Divest from Israel to Support the Human Rights of Palestinians

Nicholas Tolliver, Anti-War Committee member, gave this speech at our Human Rights Day march on 12/8/2024

Hello, my name is Nicholas Tolliver, and I am a member of the Anti-War Committee. This Human Rights Day, we are gathered here to demand that our government stop engaging in and supporting human rights violations worldwide. At home and abroad the US government violates the human rights of oppressed nations and peoples. Here in America, one does not have to look far to find human rights violations. You can see human rights violations in our violently racist police and legal system, in our massive slave labor prison system, and on our militarized border with Mexico. The United States’ human rights violations stem from its foundation as a slave/settler colony which later became the most powerful global imperialist superpower. The US government’s number one export is imperial violence and our government’s favorite customer is Israel. The US is equally responsible for the current genocide in Gaza and Israel’s longstanding campaign of ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

In this slaughter which our media pretends is a war, 70 percent of the weapons that are used by Israel came directly from the United States. In the past year, there has been a rise in human rights violations as imperial powers push for more power and control over oppressed nations and peoples. Imperial powers are trying to monopolize access to resources and secure global supply chains on a planet that is being suffocated by climate change and ecological collapse caused by capitalist production and resource extraction.

The global community developed the modern legal framework of human rights to protect people from dehumanizing violence and oppression. It is a truly amazing document that was created in large part by the global socialist block and recently independent nations that had been victims of Western imperialism. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created in 1948, in the aftermath of the fascist atrocities of World War 2.

The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created in 1948, the same year that Israel began its ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Israel, as a state project, has always existed in direct violation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Israel is the embodiment of Western imperialism’s hypocrisy concerning the enforcement of Human Rights Law. Ever since the oppressed nations of the world got together to write the UN Declaration, the Western imperialist powers have used their ill-gotten wealth and power to ensure that human rights law never applied to their use of violence and repression. The US, the UK, NATO, and Israel have all repeatedly violated human rights laws all over the world since 1948 without facing any meaningful legal consequences. If human rights law cannot stop Western imperial violence and human rights violations how can we stop imperial violence?

Divestment.

Divestment is one of the most powerful tools that we, living here in the imperial core, have to fight against imperialist human rights violations. Divestment is one of the ways that we, the people, can raise the costs of imperialism and make imperial violence unsustainable. In this morally bankrupt country money talks. Finance capital is the lifeblood of imperial projects like Israel and apartheid South Africa. Without investors and profits, imperial violence cannot be sustained.

Divesting is the best thing that we can do here in Minnesota to put economic pressure on Israel to end its ethnic cleansing campaign and illegal occupation of Palestine. While imperialist projects can be profitable for the rich, they are also costly endeavors that can become unsustainable if they become too costly for imperialist powers and their capitalist overlords. Israel sees the BDS movement as one of the greatest threats to its racist settler colonial project. That is why all across the country there has been a concerted bipartisan effort to criminalize the boycotting of Israel. Here in Minnesota, there are laws on the books that forbid the boycotting of Israel. They are scared of divestment because they know that wide-scale divestment will be the end of their illegal colonial occupation. Please join the Anti-War Committee’s movement to get the Minnesota State Board of Investment to divest from Israel and those companies profiting from their crimes against humanity. Groups from all over the state have taken up the call for divestment and every day our movement grows. Join us and together, we shall defund human rights violators like the state of Israel; because if you make bombs to destroy hospitals and bullets to kill children then you shouldn’t get a fucking dime from the state of Minnesota!