Demanding Divestment from Israel at the May 25, 2023 SBI meeting

On 5/25/23 three activists testified on the importance of MN divesting from Israel.  

Liz McLister, a member of the Anti-War Committee gave the following speech:

“Members of the Minnesota State Board of Investment claim to harbor progressive values but their refusal to divest from Israeli businesses, banks, and bonds is anything but progressive.

The Anti-War Committee calls on the SBI to divest assets from the institutions that prop up Israel’s ruthless apartheid occupation of Palestine. The SBI has invested over $800 million of Minnesotan taxpayer money into corporate interests and pension funds that facilitate Israel’s longstanding human rights violations. 

The Israeli ethnostate has spent the past 75 years terrorizing, slaughtering, and dehumanizing the Palestinian people. In 1948 Zionist forces razed over 500 Palestinian towns and violently ejected one-third of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland. To this day, over seven million Palestinian refugees are denied re-entry. 

The state of Israel now controls 85% of historical Palestine. The Palestinians who remain in that occupied territory are regularly deprived of food, electricity, fuel, medicine, and free mobility. They experience daily threats of incarceration and violent assault by militarized forces.

The UN and an array of human rights groups characterize Israel as an apartheid system whose policies are akin to those employed during the United States’ Jim Crow era and in apartheid South Africa.

Israel relies on the U.S. to cover for and fund its brutal settler colonial project. Minnesota contributes to this crisis in part by allocating public funds to entities that enable the Israeli occupation. 

Elbit Systems is one such entity. This weapons behemoth shamelessly boasts about “field-testing” lethal munitions like killer drones, white phosphorus, and flechette projectiles on Palestinians. 

Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms company, manufactures 85% of that military’s drones. Elbit hires retired Israeli generals and customizes its products for use by the Israeli military. Several varieties of the weapons Elbit manufactures are banned under humanitarian law. Five years ago the company acknowledged that its financial viability is contingent on Israel’s perpetual assault on Palestinian lives.

It’s unethical for the Board to tether the pension funds of hardworking state employees to the criminal activities of an apartheid state.

The Board is mistaken if it assumes that Minnesotans will remain unwitting profiteers of Israel’s crimes forever. Americans are awakening to the egregious human rights violations carried out by the Israeli government. According to a recent Pew research poll, an unprecedented number of U.S. citizens report feeling sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. 

SBI members have condemned regressive policies when doing so has been politically expedient. For example, Board members decried Trump’s abhorrent border wall. But when have they objected to Elbit’s role as a top border security contractor charged with surveilling the U.S.-Mexico border and literally “building the wall”?

SBI members have claimed to stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, but they’ve remained silent about the Deadly Exchange program by which American law enforcement and Israeli armed forces trade tactics for suppressing and oppressing marginalized people within their respective countries. When Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd three years ago today, over 100 on duty MPD officers had been trained by the Israel Defense Forces.

Furthermore, it’s disingenuous for leaders to claim to support Indigenous rights here at home when they ignore how Israel relegates its Indigenous population to second-class citizen status.

Divesting from the unconscionable Israeli occupation is long overdue. Minnesotans are hungry for progressive action. State Democrats are being applauded – and rightly so! – for the last legislative session’s wide range of forward-thinking policy victories. 

Our state’s divestment from apartheid South Africa demonstrated that such a measure is indeed possible and effective. There’s good reason the Israeli government has described the BDS movement at large as a “strategic threat”.  

It would reflect favorably on the State Board of Investors to act in accordance with the progressive politics its members claim to possess by divesting public funds from Israeli bonds and businesses. Free Palestine!”

Memo Perez, a member of the MN Immigrant Rights Action Committee, was the 2nd speaker and gave this speech:

Thank you for having me today, my name is Guillermo Perez, I am a member of the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee here to continue a push for the state of Minnesota to divest some $1.2 million of pension funds that are currently invested in shares of Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

Elbit Systems is among the primary suppliers of the latest surveillance tech and spyware for the Israeli Defense Forces, likewise it supplies the IDF with its weapons, including those against international conventions like cluster bombs and white phosphorus munitions. Weapons sales make up 95% of Elbit’s business. With help from the money Minnesota invests, the IDF has killed 140 Palestinians since the beginning of the year, 33 alone in the last 25 days. Minnesota cannot in good conscience continue to contribute to the massacre of civilians and their displacement in occupied Palestine.

