Police Brutality “Made in Israel”
When it comes to dehumanising and abusing a population, the Israelis are experts. Our cops should not be taking lessons from them.
Many Americans are shocked and horrified by the level of brutality and sheer force that is being levelled against peaceful student demonstrators on college campuses across the United States and the world. Those of us who are older are appalled at how much has changed: how the police and law enforcement agencies in general have started to see the American people as “the enemy”, members of a savage and dangerous population that must be subjugated, controlled and forced into submission.
How did this happen?
The answer is that, over the past 20+ years, the American law enforcement system has been “Israelised” — to the point where the techniques, the attitude and even the mission of American law enforcement has become harmonised with — if not completely subsumed by — the Israeli security state.
It all started with 9/11
When The New York Times asked Benjamin Netanyahu, who was a former Israeli PM at the time, to comment on the 9/11 attacks and what it meant for US-Israeli relations, Bibi replied: ‘’It’s very good.’’ Then he edited himself: ‘’Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.’’ He predicted that the attack would ‘’strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive haemorrhaging of terror.’’
Later, when he was once more Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu repeated his belief that the September 11 terror attacks on the United States had been good for Israel:
“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,” [Israeli newspaper] Ma’ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events “swung American public opinion in our favour.”
The Times also reported on September 12 that Ariel Sharon, who was Israeli PM at the time, “repeatedly placed Israel on the same ground as the United States”, calling the assault “an attack on our common values’’ and declaring, ‘’I believe together we can defeat these forces of evil.’’
This “common values” Sharon noted took on a dark complexion in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The emergence of the so-called “War on Terror” served to place the populations of both the US and Israel in the same position of FEAR. Fear of Arab terrorists, a permanent feeling of being under threat, and a quasi-totalitarian society obsessed with “security”.
Certainly the 9/11 attacks caused a sea change in the attitude of American law enforcement. The attacks triggered not just a blizzard of new, authoritarian legislation in Washington, they caused US security forces nationwide to adopt a different posture toward the American public.
The “dancing Israelis” had it right
On the morning of September 11, 2001, in Union City, New Jersey, a group of young Israeli men were seen dancing on top of a van, high-fiving each other and generally celebrating as the Twin Towers burned. They were also filming the disaster. Nearby neighbors were disturbed by the display and called the police.
The NJ police arrested the 5 young men based on their “bizarre behaviour”: Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari were quickly identified as Israeli citizens, and claimed they were there to “document the event”.
The young Israelis were “visibly happy” that the 9/11 terrorist attacks had taken place, as they believed that the disaster would strengthen and deepen the relationship between Israel and the US, and force Americans to more closely identify — or even mirror — the Israeli antipathy towards the Palestinians.
ABC News reported on the incident at the time:
According to the police report, one of the passengers told the officers they had been on the West Side Highway in Manhattan “during the incident” — referring to the World Trade Center attack. The driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers, “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”
In other words, Kurzberg was echoing the sentiments of Netanyahu and Sharon: namely, that the attacks of 9/11 served to bring Israel and the US closer together, to face “the same problem” of “terror” from the Palestinians.
The men were further investigated by the FBI and eventually released by special order from the Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff (an ultra-Zionist himself) that also banned them from entering the US for 10 years. The 5 quickly returned to Israel, where they were interviewed about their experience on Israeli TV.
Now, I do not know whether those young Israelis were Mossad or not, but certainly Sivan Kurzberg was right:
Thanks to 9/11, Israel’s problems had become America’s problems.
Making “common cause” with Israel
Former Bush Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, who famously discounted the Presidential Daily Briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US”, while on a trip to Israel in 2012. described the sea change that Washington underwent after the fall of the Twin Towers:
While Jerusalem and Washington were always good friends, after the attacks they became allies “with a common cause in the fight against people who would seek political gain by attacking civilians, parents and children,” she said.
As The Times of Israel reported, Rice declared that, for the United States, the Al Qaeda attack attack “changed the conception of security“.
