Minnesota activists criticize Tim Walz for refusing to meet with Palestinians

Last month Minnesota Governor and soon-to-be Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz was scheduled to meet with Palestinian families who have lost relatives in Gaza.

However, the face-to-face never took place.

According to several activists in Minnesota, after the contingent showed up at the Governor’s office they were first asked to meet with the staff. Once they explained that they weren’t just going to share their stories, but also press for policy changes the meeting was abruptly canceled.

Mondoweiss spoke with Sana Wazwaz, a member of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) in Minnesota, about the canceled meeting, Walz’s record on Israel, and Palestine activism in the state.

Mondoweiss: Before we get to what happened with the abrupt cancellation, can you talk about how the meeting with Walz was set up and how long it took to come about?

Sana Wazwaz: It took ten months for CAIR Minnesota to set up a meeting. Palestinian families from Minnesota had been trying to arrange a meeting with Governor Walz. We had been calling we’ve been emailing, you name it for it for over 10 months since the genocide began to no avail.

He has never, not once, decided to sit down to meet with a Gazan family. He’s refused all attempts to sit down and talk to any of us, and he has refused to meet with a single mosque here in Minnesota about what’s happening in Gaza. But on the flip side, he rushed immediately after October 7 to go to the synagogues, to go to a stand with Israel rally, to order flags be flown at half-staff in honor of the Israeli victims.

So, we clearly see that he has the capacity to show up for his constituents—it’s just a matter of which constituents.

So yes, CAIR Minnesota and Palestinian families had been reaching out to Walz for months and trying to get a meeting with him, and every single time the meetings had been refused.

Finally, on July 9, a meeting was scheduled. He finally accepted the meeting request, but it had to be a small closed meeting with Palestinian families. So CAIR Minnesota reaches out to AMP Minnesota and other Palestinian families, including those that have specifically lost relatives in Gaza.

It was myself and my colleague Taher Herzallah, who is a Palestinian activist with AMP National. He’s the Outreach and Grassroots Organizer, but he was also on the Parks and Rec board for the city of Columbia Heights. Then, Dr. Jehad Adwan, who’s a resident Minnesotan who’s lost droves of family members and Gaza, he and his wife attended. Also, some other folks from AMP who are Palestinian and have had family members impacted attended.

What happens when you arrive for the meeting?

So, we arrived early for the meeting. Walz is in the building, by the way. It’s not like he was on the road. He was in the building, and he was ready to meet with us. Our meeting is scheduled for 11:30 a.m., but we were there by 10:30.

Then, at 11:00 a.m., there was a pre-meeting with the staffers. So we got seated in the room where Walz was set to meet with us, and then the staffers came in. They just kind of wanted to chat with us. They asked us what this meeting was going to look like. What do you guys want to discuss?

We laid it out clearly. Listen, we don’t want to be the perfect victims with a sob story. We don’t want to sit here and play our victimhood card and cry for you guys and just trauma dump. That’s not what we’re interested in. We’re interested in material solutions. We’re interested in policy demands. We’re interested in rectifying our suffering instead of just crying about it.

We want to talk about Minnesota divestment. Governor Walz sits on the State Board of Investments, which manages public pension funds, and Minnesota taxpayer money, which is invested in institutions that are complicit in Israeli occupation. That’s $157 million. We said we wanted to address that. We want to talk about Governor Walz’s history of unleashing the state patrol on peaceful protesters and arresting people unfairly. We want to talk about the actual material issues on the ground here in Minnesota, the suppression of Palestine activists. As soon as we said that, two staffers got up. There were four or five staffers that were meeting with us. Two of them got up and left the room after a few minutes of us talking.

We just keep talking for 20 more minutes or so. 20 minutes pass and those two staffers come back. This is literally two minutes before the meeting is supposed to officially begin.

Right around the time Walz is supposed to walk in to meet us, they say, “We’re sorry. We have to cancel this meeting. We really apologize about this.”

They tried to play it very diplomatically, very nicely. They tried to tell us, we understand your concerns. We hear you guys, and these are the actual words of a staffer. I am not paraphrasing: “The Governor was prepared to hear resident families tell their stories, but he was not prepared to talk about divestment.”

We all thought, wow. In other words, we want your tears and not your policy demands. We want your sob stories and not solutions for how to rectify them, right? That’s what we want.