After going to the US-MExico border earlier this year, myself and other MIRAC members saw first hand Elbit’s surveillance technology in action. this technology sold to the US government facilitates the ongoing border crisis, the separation of families, and the trafficking of separated children who are then forced into working dangerous jobs. a recent NYT investigation found that among the 85,000 unaccounted for migrant children by the US Deparmtnet of Health and Human Services, many are here in MN in places like Worthington, Owatonna, and Mankato working long and dangerous shifts in meat packing plants and sanitation in violation of labor laws. This problem is not far off in the borderlands it is also here in MN, and Elbit systems technology is facilitating the problem.

Minnesota must be at the forefront of progressive change, as it has this legislative session. in 2009 Norway divested their state pension funds from Elbit because “We do not wish to fund companies that so directly contribute to violations of international humanitarian law”, we have an opportunity to pursue a humanitarian approach by divesting a relatively moderate sum of $1.2 dollars of state pension funds from Elbit Systems. Minnesota’s public workers have a right to retire in peace, but we cannot allow this at the expense of the peace of Palestinians and of migrants trying to make a home in the US and here in Minnesota. Let’s do the right thing, and divest from Elbit Systems.”

Wyatt Miller, a member of the Anti-War Committee was the last speaker and give this speech:

“Members of the Minnesota State Board of Investments, my name is Wyatt Miller. I’m a member of the Minnesota Anti-War Committee, and we have another member who is speaking for our group today. Last week, Nkosi Zwelivelile Mandela, grandson of anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela, spoke in Minneapolis. Mandela, like his grandfather is a politician with the African National Congress, in his case a member of South Africa’s Parliament. Before his talk in Minneapolis, he clearly did his research on Minnesota and its relations with apartheid Israel. So I’m just going to read a few excerpts from his speech:

Quote:

“Israel is an apartheid state, and it has been practicing racism, repression and brutality against innocent Palestinians since the day it was created. …We are reminded of our own struggle against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. We owe a debt of gratitude to all in the civil rights movement right here in the United States of America who stood with us in our struggle for liberation, our struggle for freedom. Without your support we may not have reached the glorious milestone on our journey to democracy and freedom. I stand here this evening as a product of your own sacrifices….We owe a debt of gratitude to the global anti-apartheid movement who mobilized the international solidarity network on all continents of the world in support of our just struggle and in support of the Release Mandela campaign.

For supporters of the Palestinian struggle in the USA, one of the most critical tasks is the lobbying to end US aid to apartheid Israel. … We also have to confront other states and private sector players who are complicit in the illegal occupation and in the daily atrocities meted out to Palestinians. I am told that the Minnesota State Board of Investments has over $800 million invested in entities carrying out or complicit in Israeli apartheid systems. For this reason, we must intensify the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. We must intensify the BDS campaign to end these investments in apartheid Israeli crimes. Our own experience in isolating apartheid South Africa and making it a pariah state in the world’s community of nations, holds very good lessons for mobilizing the largest cross section of NGOs, churches, mosques, synagogues, unions, and other civil society formations in our struggle for a free Palestine. … the Minnesota State Board of Investment itself divested from its holdings in South Africa, contributing to helping end the apartheid regime. Let us join hands once again and work tirelessly in supporting the BDS campaign for a free Palestine.”

End quote.

I hope Chief Mandela’s words, and the moral authority he carries as the chief of his grandfather’s family, resonate with this Board. Nelson Mandela himself stated that Palestine is “the greatest moral issue of our time.” I know members of this board were involved in the struggle to divest from apartheid South Africa. There is a sea change underway in US public opinion, with a majority of Democratic voters now reporting to support Palestine, not Israel. I urge this board to show leadership, to boldly begin the process of divestment from apartheid Israel despite the apparent obstacles. Palestine will be free, and so Israel is not only a bad investment from a fiscal perspective, but also politically. I hope you will join the right side of history on this urgent question. Thank you.”