Steadfast resistance under occupation from Minneapolis to Palestine

This article Steadfast resistance under occupation from Minneapolis to Palestine was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Two images, from opposite sides of the world, are seared into our minds: 

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in his blue knit bunny hat, carrying his Spiderman backpack, being snatched from the streets and detained by ICE. 

Five-year-old Hind Rajab’s voice, tiny and terrified, crying out for help from the car as her family members’ dead bodies lay next to her and the Israeli forces bear down upon her. 

This past week, on the two-year death anniversary of her daughter, Hind’s mother, Wesam Hamada, wrote in the New York Times: “Hearing my daughter trapped, begging for my help, was a kind of pain no mother should experience. … No child deserves to die like Hind did, just as no child should live under the constant threat of bombardment, starvation and displacement.”

These are not isolated tragedies. They are the logic of state terror, from Minnesota to Gaza City.

This is why when local organizers put out a call for clergy to show up and stand in solidarity with the Minneapolis community, we, as Jewish faith leaders, and as a mother and an aunt, answered. Hundreds of clergy converged in the Twin Cities in time for the statewide strike on Jan. 23. 

We were there not only to march, pray and engage in mutual aid with local Latine and Indigenous community churches, but also to join neighborhood patrols watching for ICE raids, bearing witness, and trying to disrupt the snatching of family members from the streets of Minneapolis. 

A group of us drove in a car with a local resident, listening to the volunteer-run rapid response network dispatch, responding as needed when someone called in an ICE spotting. Driving slowly through the icy roads, we scanned sidewalks and side streets watching for ICE vehicles and officers, aware that danger could materialize at any moment. Often the streets were freezing and deceptively quiet — until suddenly they weren’t. Once we encountered ICE, we grabbed our phones to witness and record.

Listening to the dispatch and the screams on the scene had an eerie similarity to hearing Hind’s voice crying for help. Rather than trust state actors to care for the community, community-based medics, observers and activists swarmed the streets to take care of one another. 

After a relatively uneventful foot patrol through a Somali neighborhood, a soft-spoken Buddhist monk reflected that most of the time, liberation work looks like standing around and not quite knowing what you’re doing. Of our 50-person clergy patrol scattered across the neighborhood, most of us encountered nothing at all. But just a few blocks away, four clergy served as a protective presence as 12 ICE agents accosted a Latina woman. She had her papers. She was shaken. And she was deeply grateful for the witness and accompaniment that reminded her she was not alone.

This is what occupation feels like. We have felt it before while accompanying farmers and schoolchildren in the West Bank: the constant vigilance, the scanning, the calculation of risk. Threats could come from anywhere, quickly and violently, rifles slung across chests. The demand to carry papers, under threat of disappearance, is a daily Palestinian reality — and now an American one.

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Faith activists are praying with their feet in Minneapolis

In Minneapolis, the occupation looks like this: children and families snatched day and night. Kids no longer safe at school. Parents hiding in their homes. Midwives operating underground because ICE is showing up at hospitals — even in neonatal intensive care units. One woman explained she was late to our clergy convening because she had been delivering breast milk to a three-month-old infant whose mother had just been abducted by ICE.

ICE’s new tactic of using offers of food support as bait is chillingly reminiscent of the U.S.-backed food aid “death trap” operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in which Israeli forces daily opened fire on starving Gazans seeking food. 

Our friend in Minneapolis, who is a middle-aged, white, unmistakably Midwestern woman, we’ll call her Sally, started driving patrols because one of her Latina friends was abducted. Like Israeli activists, once she saw the truth, she could not unsee it. 

Recently she was driving solo when she saw a squad of ICE officers pull over, jump out of their vehicles, guns visible. She started honking to draw attention. They turned toward her and raised their guns. Another car pulled between her and ICE. She was shaken, and she kept patrolling. “I have to keep observing. Reporting. Whistling. Honking,” she told us.

As Sally followed an ICE vehicle to bear witness, ICE ran her plates and drove straight to her address, with her following behind. Pointing at her house, as if to say: “We know where you live.” This is how terror works.

This is not the first time such a comparison has been made between conditions in Palestine and state violence against people of color in the United States. Black and Palestinian activists have long named shared systems of militarization. They were tear-gassed by the same weapons, trained by the same forces. The same week in 2020 that George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, Iyad al-Hallaq, a 32-year-old Palestinian man with autism was “shot dead by police officers in Jerusalem’s Old City,” and Israeli and Palestinian protesters carried signs decrying, “Justice for Iyad, Justice for George!”  

