Announcements, Featured

Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream – #OneSmallScoopForJustice

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Recently, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream announced that it would stop selling its product in illegal settlements in the Occupied West Bank (see articles here and here). The predictable backlash came immediately (see here, for example). Israeli envoy Gilad Erdan even asked US governors to activate their unconstitutional anti-boycott laws enacted in more than 30 states to punish Ben & Jerry’s and its parent company, Unilever. (Erdan made this request of the governors of all the states with anti-boycott laws, so we assume Governor Walz was one of them. There is no confirmation of this, though).

Let’s not wait to find out what Minnesota’s governor will do! We’ve started a social media campaign called #OneSmallScoopForJustice. Post a photo of yourself enjoying some Ben & Jerry’s ice cream  with that hash tag!

You can also put a bumper sticker on your car:

For a donation of at least $7.00 (which includes shipping and handling), we will send you one of these beautiful bumper stickers. Just click the button below and enjoy your One Small Scoop For Justice!

Please be sure to complete the shipping field!

… otherwise, we won’t know where to ship your beautiful sticker…

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Campaign to Repeal Minnesota’s Anti-BDS law: Update and Actions

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Background:

In 2017 Minnesota was one of several states acting on legislation limiting our free speech rights to speak out against Israel’s policies and human rights abuses affecting Palestinians. Attempts to impose Federal legislation to restrict BDS activity had failed, and what followed was a very well-funded strategic campaign to achieve at the State level what could not at that time be achieved at the Federal level. Today 30 States have approved Anti-boycott legislation; and 24 states have approved legislation that impose boycott restrictions to be eligible for state contracts, including Minnesota.

Back in 2017 many diverse groups of individuals and organizations worked to stop the legislation from being enacted. Many people met with our legislators, wrote letters, held rallies, and spoke at legislative hearings to voice objections to this initiative, addressing both free speech and human rights concerns. The legislation still passed in Minnesota, but we raised the profile of the issues among Legislators and out in the community; we established partnerships in our community. The final language of the law was watered down from its initial wording, but make no mistake, it still restricts your freedom of speech!

Recently:

On February 12, 2021 the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a similar anti-BDS law in Arkansas was unconstitutional. This on top of other First Amendment wins in Texas, Kansas and Arizona is more reason than ever to repeal Minnesota’s unconstitutional law!

We have organized with many other groups again to repeal Minnesota’s law and we have had some stunning successes! HF 1246 and SF 1039 have been introduced in the House and Senate, respectively, to do just that. They each have a number of co-authors, led by Rep. Steve Sandell and Sen. Mary Kunesh. Although we have found great support among the legislators to whom we have spoken, there is much more that needs to be done to actually get the bills to committees to be heard and then to the floors to be voted on.

TAKE ACTION TODAY!

We have an opportunity to repeal the legislation in Minnesota, and to add power to a national initiative to combat all such laws around the country. 

There is an aggressive campaign taking place now to equate BDS activity with antisemitism.

We expect that there will be a strong backlash against repeal of the Minnesota legislation, and it is important for us to work together in collaboration if this is to be successful.

People working on this project have been meeting with their legislators to bring attention to this.

We are asking those in our community to raise your voices in support of repealing the Minnesota Anti-BDS law. Contact your legislators to let them know that you support repeal and urge them to attend a (virtual) information session about these bills on March 5, 2021 at 8:30 am. (Details will be here shortly. Please check back.)

Please let us know about your activities by sending an email to mn@breakthebonds.org so we can keep track of which legislators have been contacted, and so we can more effectively organize our actions.

This is an important time for us to act on this initiative. We need to be in touch with our Legislators so they hear from us before a backlash has a chance to take hold and affect opinions against repeal.

Download this flyer to communicate with others about the repeal initiative.

Let’s act now and Repeal the Minnesota Anti-BDS Law!

Thanks to Ruben Slomianski for the text of this post.

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Articles, Featured

Dark Money

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This article, by Robert Kosuth, originally appeared in the Zenith City Weekly LLC, Volume 9, Issue 141, September 1, 2015.

On June 3, the Minnesota State Board of Investment voted unanimously to end consideration of human rights in their investment decisions.

The State Board of Investment (SBI) manages $80 billion in assets used to pay for state pensions and other trusts. In 2014, SBI saw an 18.6 percent yield, with an annualized return over the last 10 years of 8.4 percent.

