Columbia Heights solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon 

Columbia Heights, MN – On Saturday, November 23, over 100 protesters gathered along Columbia Heights’s busy Central Avenue to protest U.S. support for Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. The protest called for solidarity with the resistance in Lebanon and Palestine, an end to U.S. aid and weapons shipments to Israel, and for the state of Minnesota to divest from Israel.

Lina Jebara, a member of the Minnesota Anti War Committee gave a moving speech, “The aggression in Lebanon has left over 3600 Lebanese dead,” and “hearing the stories of Lebanon’s latest martyrs has made something very clear: that in the eyes of Israel and its imperialist benefactors, Lebanon and Palestine are one and the same. The tactics that Israel has been using in Lebanon – the means of collective punishment, the deliberate targeting of civilians, journalists, aid workers and critical infrastructure – are not foreign tactics for all of us who have been watching what’s been happening in Palestine.”

Israel’s violence against Lebanese and Palestinian civilians escalated in recent months. The Israeli military tried to annex northern Gaza and attempted to invade southern Lebanon. This was a futile attempt to push Hezbollah back to the Litani River.

In Gaza, Palestine, the Israeli forces cut off all aid shipments to the north in an attempt to starve out the people living there. Israel is intentionally destroying the civilian infrastructure necessary to maintain life, such as hospitals, bakeries and civilian shelters.

Low estimates of the death toll in Gaza say 44,000 are dead with 108,000 wounded by the Israeli military. Many bodies are buried beneath rubble and go uncounted. The thousands of bombs that Israel has dropped on Gaza, the most densely populated area in the world, are equivalent to two nuclear bombs in terms of destructive power.

The protest also heard from Taher Herzallah, a member of America Muslims for Palestine. Herzallah was a recent victim of a Zionist smear campaign spearheaded by Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and the Jewish Community Relations Council, a Zionist organization. The smear campaign was intended to prevent Herzallah from speaking to the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) Local 59 about the genocide in Palestine.

Taher responded to Mayor Frey’s attacks, “On Tuesday I woke up to some messages from some folks, saying the boy-mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, had made a video condemning me personally. Typically, I would be concerned about such things, but considering this is the George Floyd murder mayor, considering this is the [homeless] encampment destroyer mayor, considering this is the union-busting mayor, I really didn’t feel a sense of worry.” The teachers union event proceeded as planned despite Zionist attempts to shut it down. 

MFT 59 is one of a number of Minnesota unions whose pensions are invested via Minnesota’s State Board of Investment. The investment board allocates approximately $5.4 billion of that fund to Israel, Israeli corporations, and other corporations that are complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its occupation of Palestine. Rank-and-file union members around the state are increasingly speaking out against their hard-won pension funds being used to fund Israel’s crimes in Palestine.

The Minnesota Anti-War Committee is holding a Human Rights Day march at Washburn Fair Oaks Park in Minneapolis at 1 p.m. on December 8, both to mark the annual holiday and as part of a statewide week of action demanding that the Minnesota State Board of Investments eliminate all its investments in apartheid Israel.

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