And yet, what is happening in Minneapolis feels next level for our American cities.

Jewish memory, Jewish responsibility

As Ashkenazi Jews, our minds do not only go to Palestine. We are haunted by our own histories: families hiding in Berlin to avoid deportation, people abducted in the night, neighbors punished for offering shelter. The eerie familiarity is impossible to ignore.

Even Joe Rogan — of all people — asked the question about Minneapolis: “Are we really going to be the Gestapo?” We know what this is. And we know our responsibility. “Never Again” cannot mean “never again for Jews only.” As we have pointed out time and again at demonstrations for Gaza, it must mean never again for anyone. Local leaders reminded our clergy delegation that while there are comparisons to be made to the Gestapo, we must remember that Hitler’s regime was fascinated by and learned from the tactics deployed by American slave patrols, confederate ideology and Jim Crow institutionalized racism. This is not an “imported evil;” we need not look beyond our own borders to see how this pattern of racist oppression repeats itself. 

We must name that our Jewish community is deeply divided around the ongoing apartheid of Palestine and the genocide in Gaza. Gathering with dozens of Jewish faith leaders who do not see eye to eye is not easy. But being part of a delegation of over 40 Rabbis for Ceasefire created a container to live into our values. And in this moment, “ICE Out for Good” is a message we can unite around. As Bernice Johnson Reagon famously taught us: “If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition.”  

On the morning of the mass action day, we held an interfaith service and prayed together at Temple Israel. Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, reminded us of the story of Jonah and Nineveh (Jonah 1:4) — a great city whose people had grown so numerous they forgot how to care for one another. Their sin was not violence, but neglect of neighborliness. 

It is not easy to walk into synagogues that may be silent on genocide. But the hope is this: When Jewish leaders speak of loving our neighbors, that love will stretch beyond our immediate borders, toward our Palestinian kin whose enduring hospitality lights the way. Perhaps by praying “love your neighbor,” a crack opens — one that allows us to consider how every neighbor is a neighbor: in Minneapolis, in Jenin, in Hebron, in Gaza City. We believe deeply in the power of gathering across differences for a united cause. This is how we build power in a time of rising authoritarianism.

Radical hospitality and the power of love will win 

From Minneapolis to the West Bank, we witness a conflict exploding between two worldviews. This conflict has existed from the time of the Torah to the present day. That conflict is between, on one hand, a worldview that embraces the love of power, domination and the weaponization of fear and demonization of others, and on the other hand, a worldview that embraces the power of love, dispersed, nonhierarchical relations and community, and steadfast courage in the face of fear. 

The people of Minneapolis have responded to terror with extraordinary courage and resistance, just as the people of Gaza have. In Palestine, they call it sumud. In Minnesota, steadfastness. It looks like neighbors organizing food, accompanying children to school, patrols and care — quietly, relentlessly. Mutual aid humming beneath the surface.   

When Renee Goode was shot, many of us looked at her photo and saw ourselves: mid-life, white, brown-haired, thinking it could have been any of us. Many of us had that thought before, back in 2003 when Rachel Corrie was killed by the Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza. Then on Jan. 24, Alex Pretti was murdered. Another observer. Another person trying to be a good neighbor. Another witness silenced. And yet we cannot stop observing, stop blowing our whistles. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates observed, “If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.” We have an opportunity to demand that our U.S. legislators continue to draw the line, building from the Senate’s vote at the end of January in opposition to renewing ICE’s budget with no strings attached. Hundreds of thousands of people contacted their Senators in advance of that vote. We must keep the pressure up to stop these inhumane actions.  

Minneapolis is reminding us what it means to be neighbors again. “Love your neighbor” does not mean kidnap, assault, detain and deport the neighborhood. It is an old, simple idea. One our Palestinian kin have been trying to teach us for generations. Together — across cities, across borders, across continents — we are weaving a web of protection, care, resistance and beloved community.

May they hear the cries of our whistles, and may we keep showing up with the neighborly love our faith and morality demands of us.

This article Steadfast resistance under occupation from Minneapolis to Palestine was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/02/resistance-under-occupation-minneapolis-palestine/