SBI’s authority rests in four officers outlined by the state constitution—the attorney general (currently Lori Swanson), the secretary of state (currently Steve Simon), the state auditor (currently Rebecca Otto), and the governor (currently Mark Dayton) as chair. The officers supervise a staff headed by Executive Director Mansco Perry.

The vote on the June 3 resolution was initially split 2–2, with Dayton and Otto opposed. Perry repeated the major points of the resolution and they voted again, this time 4–0. But none of the constitutional officers is eager to discuss his or her vote.

Spokespeople for Dayton and Simon did not respond to multiple phone and email requests for comment. Ben Wogsland, a spokesman for the Attorney General, refused to accept questions and deferred comment to Perry.

Jim Levi, a spokesman for the Auditor, accepted questions, but deferred response to the June 3 meeting minutes, which, as of press time, had not yet been released. Levi read a prepared statement from Otto: “If I’m approached about potential investments, I refer them to SBI staff. If I’m approached about divestment of any of the investments, I listen. Everything I do on the Board I do as a fiduciary and according to state law.”

State law requires SBI to follow the “prudent person rule,” meaning the Board is to manage the state’s assets as carefully as they would manage their own. The law includes a few clauses about the types of allowable investments, as well as risk and performance standards, but the four constitutional officers have considerable latitude in setting SBI’s policies and making investment decisions.

Former Duluth Representative Mike Jaros was in the state legislature in the ’80s when it first passed divestment resolutions stemming from human rights concerns. “I think our resolution said that the Board should not invest in South Africa.” Jaros says the resolution was well received and passed easily.

In 1992, the Board adopted task force recommendations to consider human rights in its investment decisions. In its summary, the task force examined 34 countries, including South Africa, China, and Israel, but the details are only available in the full task force report. SBI accepted a data request for the full report last April, but a few weeks later, SBI Chief Operating Officer LeaAnn Stagg called to say the full report couldn’t be located.

Union leaders were involved in SBI’s human rights issues in the ’90s, but have since been silent. AFSCME Council 5 head Eliot Seide was on the task force in 1992, but Council 5 Public Affairs Director Jennifer Munt responded to questions via email. “It would be best to interview someone closer to recent actions to change the investment policy.”

UNITE/HERE did not respond to requests for comment, despite appearing at an SBI meeting in 2013, seeking support for one of their workers who was employed by a firm connected to one of the Board’s investments.

Having now withdrawn its human rights policy, SBI is free to continue giving taxpayer money to entities flagged by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Through SBI, Minnesota invests in scores of Chinese companies or those doing business in China, including more than $40 million stock in the Bank of China and $190,000 in Taiwan’s Foxconn, an electronics manufacturer notorious for its 2010–13 employee suicides in protest of working conditions.

Chinese labor law fails to meet international standards. Average manufacturing wages are 25 cents an hour and workers lack the right to organize. The Chinese government persecutes dissidents, censors the press, and displaces farmers to give their land to developers.

SBI owns more than $35.5 million stock in Rio Tinto, a mining company that holds mineral exploration leases to 36,000 acres of Minnesota land. Through its Kennecott subsidiary, Rio Tinto is drilling for copper, nickel, and other precious metals in Aitkin and Carlton Counties.

Rio Tinto’s environmental record—from burning PCBs in Utah to groundwater contamination at Wisconsin’s Flambeau mine—and its record of union–busting and squalid working conditions prompted Norway to divest from Rio Tinto in 2008.

SBI owns over $100 million stock in Royal Dutch Shell, which paid out $15 million in 1996 to settle a lawsuit over the oil company’s collaboration in executing tribal leaders in Nigeria. Despite promoting itself as a sustainable energy company, Shell has been linked to dozens of oil spills, fires, and toxic dumps.

SBI owns $80 million stock in Coca–Cola, whose Colombia subsidiaries were accused in 2003 of contracting with paramilitaries to kill union organizers.

SBI owns $100 million in bonds and dozens of companies in Israel, which has conducted a violent military occupation of the Palestinian Territories since 1967. Sometimes compared to South African apartheid, Israel walled off the West Bank, imposed a blockade on Gaza, set up military checkpoints that restrict Palestinian access to jobs, education, and medical care, and built civilian settlements on Palestinian land—acts declared illegal by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice.