We felt that this was a major excuse. I think it’s totally dishonest to say that Governor Walz was not expecting a policy discussion. He knows that CAIR Minnesota, AMP, our allies, and Palestinian families have been pushing for this political demand for divestment for months and even years, right? He knows that this is on the table. We’ve been packing the State Board of Investments meetings and pushing for this demand. So to say that he just wasn’t aware that we were going to not just talk about suffering, but how to end the suffering is just flat-out wrong.

This also signals a really sinister perception that he has of the Palestinian community. And that is that we are essentially just the PR puppets and we’re just a nuisance, right? We’re not actual partners to affect policy change. He doesn’t take our policy demands seriously. He just wants to hear us cry. So that’s that’s how the meeting kind of went down.

Many progressives opposed Kamala Harris’s potential pick of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro over his positions on Israel. There seems to be a public perception that Walz is better on the issue. Many people are learning about Walz for the first time this week. As someone who lives and organizes in Minnesota, what should people know about him when it comes to this issue?

Great question. So first of all, I just want to say this meeting, or the cancellation of this meeting, is not an isolated incident. It is actually indicative of a long history of Governor Walz being a straight-up genocide ally, not only in his investments and his public solidarity with Israel but also in the way that he conducts himself with his Palestinian constituents, or actually doesn’t conduct himself—the way that he just shuts down and decides not to engage with us whatsoever.

When I heard that Walz was selected the first thing I thought was, this is a genocide ally and we need to press him. We need to pressure him, not only to divest but to call for an end to the siege of Gaza.

As far as him being “better” than Shapiro, that is not the bar that we should settle for. 

Other things your readers should know about Walz? First of all, I mentioned his material investments. $157 million of Minnesota state taxpayer funds invested in institutions that are complicit in the occupation. This includes weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, and Elbit Systems, companies that are complicit not only in violence in Gaza but in violence across the globe. In the bombings of Yemen and Lebanon, surveillance on the U.S.-Mexico border. These are very clear offenders with repeated brutality against Black and brown communities across the board.

So there’s that. Also, in 2019, Walz approved a $1.3 million Minnesota state taxpayer-funded grant to construct a Lockheed Martin facility in St. Paul, Minnesota, and didn’t just construct it quietly and shut up about it. He boasted about it and said that this was good news for Minnesota. He’s done that repeatedly despite the fact that we have packed his state investments meeting over and over for years on end.

People have testified. Like the staffers wanted at that meeting, they have cried all the sob stories, shared all the data, and shared all the human rights reports to prove how these investments are detrimental to Walz’s constituents. He’s done nothing about it. He has offered no sympathy for it and every single time when we come to that State Board of Investments meeting and we testify about these investments, there’s a blank look on his face and he calls up the next speaker. That’s it. There’s absolutely no engagement or empathy whatsoever.

As for his public-facing stuff, it’s very clear that he’s a champion and a cheerleader of Zionist genocide against the Palestinians. As soon as the October 7 situation happened, right away he visited a synagogue, he went to a stand with Israel rally, he ordered flags at half-staff, he lit up a bridge in blue and white to honor the Israeli victims. He hasn’t done anything for Palestinian constituents in a state where residents lost 30 members of their families in one night. We had a funeral service for multiple residents in our community who have lost droves of family members. I did not see Governor Walz coming out for that. I did not see Governor Walz reaching out to these families and checking in on them. Nothing.

Can you discuss the Palestine organizing happening in Minnesota and some of the local issues your organization is currently working on?

The prominent coalition here is the Free Palestine Coalition, which CAIR Minnesota and AMP are both members of. One of the biggest campaigns that we’re working on is the Divest Minnesota campaign. We’re trying to get the State Board of Investments of Minnesota to divest Minnesota pensions and taxpayer money from companies complicit in the occupation and violence globally.

So what that looks like right now is a large public pressure campaign that involves protests, civil disobedience, disrupting these politicians’ public visits, and public platforms to make sure that they’re very clear that business as usual isn’t going to continue as long as they keep investing this money. We have the State Board of Investments meeting next Wednesday, August 14.

What we are planning to do is now we’re expanding our movement to people that have pensions invested across the state. So we’re bringing folks in from Northern Minnesota, from more rural Minnesota, into the State Board of Investments meeting. Union members and people from all different public employment sectors are coming in to testify and tell Governor Walz and the State Board of Investments and the State of Minnesota that we’re not okay with this and that we’re going to keep doing this until they divest. That’s been our big ongoing campaign and we’re trying to expand the reach of it throughout the state.