Editor’s Note: The views expressed within this letter do not necessarily align with the views of The Mac Weekly.

It’s hard to believe that only a bit over a year has passed since Macalester’s Board of Trustees (BoT) issued its decision regarding the Macalester Student Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) Proposal.

Macalester’s BoT didn’t simply reject the specific petition by students that had been endorsed by Macalester’s faculty. The administration also issued a statement that whitewashed Israeli state-sponsored violence in Palestine and contributed to the environment we are all experiencing today.

In its statement, Macalester claimed sympathy with the U. N. in “championing human rights, upholding social justice and the rule of law.” The college claimed to be “committed as a community to upholding these principles.”

But, after the initial platitudes, Macalester’s statement showed no such sympathy or commitment and merely slipped into passive voice and inaction. Macalester made no mention of the many compelling examples of Israeli war crimes, discrimination and illegal activity cited by Macalester students in their proposal or the manifold ways in which these actions are inconsistent with Macalester’s mission. Instead, Macalester blandly lamented “events taking place in Israel and Palestine.” No perpetrator. No crime. No injustice. Just events occurring.

The BoT statement then reduced Mac for Palestine’s BDS Proposal to a fiscal decision regarding the “tenuous connection, if any, between Macalester’s investments in such diversified market products” and the “violence and injustice … in Israel and Palestine.” What a sad day for Macalester when our BoT responds to a request for leadership with the pecuniary terms of a poorly written mutual fund prospectus.

The actions committed by Israel that Macalester gives license to with its silence have a foundation that impacts all Americans, as we are now seeing. Israel’s human rights practices, policing methods and surveillance practices are taught and promoted to U.S. law enforcement, and the exchanges are frequently funded by non-governmental, Zionist organizations rather than the U.S. government.

For example, in 2015, the Jerusalem Post described an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) program that brings officials from “U.S. security agencies and police departments” to “learn lessons from Israel in terms of tactics and strategies,” noting that the officers who take part in these visits “come back Zionists.”

In September 2017, The Intercept described a series of exchange programs sponsored by American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the ADL and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs that focused on topics like “balancing the fight against crime and terrorism.” The Intercept wrote that “more than 200 law enforcement executives from over 100 departments in the U.S. and abroad, immigration enforcement agencies, and even campus police have participated in the ADL program since it launched in 2004.”

In another example, in March 2022, the Department of Homeland Security announced that DHS would “increase security cooperation with Israel through new arrangements” designed to promote “cyber security information sharing” and “expert to expert exchanges.”

In 2025, Israel and the U.S. deployed their fusion of military training and law enforcement cooperation through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The GHF combined Israeli Defense Force (IDF) leadership with U.S.-backed contractors, including, according to the BBC, members of the anti-Muslim “Infidels Motorcycle Club,” to create a cesspool of amorality that Doctors Without Borders called “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.”

Now, Israel’s state-sponsored violences, enabled by U.S. funding and military aid, countenanced by the willful blindness of American institutions like Macalester and redirected back to the U.S. through Zionist training programs, have reached Minnesota.

In seeking to minimize the “Israel Palestine conflict,” as Macalester’s statement benignly referred to it, the BoT statement called it “one of numerous other conflicts unfolding around the world.” However, the links between Israel’s military and American law enforcement make it quite a bit different.

When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) killed Renée Macklin Good, it could have been a scene lifted from Gaza or the West Bank, horrific and shocking and vaguely reminiscent of the killing of Hind Rajab and so many others that the IDF has left to bleed out in the street. Indeed, the Trump administration quickly asserted that Good was a “terrorist,” echoing the IDF statements that frequently refer to any Palestinians, even children, who are arrested or killed as terrorists disobeying an order. The same pattern played out again when Alex Pretti was killed and quickly labeled a “domestic terrorist” by members of the Trump administration.

Prior brown and Black victims of ICE, such as Keith Porter Jr. and Geraldo Lunas Campos, have received far less press. And perhaps the relative indifference to their deaths at the hands of ICE had a similar result as the relative indifference to the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of Israel. Silence is interpreted as consent, and consent for violence, once given, is hard to contain.

Due process? Freedom of movement? Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza aren’t entitled to those under Israel’s apartheid rules. Minnesotans who wish to protest the government may be finding they have more in common with Palestinians than they thought. But I would imagine that the IDF approves of the “balance between terrorism and crime” that ICE is demonstrating in Minnesota.

When the Macalester BoT chose not to accept the Macalester Student BDS petition, it issued a statement that provided cover for the worst kinds of human rights abuses and war crimes perpetrated by Israel. Now some of those abuses have come to the U.S. and Minnesota, courtesy of ICE. Perhaps the violence being perpetrated by ICE will remind the BoT that symbolism does matter, that failure to call out abuse creates complicity and that institutions that do not hold themselves accountable are not worthy of respect.