Israel engages in targeted assassination and disproportionate force (e.g., a crime by a Palestinian prompts Israel to respond with ground troops, home searches, and bombing civilian targets like schools or hospitals).

“We have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the returns,” says SBI Executive Director Mansco Perry. “Absent a legislative mandate, the sole criterion is to exercise fiduciary responsibility, to maximize returns.”

Perry says SBI’s investment decisions are “very apolitical…We invest in most stocks around the world. When it comes to choosing one or the other, the factors are weighed to try to determine which will give us the best return. We also have to take diversification into consideration, not just the simple, ‘I like A and I don’t like B.’”

But it’s hard to make a case that SBI’s divestments have not been influenced by parallel political trends. In addition to South Africa, the legislature restricted SBI from investing in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and it currently prohibits investment in Iran and Sudan.

More importantly, SBI’s behavior does not suggest its decisions are apolitical.

In 2011, SBI was sued by Minnesota Break the Bonds, an organization seeking divestment of publicly held stocks and bonds in Israel. [Author’s disclosure: I’m a member of Break the Bonds, which has been attending SBI meetings since 2009.]

Opposition to divestment was led by the Jewish Community Relations Council, where Secretary of State Steve Simon serves on the board of directors in addition to being a constitutional officer of SBI.

The Council retained St. Paul attorney Charles Nauen, who was Dayton’s lead attorney in the 2010 Dayton–Emmer vote recount. In addition to contributing to both Dayton and Swanson’s campaigns, Nauen “spent election night with Dayton in case elections issues came up,” according to the Star Tribune. Nauen also represented Otto last year in an election dispute with Matt Entenza.

Break the Bonds’ lawsuit was dismissed for lack of standing, but SBI considered a divestment motion at its quarterly meeting on March 4, 2015. After comments from the Arab–American Anti–Discrimination Committee and the Jewish Community Relations Council, Dayton presented a motion declining to divest from Israel. Simon seconded the motion, opening the floor to discussion.

A member of the public asked the Board to speak louder so observers could hear them, and Dayton replied that they are not required to.

After repeating the mantra of “fiduciary duty,” Swanson asked Perry about the lawsuit. Perry said the court upheld SBI’s right to invest in Israel bonds, but he did not mention the human rights issues in the suit.

Swanson noted that Israel bonds yield more than treasury bills (2.4 percent versus 1.54 percent). Perry said the rates were “competitive,” but made no reference to his 2014 report that SBI’s Combined Funds yielded 18.6 percent in 2014 and 8.4 percent annualized over 10 years.

Simon, making no mention of his board position with the Jewish Community Relations Council, stated, “I will be voting today according to our fiduciary duty, and on that alone.”

The motion passed 3–1 with Otto opposed after reiterating her concern that, “Politics should not drive our decisions, as we are fiduciaries.”

Followed three months later by the Board’s vote to no longer consider human rights, labor rights, or environmental concerns in its investment decisions, Minnesota pensioners can now be assured their retirements are funded in part by human misery, military violence, and the destruction of the planet.

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Minnesota Break the Bonds Member Publishes Editorial in Star Tribune

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Editorial counterpoint: The other side of the Gaza story

By Sylvia Schwartz

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/268020311.html?src=news-stmp

I am the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors. I say this to emphasize that Jews do not speak with a single voice. I have spent considerable time studying Zionism (not to be conflated with Judaism) and the history of Israel and Palestine. This history is critical as it relates to the present.

Zionism is a political philosophy that calls for a homeland for Jews. The political movement was begun in the late 1800s by Theodor Herzl and led to the founding of Israel in 1948. Contrary to common perception, this conflict has not been raging for millennia. Jews, Christians and Muslims lived fairly peacefully together for centuries in Ottoman Palestine. The influx of tens of thousands of European Jews, escaping anti-Jewish pogroms, began pushing out the indigenous population. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in what the Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe) and Israelis call the War for Independence. Tens of thousands fled to Gaza, others to the West Bank or nearby Arab countries.

Gaza has been militarily occupied by Israel since 1967. Israel claims that withdrawal of its army and civilians from Gaza means it is no longer occupied. However, the legal definition of occupation is effective provisional control. Israel has absolute control over Gaza and its population.

