The State Board of Investment must divest from Israel!
The SBI must divest from Israel
Statement by Wyatt Miller of the MN Anti-War Committee at the MN Capitol on 5/25/22 before the quarterly SBI meeting
The State Board of Investment’s opportunistic divestment from Russia reveals its hands were never tied.
The Anti-War Committee once again calls on the Minnesota State Board of Investment to divest from Israeli companies, banks and bonds.
For people as progressive as the SBI’s members claim to be, the debate on Israel should be over by now. Even mainstream media like CNN, who rarely even interviewed Palestinians on air until last year, have found clear evidence that Israeli Occupation Forces knowingly assassinated Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh two weeks ago, while the Israeli government issues only half-baked and crass denials. Human rights groups and UN investigators are now nearly unanimous in affirming that Israel presides over an apartheid system, comparable to apartheid South Africa or the racist Jim Crow system in the United States, where Palestinians lack rights as basic as freedom of movement, much less political self-determination.
But above all, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is built on mass violence, violence which has been continuous for 74 years, violence which has as its aim the subjugation and ethnic cleansing of an entire nation. Violence which comes in the most dystopian and cowardly forms, like unmanned drones that level civilian apartment blocks in Gaza, or white phosphorus munitions that indiscriminately rain unquenchable, poisonous fire onto entire neighborhoods. Both of which are manufactured by the Israeli weapons company Elbit systems, which the SBI uses public money to buy millions of dollars worth of shares.
As immigrant rights groups told the SBI in 2019, this same Israeli company — which advertises its products as “field tested” on Palestinians — also was contracted by the United States to build Trump’s border wall that members of the SBI vowed to oppose, with strong popular support. This should be easy. Divestment should be a political slam dunk. But time and time again, the SBI has deflected, claimed its hands were tied by “fiduciary responsibility”, and refused to divest from Israel and its 74-year occupation of Palestine.
But then, within one week of the war breaking out in Ukraine, the chair of the SBI, Governor Walz, pledged publicly that he would divest us from Russia. He even said, verbatim, “hiding behind a fiduciary responsibility” shouldn’t get in the way of “taking the actions necessary”. And then they divested. The barriers to divestment which were supposedly insurmountable when it came to Palestine were suddenly overcome. The very thing they had told us for years to be impossible, was shown to be fully possible.
And to be clear, the SBI divested from Russia over unverified allegations of war crimes, amid a media-fueled war hysteria that echoed the lead up to the Iraq war in 2003. If the SBI continues to refuse to divest from Israel, it won’t just be an insult to the human rights activists who have spent decades painstakingly documenting 74 years worth of apartheid Israel’s crimes through thick and thin, or to the millions of Palestinians who’ve risked their lives to make those crimes visible. It will also cheapen the very notion of war crimes, or human rights, or international law, and reduce them to a meaningless rhetoric deployed only when it’s politically expedient and in the interests of US foreign policy. It will stain the credibility of Walz, Ellison and the rest of the board, and weaken by association the broader progressive movements they claim to represent.
The truth of what the Israeli occupation has done and continues to do in Palestine is on a scale that it can’t be glossed over. US support for Israel is a growing political problem that smart politicians should want to get on the right side of sooner rather than later. Because from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!