Gaza, Venezuela, and Minnesota: How we fight back

Those of us fighting for Palestinian liberation have watched as laws, norms, commitments, and principles bent and broke all around us to allow Israel’s genocide to continue. The Leahy Law was circumvented to continue arming Israel. The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants were denounced and supporting organizations were sanctioned. Even in the Bay Area, attempts to simply call for a ceasefire were opposed on flimsy and racist pretexts by San Francisco’s mayor, State Senator, and the supervisor with the largest concentration of Palestinian Americans. Another supervisor introduced new legislation urging the city not to take positions on foreign policy issues.

We warned then that there are no clear boundaries between the local and the global, and that such transgressions would not, and could not, be contained to the killing fields of Gaza.

Last year, the Trump administration’s attacks on fishing boats in the Caribbean were an early sign that the lessons from Gaza were being extended to the Western Hemisphere. The illegal drone strikes closely matched the strategy, and the blatant illegality, of Israel’s drone attacks on doctors, aid workers, journalists, and fishermen as well. Therefore, widespread condemnation of attacks that killed at least 104 Venezuelan fishermen accomplished little in the context of a world where such attacks have become commonplace in Palestine. And as with Palestine, this environment of accommodating the perpetrator, instead of demanding accountability, made escalation inevitable. In January, the US launched a direct assault on the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, murdering another 100 people and kidnapping a sitting head of state and his wife, a singularly brazen act even in the long history of US imperial interventionism. Meanwhile, the drone strikes have not stopped. Another two people were killed today.

The attack on Venezuela’s sovereignty not only follows the Israeli tactical playbook, but also traffics in a shared vocabulary of "counter-terrorism" and the use of such terminology to justify a total absence of due process, accountability, or transparency. It is, as described by Professor Sami Al-Arian, the "arrogant vocabulary of conquest, rather than legality and justice." The consequence, as in Palestine, is the systematic immiseration of millions, the theft of their land and resources, and the imposition of systems of domination and control to force compliance through raw, unchecked violence.

Just as the imprisonment and torture of foreigners at Guantanamo led to the imprisonment and torture of Americans at CECOT, such processes have now, predictably, come home. The ever-growing militarization of federal troops in Minnesota, the wanton violence against civilians, door-to-door raids, blocking of ambulances and assaults on health care workers, seem copied directly from IDF playbooks. Scenes we have witnessed countless times in Maghazi are now playing out in Minneapolis. This is not a coincidence; using the same "counter-terrorism" justifications, ICE is being trained by Israeli forces, and supported by the same tech infrastructure, to create the same atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and isolation.

In all these circumstances, the goal is not merely conquest; it is control. From Khan Younis to Caracas, new colonial forms of governance are being imposed on a people still reeling from violence, sanctions, blockades, and engineered impoverishment. That same precarity, resource extraction, and repression is happening in Minnesota and also here in California, planned and executed by the same people, with the same goals in mind. Systems of power want us divided, disorganized, disenfranchised, and despairing; these are the conditions under which their projects of extraction and pacification thrive. This is why organizing our communities with internationalist perspectives is so critical at this moment: unity across all fronts, standing in solidarity with one another, is the only way we win.

Today, countless labor unions, community organizations, and ordinary Minnesotans across the state are joining together in a general strike to demand ICE get out of their neighborhoods, schools, and everywhere else too. Solidarity protests and boycott calls have spread across the country. Liberation comes from the collective impact of all these actions, protests, disruptions, and creations. We invite you to join them, to bring freedom to the people of Minnesota, Venezuela, Palestine, and beyond.