Israel controls all of Gaza’s borders except that with Egypt. Israel controls Gaza’s sea and airspace. Palestinians are shot at when fishing more than 3 nautical miles from the coast, although the Oslo Accords allow 20 nautical miles. Israel posts snipers along the fence and maintains a 300-meter buffer area between the wall and Gaza’s land. This farmland lies fallow because Israeli snipers shoot and kill farmers there.

Israel controls all goods into Gaza, and since the siege began in 2007, disallows virtually all exports, thus destroying Gaza’s economy. Gaza has been a humanitarian disaster for years.

A recent Star Tribune editorial (“Hamas cynicism is the biggest threat to Gaza,” July 16) placed the blame of the current conflict solely on Hamas, exactly what the Israeli government wants Americans to believe. In fact, it so parroted the Israeli line that it could have been written by an Israeli government propagandist.

Israel claims (without evidence) that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, though many reports show that Israel uses Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Eighty percent of the victims of this attack have been civilians, and dozens have been children. The United Nations and other humanitarian agencies have accused Israel of war crimes.

Israel claims that it has a right to defend itself. I ask: Do not Palestinians have the right to defend themselves?

Israel has an obligation under international law to protect civilians. It is a violation of the Geneva Conventions to target hospitals and places of worship, yet hospitals and mosques have been destroyed.

This attack on Gaza is an extension of the Zionist project, one to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and replace them with Jews. In this scenario, all Palestinians become the enemy and therefore in Israeli eyes, all Palestinians are legitimate targets, babies and children included.

It is truly a tragedy that most Americans side with the aggressor in this conflict, although not surprising. The American people have been told only one side of this story. Only recently have the Palestinians become more successful at reaching Americans.

Public awareness of the facts is increasing. When Palestinian civil society called for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) from Israel until it complies with international law, people all over the world, and increasingly in America, began to see how this nonviolent movement could bring about change. To date, universities and churches have divested from corporations profiting from human-rights abuses. Academic, cultural and consumer boycotts are spreading. These initiatives will pressure Israel to change its policies.

BDS has the potential to create justice in Israel and Palestine. For further information, contact the Minnesota Break the Bonds Campaign via http://mn.breakthebonds.org.

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Twenty Years of Failure

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Twenty Years of Failure: MN BBC Report Documents MN State Board of Investment’s Neglect of Human Rights

On September 11, 2013, members of MN BBC personally delivered a comprehensive report to Governor Mark Dayton at the quarterly State Board of Investment meeting documenting the SBI’s twenty year failure to follow its own international human rights investment guidelines. MN BBC prepared the report following a two year examination of internal SBI documents. Those documents revealed that the SBI’s human rights guidelines, adopted in 1992 by a task force led by then State Auditor Dayton following pressure from Minnesota’s two largest labor unions, have failed to prevent the SBI from investing in countries, like Israel, that are documented human rights violators. According to the the report, the guidelines have received little more than lip service from the SBI’s investment managers, exposing the State of Minnesota to accusations of financial complicity in international human rights violations. The report concludes with recommendations that would immediately bring the SBI into compliance, if adopted. Click MNBBC-White Paper to see the full report.

 

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Grants from the Israeli Consulate Should be Returned

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This article was originally published by the Minnesota Spokesman Recorder on December 30, 2021.

The Israeli Consulate in Chicago announced Social Impact grants to three Minneapolis-based organizations, and held a ceremony on Thursday, December 9 to distribute the $5,000 checks to A Mother’s Love, Mr. Basketball Academy, and Minnesota STEM Partnership.

The irony of awarding “Social Impact” grants is astounding. This has been a year when the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has killed hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, many of them children, demolished homes in Jerusalem and in the Naqab (Negev) desert, denied Palestinians the COVID vaccine, denied them freedom of movement, education, health care, water, livelihood, and arrested dozens of children from their beds at night.

In October, Israel declared that six human rights organizations are “terrorist” organizations, severely restricting their operations and funding.

What could motivate Israel to give American human rights organizations grants? Israel is suffering a public relations setback, which was exacerbated by their bombing of Gaza in May. Human rights abuses within Israel and the occupied territories have only intensified since then. Israel used to be able to apply oppression with impunity, but now there is increased awareness of the situation in the United States.

