How Minnesotans became Palestinians: Top 5 Ways they are Occupied

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By Juan Cole for Informed Comment

The people of Palestine are occupied by the Israelis. In my experience most Americans do not even know this basic fact. Ignorance of it makes it impossible to understand what is even going on in the Mideast, and I fear until recently most Americans did not.

I went to see the Oscar-nominated film The Voice of Hind Rajab yesterday. The story of six-year-old Hind Rajab, murdered by the Israeli army in Gaza, is told here. It is heartbreaking because it is about the helplessness induced by occupation and the arbitrariness and impunity of the occupier. Occupiers are always arbitrary and unfair because they can be, since they have all the power, and because they feel they must act precipitately since they are the ones actually in danger.

It may help Americans to understand if they can see the similarities between Minnesota under Trump’s ICE and Palestine (the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza) under the Israeli army. The logic of occupation is always the same. Cole’s Five Laws of Occupation are as follows:

1. Occupation ideology holds that the occupation is necessary to protect the majority population, since the people being occupied are inherently violent and irrational and any leniency in their treatment will simply allow them to kill and act savagely. Peter Beinart has pointed out that he grew up in South Africa hearing whites talk that way about the majority African population, who whites felt had to be kept down because if given a chance they would attack whites. Nelson Mandela disproved this thesis in the 1990s. Despite what white racists like Trump allege, whites in multi-cultural South Africa have prospered and have so far retained a vastly disproportionate share of the national economy. The thesis of the inherent, almost genetic, savagery of the occupied that necessitates their eternal occupation is a fallacy. Its falsity, however, does not prevent the implementation of occupation, since it is founded on an irrational conspiracy theory. Of course, the occupied population does commit some violence, since the unjust conditions of occupation are unbearable. But the violence isn’t genetic, it is situational. That the occupied can be occupied in any case shows that they are the weaker and less dangerous population.

2. Occupation ideology holds that the majority population is fully human and fully citizens of the occupation state. The occupied minority is less than human, and does not have a right to live where they live — even if their families have lived there for thousands of years. They are not citizens, are stateless, and therefore have no state to protect them. US Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren defined citizenship as the “right to have rights.” Occupied people do not have rights, and they do not even have the right to have rights. They are lesser.

3. Any members of the Occupied population who somehow obtain citizenship rights in the majority state nevertheless are treated discriminitorily, as with the Israeli citizens of Palestinian ancestry. Their relatedness to the occupied population makes them suspect and authorizes forms of discrimination against them, including curbs on freedom of speech and movement.

4. Members of the majority who sympathize with or work for the occupied population are themselves stripped of rights and may be brutalized with impunity. In Jim Crow racist America, it was perhaps even worse to be a white person thought of as an N-lover than to be an African-American. The far Right in any society is dedicated to a vision of society as a racial and/ or religious hierarchy with themselves on top. One of the benefits for them of an occupied population is not only that they can lord it over them, but they can also cull from their own tribe anyone not on board with the racist vision, and lord it over them, too. They can in this way challenge an egalitarian and multi-cultural vision of the nation, and subvert it.

5. Occupation forces have impunity. They may kill without punishment. There is no such thing as a law-abiding occupation. The logic here is that since the occupier is pursuing occupation as a form of self-defense from barbarians, any killing undertaken by an occupation soldier or agent is actually a form of self-defense. Hence, such murders cannot be prosecuted. This logic is so powerful that Israel’s deliberate killing of tens of thousands of innocent, unarmed civilians in Gaza 2023-2025 was excused by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, by President Joe Biden, and by the Trump team as simply a form of self-defense. The civilians killed had to be murdered because they were in the line of sight to targeting the violent terrorists, who allegedly used them as human shields (they didn’t).

The people of Minneapolis arguably have been occupied by some 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. They did not ask for this occupation force — it was sent by Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Gregory Bovino, and ultimately by President Donald J. Trump. The Trump administration allegation that Minneapolis of all places has a problem with undocumented residents is absurd on the face of it. The state only has 130,000 undocumented residents.

All sociological studies have demonstrated that undocumented people are much more law-abiding on the whole than native-born residents. Moreover, crime rates in the US have plummeted over the past 40 years, precisely the period in which immigration of all sorts has greatly increased. There are 24 major US cities that have worse crime rates than Minneapolis, and there is no reason to think what crime it experiences is because of immigrants. The murder rate in Minneapolis fell 16% in 2025. What is causing it to rise in 2026 is the murderousness of the ICE occupation.

ICE obviously has orders not simply to kidnap law-abiding residents without documentation but to bully and brutalize any native-born Americans who object to their unconstitutional and illegal tactics. They have been encouraged not only to enter residences without a judicial warrant but seemingly to beat up and arrest native-born protesters and to have a low bar for simply killing them. They are after all N-lovers. We have seen two high-profile killings, which are almost certainly murders, just this month in Minneapolis — Renee Nicole Good and now Alex Pretti, who was protesting the killing of Good among other things. Pretti was a 37-year-old ICU nurse.

Do I need to spell out the way Cole’s Five Laws of Occupation apply to Minneapolis?

Law-abiding undocumented Americans are being made a pretext for the occupation of Minneapolis. These are stateless people treated as having no rights and no right to have rights. Somalis and Hmong who are American citizens have been illegally detained by ICE. And native-born Americans who defend them are awarded the same status, having their constitutional rights — of speech, of public assembly, of the press, of religious conviction, and even of life — stripped from them.

ICE agents act with impunity, protected by the full-on fascist Department of Justice and FBI. This impunity underlines the white Protestant hierarchy, in which the favored population is above the law.

Hence, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti may have their lives taken without the killers being held responsible. Under the logic of occupation, any time an occupation soldier kills a native it is always a form of self-defense and therefore no culpability attaches to it.

The major figures and organs of the Trump administration smeared Ms. Good as a domestic terrorist, and they falsely accused Mr. Pretti of brandishing a gun at ICE agents; film shows him brandishing a smartphone at them to record them pushing a woman to the ground. He tried, as a nurse, to help the woman.. He did have a gun on his person, but he also had a license for it and did not ever draw it. On finding it, ICE opened fire on him. The logic of the occupation state, that all violence by its agents is a form of self defense against dangerous savages, cannot be overridden by the facts, since the occupation state controls the narrative and controls the prosecutors and courts.

Thus, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot down by an Israeli sniper, who certainly deliberately targeted her even though she had a big “Press” sign on her back. The sniper was never punished, likely because his superiors had ordered the hit. Occupation governance is always corrupt, since occupation officials authorize arbitrary killing as a way of underlining their power over the barbarians and their determination never to allow themselves to be attacked by them. Seeing the occupied population as intrinsically berserk and dangerous allows officials to configure peaceful journalists, ICU nurses, Christian poets and six-year-old little girls huddling among corpses in a car as dire threats that must be removed from the board.

The Republican-ruled states of Texas and Florida have 1.6 million undocumented residents each. The Trump administration is not causing trouble for Republican governors Greg Abbot and Ron DeSantis by sending in large numbers of ICE agents to those states. It is concentrating on a solid blue state to create an image of chaos so as to argue in the mid-terms that Democrats foment crime and disorder by coddling the undocumented population, which they falsely accuse of violent criminality. Since Republicans run on a fantasy of America under siege by rising crime rates, it is inconvenient for them that crime has decreased so tremendously in the past few decades. The pretexts for occupation, however, can never be interrogated, or the entire enterprise would collapse.

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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