our southern border. There they encounter the wall that pushes them into the smoldering oblivion of the desert. When the desert becomes too treacherous for construction of the wall, mountains force you further in, then in the distance you see the Elbit surveillance towers. Their towers can spot people from miles away, so you travel further into the desert, and only travel at night to avoid being seen by the towers. With only the moonlight to guide you, you hike through miles of lethal darkness. Inevitably, someone trips and falls, hurting themselves, unable to continue the journey. There is nothing you can do for them, and if you stay with them you will die too so you walk away from your brother, your sister, your mother or your best friend leaving them to die slowly and painfully all alone in the desert. 

For some of these young people who cross the border the story does not end there, just a few years later in Worthington Minnesota a student sits in a classroom trying to stay awake. His teacher asks him why he’s having trouble staying awake. He replies that after school he works the night shift cleaning the kill floor of a slaughterhouse. He is an unaccompanied minor, under the care and supervision of the Federal Government. And somehow under that care he ended up working illegally in a slaughter house at the age of 15. 

This is the system of Prevention Through Deterrence that our government assures us is working very well, and the state board of investment has made the conscious and informed decision to fund this system of death, using my money and the money of educators across Minnesota. Educators whose students are children who crossed the desert, our money goes directly into the hands of people who exploit and degrade our students. The state board of investment must break ties with Elbit or live the rest of your life knowing you are a merchant of death.