A growing number of US citizens are becoming sympathetic to Palestinians, and even favorable opinions of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement are increasing. (The BDS movement attempts to compel Israel to comply with international law through economic, cultural, and educational boycotts and divestment.)

Clearly, Israel feels the need to counter this growing sentiment in the US by showing its support for “social justice”–everywhere except in Israel.

Make no mistake: Israel targets Palestinians simply because they are Palestinians. The 2018 “Nation State Law,” one of the Basic Laws which substitute for Israel’s constitution, clearly states that non-Jews do not have the same rights in Israel as Jews. This law is Israel’s admission that it practices apartheid, as two human rights organizations (B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch) laid out in separate reports in 2021.

Do the three organizations receiving grants from Israel really want to accept money from an apartheid state? Do they want to do public relations work for a country whose laws enshrine Jewish supremacy?

In my world, social justice means equality. These Minneapolis organizations are working towards equality, healing from past and present injustices, and community uplifting. But those values are contradictory to all that Israel stands for–ethnic supremacy, settler colonialism, and apartheid.

Organizations working for social justice should not accept money from countries working for injustice and inequality. The three community organizations that received grants should return the money. This should be done publicly and loudly, proclaiming that, n the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

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Announcements, Events

Deadly Exchange: Israel and US Policing

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Since 2002, thousands of US law enforcement officials have trained with Israeli military forces in the context of the “War on Terror,” learning about Israeli methods and technologies of surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest. As Black Lives Matter and other social movements seek accountability and an end to police violence, why are US police departments training with occupying Israeli forces? How do we resist the militarization of police and the criminalization of US citizens and immigrants? And how is the movement for Justice in Palestine organizing for justice and real safety from the US to Palestine?

Speaker Eran Efrati is the executive director of Researching the American-Israeli Alliance (RAIA), and an investigative researcher into the Israeli military and arms industry. He has worked with the International Criminal Court and participated in both independent and UN investigations into Israeli military operations. His investigative reports have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, among others. He currently serves as chair of the board for Jewish Voice for Peace, and his research focuses on military and police partnerships between the United States and Israel.

Thursday, August 12, 2021, 7 PM

Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83334769540 • Facebook.com/WomenAgainstMilitaryMadness youtube.com/WomenAgainstMilitaryMadness • twitter.com/WAMMwomen

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Announcements

When a Minnesota Law Silences Us

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Two Minnesota laws, passed in 2017, prohibit the Legislature or any State Agency from contracting with any business or vendor that supports BDS or “discriminates against Israel.” Similar laws in states across the U.S. violate free speech rights protected by the 1st Amendment. Learn about the laws and efforts to have them repealed.

             Featured Speaker: Meera Shah Senior Staff Attorney, Palestine Legal

Register: HERE

For Information: mn@breakthebonds.org

Co-hosts: American Muslims for Palestine–MN, Jewish Voice for Peace–Twin Cities, MN BDS Community, Middle East Peace Now, MN Break the Bonds, MN Friends of Sabeel, Northfielders for Justice in Palestine/Israel, Palestine Israel Justice Project, Palestine Legal, Women Against Military Madness

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Articles

Admit it: The two-state solution for Palestine is dead

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This article, by Mary Christine Bader, is reposted from a Minneapolis Star Tribune opinion piece, August 7, 2020.

It’s not democracy, it’s apartheid.

Support for the “two-state solution” is the pious cover invoked by senators and members of Congress whenever they are asked to support Palestinian rights. Our politicians talk about two states even though Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long spoken of “less than a state” to describe his vision of a future for Palestinians who demand equal rights in their ancestral land.

Now, with Netanyahu promising to annex a third of the West Bank Palestinian territory, illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, we are at the end of the zombie two-state myth. The choice for Israel and for its U.S. supporters is now clear: an apartheid Jewish-supremacist nation with millions of Indigenous people denied self-determination, freedom of movement, equal justice and other basic human rights — or the alternative, two peoples with equal rights living together in one state.

Many Jews will regard the latter as failure of the utopian Zionist dream of creating an exclusively Jewish nation state in a land inhabited by others.

The Jewish writer Peter Beinart, once a loyal two-state liberal Zionist, recently horrified supporters of Israel with his articles in the New York Times and Jewish Currents confessing that he no longer believes in a Jewish state. For that, some Jews are calling him a traitor.

