Minnesota, Palestine – Life Under Occupation
By Dr. M. Reza Behnam.
The union of the US-Israeli regimes has engendered in America a receptive environment for white supremacy.
Israel has come home to roost in Minnesota. The people of Minneapolis and St. Paul have become the Palestinians of Minnesota. The residents of the Twin Cities are experiencing the loss of sovereignty and civil rights that Palestinians have suffered for over eight decades.
L’Etoile du Nord (the Star of the North) state has been besieged by thousands of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents. The Twin Cities are now occupied communities, surveilled and under attack from their own government.
The militarism, violence, and terrorism Israel has inflicted on Palestinians in occupied Gaza and the West Bank have reached into America’s heartland and bled into the nation’s political system.
The tactical and ideological similarities between ICE and the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) are easily recognizable. These similarities are rooted in decades of joint training programs, shared technology, and surveillance. Thousands of federal agents have participated in Israeli “security” training programs.
Simulating the reality of occupation in Palestine, militarized federal agents patrol American neighborhoods, abducting residents. Without warrants, unidentified men armed with assault rifles conduct raids, drag people from their homes, pull them from vehicles, detain and even kill them, as evidenced this month in the deaths of US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Masked agents treat protestors as threats, using chemical and sublethal weapons against them.
Thousands have been forcibly detained and held in ICE detention centers without due process. Since the beginning of 2026, six deaths have been recorded. And in 2025, ICE’s deadliest year in two decades, 32 people died.
As of January 2026, over 9,350 Palestinians are being held, most without charges, in Israeli prisons and detention centers; approximately 350 are children. And since October 7 2023, at least 98 Palestinians (with the toll likely higher) have died in Israeli custody.
Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, said it best, “This is tyranny… Nobody ever thought America would look like this. We now don’t have to speculate as to what American fascism looks like. It’s right outside the door.”
Our America was bound to look like this. All pretense of humanity was discarded when avowed Zionist President Joe Biden, after October 7, 2023, green-lighted the massacre of Palestinians and devastation of Gaza, which he continued to do until he left office on January 20, 2025.
By throwing America’s financial, military, and political weight behind genocide and failing to respect international and humanitarian laws, the Biden administration set the stage for the domestic and international lawlessness of his convicted felon successor. A nation that condones the “crime of crimes,” the ultimate human atrocity, fosters a culture of violence that inevitably turns inward.
Ineluctably, the Zionist ideology of violence and force has found a home in America, where in black, brown, and indigenous communities, quasi-military policing has always been an actuality. Thuggery has now gained ground in mostly white communities, like Minneapolis.
Gaza awakened the nation to the reality that all is not well; that America is a country of laws, but little justice, something minority groups have long known. A nation that upholds human rights and justice, as the United States proclaims, would have defended and vigorously supported the people of Palestine.
From Palestine to the streets of America, the objective appears to be submission—to terrorize immigrants and those who protect them; and to silence dissenters who oppose the “world order” envisioned by the military, industrial, political, media, and digital complex (MIC plus).
The United States has entered the grave new world that President Dwight D. Eisenhower foresaw in his January 1961 Farewell Address to the nation.
As the Trump administration tramples on the US Constitution, the relevance of Eisenhower’s warning against the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” and his plea to never let it “endanger our liberties or democratic processes” cannot be overstated:
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, and even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government….Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society… The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”
War has been central to the MIC plus, as it has been to the United States and Israel. It has been foundational to the settler-colonial ideology of Israel, with expansion justified as defense. Also, it has been pivotal in America’s pursuit of global dominance, with economic hegemony camouflaged as defense of democracy and freedom.
In Israel, the Zionist project to destroy an ancient culture and eliminate its people is disguised as “defense” of the nation. And in the United States, the Trump regime uses the “securing the country” trope against undocumented immigrants to justify its cruelty and suffocation of freedoms and rights. He has also employed the formulaic “antisemitism” cudgel to detain and deport those who oppose Israel’s genocidal war and who support a free Palestine.
The MIC plus has also had a powerful influence in shaping and manipulating societal thinking.
Washington’s partnership with Israel has promoted America’s drift toward proto-fascism. Zionist Jewish supremacy, demonization of Palestinians, national unity built on external threat narratives, and the fetishization of military culture have found fertile ground in the Trumpian landscape.
The union of the US-Israeli regimes has engendered in America a receptive environment for white supremacy and the demonization and scapegoating of immigrants, minorities, and leftists.
Many of the measures Israel has used to terrorize Palestinians are now employed by federal agents against Americans; for example, detention and imprisonment without due process, home invasions, kidnapping, separation of children from families, and children used as human shields.
Trump’s mass deportation agenda is a tool for social control; a way to erode basic civil liberties and terrorize vulnerable populations. Like their Palestinian counterparts, however, the people of Minnesota have remained unbowed despite the danger. In reaction to the military occupation of their towns and cities, they have defiantly mobilized an effective opposition, giving life to resistance movements.
The Gaza rebellion of October 7, 2023, has altered Americans’ perception of Israel and their own government. By putting the interests of Israelis above the well-being of Americans, US administrations, particularly Biden and Trump, have ruptured the social contract.
The 1776 Declaration of Independence, with its message of inalienable rights and resistance to tyranny, echoes the struggle of Americans in 2026, and the eight-decade-long quest by Palestinians for self-determination.
The usurpations and abuses in Minnesota and in occupied Palestine require that we remember, in the words of Thomas Jefferson:
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government….when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
– Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.
As the Romans warned: hodie mihi cras tibi (today it's me, tomorrow it will be you). In the past 853 days of genocide in Gaza I often wrote: if we don't oppose the genocide and the undermining of international law by the zionists USA and their supporters, if we don't support the Palestinians and their human rights, the day will come that they will do the same to us as well.
That day has come, in USA and in Europe. It's only getting more extreme by the day. ICE in Minneapolis is just an example.
Let the genocide in Gaza and ICE in Minnesota be a warning to all of us. Hodie mihi cras tibi.
>> Fight for their rights = your rights. Use them or lose them. <<
Liked: 'From Palestine to the streets of America, the objective appears to be submission—to terrorize immigrants and those who protect them; and to silence dissenters who oppose the “world order” envisioned by the military, industrial, political, media, and digital complex (MIC plus).'