“We realised that Israel, our good friend, was very advanced in this area. Security has been a concern of Israel’s since the day it was born”, she said.
And so, in one fell swoop, the United States suddenly found itself under the same “security threat” that Israel faced. The two countries now shared a bond of blood.
It was a “moment that mattered,” Rice said.
The transformation of US law enforcement
There is no doubt that 9/11 “changed everything”. Totalitarian legislative proposals such as The Patriot Act, which contained many provisions that conservatives had been keeping “on the shelf” for decades, were dusted off and passed in just 45 days, often by unanimous consent and without a moment’s pause to reflect (or to even read the bill).
The new laws gave the Federal Government sweeping new powers of surveillance and monitoring, but the new centurions of the empire were faced with a dilemma: US law enforcement agencies were still too “soft” and tended too much to worry about citizens’ rights and such things as peaceful “community policing”.
If America were going to confront the new “terrorist threat”, then America needed to toughen up, to “go to the Dark Side”, as then-VP Dick Cheney so famously said.
But this “Dark Side” did not just entail external measures such as “extraordinary rendition”, black sites and secret torture programs. There was an internal, domestic component that entailed a wide-ranging metamorphosis of American law enforcement, from a lightly armed constabulary into a highly mechanised and militarised security force.
As Juliette Kayyem, the first “Undersecretary for Homeland Security” in Massachusetts and self-proclaimed “Security Mom” explained:
“9/11 showed us that national security wasn’t just something “over there” [outside the U.S.], but that the government had — through good and bad, mistakes and successes — to take its homeland defenses seriously.”
What Kayyem and Cheney both had in mind — at least in terms of America’s police — was something more like this:
Creating a “Deadly Exchange”
Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the scope of the US-Israeli cooperation on domestic law enforcement really expanded in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York:
Months after the September 11 attacks, US law enforcement delegates attended their first official training expedition to Israel to exchange “best practices” in “counter-terrorism”.
Since then, thousands more from across the US — including agents from the FBI, CIA, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — have been schooled at these meetings in both Israel and the US, sponsored by far-right Israeli lobby organisations.
As Alice Speri explained in The Intercept:
“In the aftermath of 9/11, Israel seized on its decades-long experience as an occupying force to brand itself as a world leader in counterterrorism. U.S. law enforcement agencies took the Jewish state up on its expertise by participating in exchange programs sponsored by an array of pro-Israel groups, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).”
In the years following 2001, several so-called “law enforcement exchange programs” (LEEPs) were created, many at the municipal level.
In one example, the City of Baltimore was found to have had deep ties to Israeli security forces in a 2016 US Dept. of Justice report that documented “widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement, and culture of retaliation” within the Baltimore Police Department (BPD).
As Amnesty International discovered, Baltimore was just one example of malicious influence through LEEP programs in place throughout the United States:
“Baltimore law enforcement officials, along with hundreds of others from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state as well as the DC Capitol police have all traveled to Israel for training. Thousands of others have received training from Israeli officials here in the U.S.”
In addition, Amnesty International noted:
“Many of these trips are taxpayer funded while others are privately funded. Since 2002, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) have paid for police chiefs, assistant chiefs and captains to train in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).”
ADL is the leader
In their 2016 Annual Report, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) boasted that “100% of major metropolitan police departments” had sent representatives for training in their “counterterrorism” programs in Israel.
Moreover, the ADL has “special” training courses for Campus Law Enforcement. These courses provide:
“Training for all campus law enforcement personnel, as well as administrators overseeing campus police, covering…Joint training with surrounding jurisdictions on handling protests and demonstrations.”
So if you are wondering why school administrators are so trigger happy in calling in the local storm troopers, the ADL is your answer.
Leading the resistance: Jewish Voice for Peace
Just as they lead the general opposition to Zionist overreach and the demand for a ceasefire and halt to the genocide in Gaza, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is also leading the movement to end the law enforcement exchange programs with Israel.