Beinart’s sin seems to be letting his humanity override his liberal Zionist instincts. He has now declared his belief in a single, binational state with equal rights for all, explaining in the New York Times: “I knew Israel was wrong to deny Palestinians in the West Bank citizenship, due process, free movement and the right to vote in the country in which they lived. But the dream of a two-state solution that would give Palestinians a country of their own let me hope that I could remain a liberal and a supporter of Jewish statehood at the same time.”

Beinart and many others have seen that hope extinguished by Israel’s relentless building of Jewish-only settler colonies on Palestinian lands throughout the West Bank territory that Israel has occupied for 53 years, in violation of existing international law. Israel’s formal annexation that is planned would leave only noncontiguous enclaves for Palestinians to inhabit in their ancestral lands, erasing all hope for a viable, independent state of their own.

“It’s time,” Beinart concluded, “to abandon the traditional two-state solution and embrace the goal of equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. It’s time to imagine a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.”

Palestinians have been imagining such a state for a long time.

In his latest book, “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine,” Columbia University historian Rashid Khalidi reframes the long struggle for control of Palestine as a colonial war on the Indigenous population that has rationally resisted displacement by Zionist settlers for more than a century.

“With the establishment of Israel” Khalidi writes, “Zionism did succeed in fashioning a potent national movement and a thriving new people in Palestine.” But, despite a campaign of Zionist terror and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians, the Zionist movement “could not fully supplant the country’s original population, which is what would have been necessary for the ultimate triumph of Zionism.”

The fundamental colonial nature of Israel in Palestine must be acknowledged, Khalidi writes, but “there are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other. Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, notwithstanding the crucial historical difficulties between the two. There is no other possible sustainable solution, barring the unthinkable notion of one people’s extermination or expulsion by the other.”

In general, Americans have not viewed Israel as a domineering colonial power. And considering our own colonial history, some Americans think we have no right to criticize Israel. No matter that U.S. taxpayers provide at least $4 billion a year to support Israel, a prosperous country that is the largest recipient of our foreign aid.

Our representatives in Congress refuse to put conditions on this aid for Israel’s behavior, be it annexing occupied land or imprisoning Palestinian children. They justify unqualified support for Israel by saying it is the “only democracy in the Middle East.” It is, however, a country that does not provide equality to all its people. Israel grants full rights only to a specific ethno-religious group, and it denies all rights to millions of other people under its control. That is not the kind of democracy embedded in the U.S. Constitution. That is apartheid.

As Israel prepares to formally annex the most fertile, most water-rich third of the Palestinian West Bank, will America continue to enable Israeli apartheid and the Hundred Years’ War on Palestine? Or will we help birth a true democracy based on equal rights? That is our choice.

Mary Christine Bader is a writer in Wayzata.

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Announcements, Featured

New Campaign: Repeal Minnesota’s Anti-BDS Laws

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Background:
In 2017, after debates in both chambers of the Minnesota legislature, including testimony from many members of MN BBC and other organizations against the bills, the legislature approved two bills and Governor Dayton signed them into law. These laws (MN Statutes 3.226 and 16C.053) prohibit the state and the legislature from entering into contract with an individual who boycotts Israel.

During the debates the legislators tried to smooth out the wording to make it appear that the purpose of the laws was not to restrict speech that is protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, but instead to protect Israel from discrimination, but the revised wording failed at both. The laws are unconstitutional because they condition receiving contracts based on a political view (this was determined in a Supreme Court ruling NAACP v Claiborne Hardware Store). Furthermore, the laws do nothing to prevent discrimination. Discrimination and hatred against people and ethnic or religious groups are things that we absolutely and wholeheartedly condemn. We believe in human rights for everybody. But really, what does it mean to discriminate against a country? This is non-sensical.

We support many boycotts and divestment from companies and entities profiting from human rights abuses. We support efforts to impose sanctions on countries, including Israel, which commit widespread human rights violations. We know that Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) are non-violent tactics to pressure countries to end their human rights violations. We know these tactics work to bring bad behavior into the open and to educate people in our communities and around the world about what is really happening in Israel/Palestine. And because they are such effective tactics, pro-Israel organizations have been working very hard to criminalize constitutionally protected behavior in Minnesota and around the country.

Even though the laws are unconstitutional, they were enacted and exist now in Minnesota’s Statutes. We now have a new campaign to repeal the unconstitutional laws.

