What unites Palestine and Minneapolis

During the January 23 protest at Union Square in New York City, Workers World Party displayed placards saying:  “Stop the Occupation from Minneapolis to Palestine!”  This message was not intended to equate the almost 78-year-old apartheid, Zionist military control over an entire people to the current invasion of  Minneapolis by 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) storm troopers. Occupations of any nature should not be presented as the same.

The slogan aimed to illustrate that despite being geographically thousands of miles apart, Palestine and Minneapolis face a common enemy with no borders – and that enemy is U.S. imperialism.  

It is imperialism –– a worldwide system of capitalism –– that backs and sustains the settler-colonial, Israeli genocide to terrorize the Palestinian people, especially in Gaza and the West Bank. And it is this same system under which ICE thugs in  Minneapolis have terrorized migrant communities, especially Somalis, since early December. Lest we forget, six years ago, Minneapolis was the epicenter of the struggle against police brutality when the video of George Floyd’s lynching ignited a spontaneous rebellion.  

It is not surprising that there is a direct connection between the training of the Israeli Defense Force (aka Israeli Occupation Force/IOF) and police departments and federal repressive forces across the U.S., including ICE.  According to accuracy.org: “Thousands of law enforcement officials have traveled to Israel to learn new repression strategies and surveillance techniques from the Israel National Police, Israel Defense Forces, and the Shin Bet, who inflict violence, crowd control, and surveillance onto Palestinians. … Police departments in New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Atlanta, among others, have close ties with Israeli forces.” (June 10, 2025)

ICE is a creation of the federal government’s Department of Homeland Security.  Similar to the U.S. Border Patrol, ICE is given free rein to indiscriminately detain, deport and brutalize anyone they deem “illegal” using the biased criteria of how they look and how they speak.  

These storm troopers have been given a legal license to break into people’s homes when and wherever they want without any warrants, a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment that supposedly protects individual residences and to a lesser extent public spaces like schools and businesses from “unreasonable searches and seizures” without warrants.  

New York City protest, Jan. 23, 2026. (WW PHOTO: John Catalinotto)

And as we have tragically witnessed with the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ICE and the Border Control have the green light to kill with impunity anyone who expresses any inkling of class solidarity with their migrant neighbors. None of the officers responsible for the executions of these two anti-ICE monitors have been arrested or prosecuted.  

Resistance on many fronts

Since Oct. 7, 2023, the Palestinian Resistance has been in the forefront of inspiring millions of people around the world to confront the Nazi-like state of Israel and its U.S. backers with mass protests, boycotts and direct actions organized by students and workers. This Resistance continues to survive despite being demonized as “terrorist” and targeted with the assassination of its leaders by imperialist war criminals Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

And there is a direct parallel from what is happening in Palestine to Minneapolis when Kristi Noem, the head of Homeland Security, falsely labels Good and Pretti “domestic terrorists” to justify their murders. 

Police occupations of communities of color have been ongoing within class society divided into the haves and have nots; the oppressed versus the oppressor. The Floyd murder is a reflection of this antagonistic relationship. But ICE adds another extra-legal, terrorist dimension of capitalist violence. That is fascist terror which openly threatens the destruction of the bourgeois democratic rights of the workers and oppressed. 

The existence of both ICE and the IOF reflects the growing, permanent instability of the capitalist economic system. The only response to ending this repression and the system that thrives on it is a united revolutionary, militant and working-class movement at home and abroad.