In 2018, JVP published a report entitled “Deadly Exchange” that detailed the level and the extent to which the LEEPs with Israel were threatening American liberties and rights. They also launched a public campaign by the same name that seeks to permanently end the practice of law enforcement cooperation with Israel. The group’s website explains:
In these programs, “worst practices” are shared to promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing in both countries. These include racial profiling, massive spying and surveillance, deportation and detention, and attacks on human rights defenders.
JVP has particularly targeted the Anti-Defamation League, as they are a primary sponsor and funder of police exchange programs between the US and Israel.
Real world examples of Israeli-trained overreach
Given the depth and breadth of the law enforcement exchange programs with Israel, and given the fact that every major metropolitan police department in the United States has participated in these programs, it is not hard to pin the blame for instances of police overreach on Israel.
A case in point: Ferguson, MO
In 2014, a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. When black people began to riot in Ferguson, the mayor deployed highly militarised police in armoured military vehicles, with snipers and machine gunners.
Tom Nolan, a 27-year veteran of the Boston Police Department and professor at SUNY Plattsburgh wrote in an op-ed at the time:
Have no doubt, police in the United States are militarising, and in many communities, particularly those of color, the message is being received loud and clear: “You are the enemy.”
It turns out, the St. Louis County police chief — the one who ordered the militarised response in Ferguson — had gone to train and study in Israel.
A case in point: George Floyd
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old black American man, was murdered in Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, a 44-year-old white police officer. Floyd had been arrested after a store clerk alleged that he made a purchase using a counterfeit $20 bill. Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face-down in a street. Floyd died from the restraint, and Chauvin was convicted of murder.
In 2012, at least 100 Minnesota police officers attended a conference hosted by Israel’s Chicago consulate, the second time such an event had been held. There, they learned the violent “restraint” techniques used by Israeli forces to terrorise and repress Palestinians under the guise of “security operations”. The so-called counterterrorism training conference in Minneapolis was jointly hosted by the FBI.
A case in point: Skunk
Developed by Israeli police and manufactured by the Israeli company Odortec, “Skunk”, according to the JVP, is a “foul-smelling liquid designed to cause nausea and linger for days when sprayed at high pressure onto protesters at demonstrations”.
As JVP noted in Deadly Exchange:
“Based on its proven effectiveness against Palestinian protests — particularly in West Bank village demonstrations against the Apartheid Wall — the American company Mistral Security began selling Skunk to U.S. police departments, including the St. Louis Metropolitan Police, following the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri.”
“Skunk” was also used against pro-Palestine student demonstrators at Columbia University in New York in January 2024. Two Columbia students and former Israeli military soldiers “infiltrated” the Jan. 19 pro-Palestinian rally at which protesters allege they were sprayed with a hazardous, foul-smelling chemical, according to an Al Jazeera documentary on the incident. Eight students were hospitalised due to the attack.
Skunk was developed as a way to humiliate Palestinians and degrade their quality of life, causing them to reek “like raw sewage mixed with putrefying cow’s carcass“. It is the tool of an occupier and an oppressor who seeks to dehumanise the people it is deployed against. It should not exist. And it certainly is not something that American police should be deploying against the citizenry.
Here’s why the Israeli training is WRONG
Since 2001, over 1000 top federal, state, and local police officers from all the major police departments across the U.S. have gone to Israel to learn about its “counterterrorism-focused” policing.
American cops believe they are “learning from the best”, when it comes to policing. But there are many reasons why learing from Israelis is not just inappropriate, but DANGEROUS for American policing and the American people.
Israelis do not have “constitutional rights”
Because Israeli and American government officials are constantly crowing about “shared values”, many Americans think that the legal structures and rights are the same or at least similar in both countries.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Unlike the United States, Israel does not have a constitution. Israelis do not have a Bill of Rights to protect them from government oppression. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, etc. are not enshrined in any sacred founding document, as they are in the United States.