What you can do:

We have made contact with many of our state legislators and have found several House members and Senators who will introduce a bill to repeal those unconstitutional laws. Please contact your members (one Senator and one Representative) and urge them to sign on as co-sponsor, or to vote for repeal when it comes up for a vote. Go to this website and input your address to find your representatives. Then call those members’ legislative aids and explain why you think they should support repeal. To help in this, we have placed talking points here.

When you finish, please write a short email to mn@breakthebonds.org and tell us how it went. Be sure to name the legislator whose office you contacted, and what their reaction was.

Many thanks!

Your friends in solidarity,

MN Break the Bonds Campaign

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Announcements, Events, Featured

Parallel Liberation Struggles: Lessons in Resistance

Conference, Saturday, October 21, 2017, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm*

University of MN, Keller Hall, Room 3-210, 200 Union Street SE, Minneapolis, MN

*Registration: 9:30 am / Lunch will be provided

Conference is free and open to the public. Advanced registration is requested.

People under oppression suffer from three types of violence (Johan Galtung)

Structural violence  Direct Violence  Cultural Violence

as in Genocide, Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing (Raphael Lemon)

Join us as we (1) commemorate the 100-year Palestinian resistance to Israel’s settler-colonial project and (2) explore the similarities in violence used against Palestinians, African Americans, and Native Americans and their methods of resistance.

Speakers:

Philip Weiss

Mondoweiss.net

 Dhoruba bin Wahad

Black Panthers
Nadia Ben-Youssef

Adalah Justice Project

 Alan O. Gross

American Indian Movement
Jennifer Bing

AFSC, No Way to Treat a Child

Raven Ziegler

Lakota Sioux Activist

 Erika Levy

Jewish Voice for Peace

 

Please register here

Sponsoring Organizations: MN Break the Bonds Campaign, Women Against Military Madness – Middle East Committee, Anti-War Committee, Middle East Peace Now, Jewish Voice for Peace – TC, National Lawyers Guild, American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, Minnesotans Against Islamophobia, Socialist Action.

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Announcements

2016 Minnesota Precinct Caucuses

The 2016 MN precinct caucuses are coming up on MARCH 1ST and the Minnesota Break the Bonds Campaign has prepared a critically important resolution for you to share with your community. First the resolution – then some background!

Because the Minnesota State Board of Investment invests a sizeable portion of the state’s nearly $100 billion taxpayer-funded public employee pension fund in foreign, corporate, and government securities without restriction (which may include arms dealers, carbon polluters, sweat-factories and apartheid states), mandatory environmental, labor and human rights investment guidelines should be enacted by the legislature to ensure that Minnesota is not financially complicit in the violation of universally recognized environmental, labor and human rights standards.

Background of the Resolution

We pushed hard for the State Board of Investment (SBI) to adhere to their own guidelines when it came to investing our money. The ethical guidelines made it clear that Minnesotans value human rights, labor rights and environmental protections, and any fund manager that wanted to invest public money in a country that did not take those values seriously would have to be able to justify their proposal to invest in them. The SBI, saying that they never used those guidelines anyway, voted in 2015 to throw the guidelines out! Regardless of the flaws in the way these former guidelines were used (or not used), it is unacceptable that the SBI would rather get rid of all ethics guidelines (read: constraints) for their investments than reform them, so that they are usable. This resolution calls for the creation of new guidelines that can’t be brushed aside, guidelines that will be law, enacted by the legislature, that require the SBI to follow. Without the creation of new mandatory ethical guidelines the SBI will continue investing our money in dozens of enterprises, which violate human rights, labor rights, and damage the environment. Without this resolution, the SBI will continue making every Minnesotan complicit in funding international and local human suffering and poisoning the environment.

What You Can Do

1. Plan to Attend Your Precinct Caucus on MARCH 1ST – Figure out now where your caucus location is and make sure you are registered to vote! Caucusing is just as important as voting in the general election, if not more. It’s your biggest opportunity to influence your party’s platform and let our representatives know what they need to support to get our votes! This is done by introducing a resolution that you’d like the party to endorse. To find your caucus location, please see the Resources section at the bottom of the page.

2. Bring This Resolution and A Resolution Form to Your Caucus on MARCH 1ST – To introduce a resolution you need a resolution form. You can write the resolution on the form itself or staple it to the back.

3. Introduce the Resolution During the Appropriate Time – Ask whoever is leading the caucus when resolutions will be introduced, and let them know you have one. To introduce the resolution you can read the background section above or put it in your own words. Make sure to speak about why you personally support it! Tell your neighbors why you think they should support it! Are we going to let our government use tax-payers’ money to commit human rights abuses or pollute the environment?

4. Vote for the Resolution!

5. Tell Us What Happened – Regardless of whether the resolution passes or not in your precinct, please tell us about it. Did it pass? By how much? Were there questions? A debate? What kinds of comments were made? Send an email to mn@breakthebonds.org

6. What Happens If It Passes? – Resolutions that pass will advance to be evaluated by your party Platform Committee, then the State Convention. If enough precincts pass the resolution, there is a good chance of getting the resolution onto the party platform.

Register to Vote: https://www.usa.gov/register-to-vote#item-212126
Precinct Caucus Location:
Find your DFL Caucus location: https://www.dfl.org/about-our-party/caucuses-conventions/
Find your GOP Caucus location: http://mngop.com/precinct-caucuses/
Find your GPMN Caucus location: http://mngreens.nationbuilder.com/dstrand/green_party_of_minnesota_caucuses_2016

Read below for Talking Points to take to the Caucuses. These will help if you get questions.

Continue reading 2016 Minnesota Precinct Caucuses →

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Announcements, Featured

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS DELIVER PETITION DEMANDING SEC DISCLOSE ISRAEL BONDS FUND ILLEGAL SETTLEMENTS

Contact: Sylvia Schwarz at 651-485-5269 or Robert Kosuth at 218-724-4800.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS DELIVER PETITION DEMANDING SEC ENFORCE DISCLOSURE RULES ON ISRAEL BONDS

Palestinian rights activists are calling on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to enforce U.S. law in the sale of Israel Bonds, the latest attempt by human rights groups to ensure the U.S. government is implementing its own policies concerning Israeli actions.

On Tuesday, January 19, 2016 activists from Minnesota Break the Bonds (MN BBC), the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Jewish Voice for Peace, and US Palestinian Community Network delivered a petition to the SEC signed by more than 6,400 people demanding the agency implement an existing law that requires a seller of securities in the United States disclose all material facts about the security to potential investors.
The petition contends that by failing to disclose to investors that money received from the sale of Israel bonds is used for projects that violate international law, the Development Corporation of Israel (DCI) is withholding facts that would cause a prudent investor to make a different investment decision.

“The US government has a responsibility to enforce US laws. It is longstanding US policy that Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land are illegal and a major obstacle to peace so how can the SEC allow investors to unknowingly invest in these activities?” said Robert Kosuth from MN BBC, which started the petition and has campaigned to have the State of Minnesota dump its multi-million dollar pension fund investment in Israel Bonds.

Money received from the sale of Israel Bonds is deposited into Israel’s pooled General Treasury accounts, which are used to fund projects such as building settlements, illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and constructing the separation wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004. The DCI omits these material facts from its prospectuses and only states that the money is used for “general purposes of the state.”

Earlier this month DCI announced that it had surpassed one billion dollars in US sales for the third year running. The largest institutional investors in Israel Bonds in the United States are state and municipal employee retirement funds. MN BBC believes that it is unlikely that any public fund fiduciary who is properly informed of all material facts about the use of Israel Bonds would invest public funds knowing that the money will be used to violate international criminal law.

“Retirement fund managers who purchase securities knowing that the funds will be used to violate international criminal law are in breach of their fiduciary duties,” Robert Kosuth said.

The SEC has not yet responded to the petition.

The Israel Bonds issue is only one example of how the United States fails to clamp down on funding for Israel’s illegal activities. In December Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz detailed how US donors had given settlements more than $220 million in tax-exempt funds over five years. A group of American citizens filed a lawsuit on December 21 against the US Department of Treasury seeking to stop nonprofit groups from sending donations to support settlements and the Israeli army.

“The US government keeps insisting that it seeks peace between Palestinians and Israelis but continues to allow Israel to act with complete impunity. It is long past time for the United States to end its complicity in the denial of Palestinian rights and a major step would be to end the material support Israel receives to continue its policies, support that violates US laws,” said Ramah Kudaimi of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

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Divest for Justice in Palestine!