“…despite their branding as top-tier counter-terrorism experts, Israeli police and security agents regularly violate civil rights, and implement racist and deadly policies” — Jewish Voice for Peace
This means that Israeli policing techniques do not need to reflect or respect the rights of the citizenry, as they must in America. What our cops are learning through these programs may work in Israel, but they are not appropriate for the US and indeed, they may not even be legal under US law.
As JVP Deputy Director Stefanie Fox said in 2018:
“American police already have a terrible track record on civil rights and racism — and then they go to Israel and train with Israeli police and security agencies that are documented human rights violators! We should be investing in our communities, not militarising our police”.
Israeli police operate in “nondemocratic environments”
Israel’s policing techniques are also inappropriate for American streets because the primary purpose of Israeli police is to enforce an occupation. Indeed, Israel has imposed military rule in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza for over 50 years. The skills they have developed over the past decades are designed to subjugate, repress and deter.
In Israel, the armed forces (Israel Defense Force) and the Israeli police often act on the same “counter-terrorism” mission. But in the US, the military and the domestic police forces have very distinct and different roles.
As former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb once put it, “Soldiers are trained to vaporise, not Mirandise.” That distinction is why the US passed the Posse Comitatus Act more than 130 years ago, a law that explicitly forbids the use of military troops in domestic policing.
Israel has no such law.
Moreover, the Israeli occupation and the forces that impose it are plagued by abuse, according to Human Rights Watch:
At least five categories of major violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law characterise the occupation: unlawful killings; forced displacement; abusive detention; the closure of the Gaza Strip and other unjustified restrictions on movement; and the development of settlements, along with the accompanying discriminatory policies that disadvantage Palestinians.
Israeli police and security forces also regularly violate the international human rights of Palestinians and immigrants inside Israel proper.
Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and author of a forthcoming book on global policing, explained to The Intercept’s Alice Speri what makes Israeli policing techniques so dangerous:
“A lot of the policing that folks are observing and being talked to about in these trips is policing that happens in a nondemocratic context,” he said. “It involves either military policing, border control policing, or policing of folks in the occupied territories who aren’t full legal subjects in the Israeli legal system.”
It is little wonder, then, that American cops who go through Israeli training programs come out thinking that the communities in which they serve are “enemy territory” and that the people they interact with do not have their full “democratic” rights provided by the US Constitution.
Shocked elites should act
Until now, the violent, Israeli-style over-policing in America had been carried out on communities of colour. With the current wave of campus protests, however, America’s elites are getting a taste of what American POC — and their Palestinian brothers and sisters — have been suffering for decades.
The time has come to take back our police departments and “de-program” our cops back into American “peace officers” and not the jack-booted thugs enforcing a violent “occupation” on an oppressed people.
#End
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Great, fact-filled article on a critically important subject. Our police have been trained by a bunch of genocidal maniacs. That reason alone should be enough to throw out the Israeli training manuals.
"....Until now, the violent, Israeli-style over-policing in America had been carried out on communities of colour. With the current wave of campus protests, however, America’s elites are getting a taste of what American POC — and their Palestinian brothers and sisters — have been suffering for decades....The time has come to take back our police departments and “de-program” our cops back into American “peace officers” and not the jack-booted thugs enforcing a violent “occupation” on an oppressed people....."
Here I would question this concept of "our police departments"/"our cops".
They are not your cops and they exist purely as a militia ensuring that America's 0.1% feel comfortable. They are not public servants in the first place.
If they have largely been absuing what you call "POC", I would point to the fact that so-called whiteness is a mirage, a fabrication by means of which America has for centuries used as a currency to divide the masses and make those descended from European immigrants to feel better about not being in the 0.1% by saying or thinking quietly that they are still well off beings they are "not %&&gger" .
Well now Americans en masse are riding out that its still a plantation nation and the 0.1% stil says that if you stand with the %&&ggers, then well you are them too.
Nothing has changed in the world's biggest and most unreconciled plantation.nation.