The U.S. + Israeli Policing Partnership

Mar 26, 2024

I identify as a prison abolitionist. That is to say, I believe in the vision that much smarter and evolved people than me have placed before us: that we can foster a society in which every human has all the elements necessary to thrive. A society in which we have ways to address harm without resorting to the systems of oppression that perpetuate harm.

Abolitionism is a slow practice for me, one that requires an active, near-daily unlearning of white supremacy and patriarchy, ideologies that try to seduce us with promises of punishment and revenge.

When I reflect on the way punishment undergirds social order in most systems today, incarceration and policing come to mind.

Since Israel’s large-scale invasion and ethnic cleansing of Gaza began anew in October, U.S. police brutality and Israeli military brutality have come to our attention myriad deeply distressing ways.

In my last column, I wrote about Aaron Bushnell, and about the police officer who kept his gun resolutely trained on Aaron as the young man burned to death in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington:

Enter an embassy police officer, stage left. The officer does not move in to help, but trains his gun on Aaron for the entirety of the incident. He watches mutely as Aaron burns to death, as he screams and suffocates on the smoke from his burning body.

The image of the police officer, gun trained on a dying man, embodies the carceral nature of the U.S. government, the brutality of the Israeli Defense Forces, and the extensive connections between the two.

To witness the disturbing image of the police officer training his gun on Aaron Bushnell while the 25-year-old burned to death evokes the addiction to punishment—both the individual punishment of private citizens and the collective punishment of racialized people—that underlies both the U.S. and Israeli policing systems and, by extension, their military forces.

I’d like to address some of these connections here.

The U.S. Prison Industrial Project

The United States Carceral Project—or simply put, policing—has roots beyond the emulation of British law enforcement. It arose from enslavement, and from the slave patrols of the 17^th and 18^th centuries as well as the enforcing of Jim Crow laws that occurred from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

According to History.com,

“Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. Named after a Black minstrel show character, the laws—which existed for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until 1968—were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education or other opportunities. Those who attempted to defy Jim Crow laws often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence and death.”

Former Confederate soldiers worked as police officers and also as judges. This made it difficult for Black Americans to win court cases. It also ensured they were subject to Black codes, restrictive laws that were designed to limit Black Americans’ freedom and to use them as a cheap labor force after the end of enslavement. These codes operated in tandem with labor camps for those who were incarcerated, who were treated as enslaved persons.

Let’s look at the alarming evolution of policing in America.

Despite comprising just 5 percent of the global population, the U.S. accounts for a whopping 25 percent of the world’s prison population. It ranks second highest in the world behind China, with over 1.5 million people incarcerated.

Put another way, the rate of incarceration in the U.S. is between 5 and 10 times higher than other “industrial” nations.

And the business of incarceration known as the prison industrial complex is financially lucrative, to say the least.

In the U.S., incarceration costs taxpayers close to $80 billion a year.

Meanwhile, private prison corporations bring in an estimated $374 million annually.

Moreover, these corporations and other beneficiaries extract such staggering profits to a much greater extent from the bodies of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people than from white people.

According to The Sentencing Project, Black Americans are 6 times more likely to be incarcerated than white adults.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the U.S. incarcerates First Nations people at a rate 38 percent higher than the national average. In a full nineteen U.S. states, First Nations people are overrepresented in the prison population more than any other race or ethnicity.

But that’s not the worst of it. There exists a terrible inequity in who the criminal justice system uses pretrial detention.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 45 percent of people incarcerated in tribal jails were being held pretrial, and pretrial detention rose by at least by 80 percent since 1999. The average length of stay doubled from 2002 to 2018.

This grossly disproportionate rate of incarceration extends to First Nations youth as well. Despite accounting for only 1 percent of the national youth population, a staggering 70 percent of Native youth are incarcerated into federal prisons.

Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and American Indian/Alaskan Native youth are more likely to experience pretrial detention than white youth.

And the pretrial detention setting itself exposes confined youth to experiences that present direct harm, including sexual abuse, sexual harassment, physical violence, placement in restraints or solitary confinement, and further psychological trauma.

For youth with little prior contact with the carceral system, pretrial detention has been shown to be associated with increased recidivism.

It is the last series of shocking statistics—on the outsized incarceration of Indigenous people and its impact—that evokes for me the patters we see in Israel’s incarceration practices and its enforcers, the Israeli Defense Forces.

What, you might wonder, do policing, racial profiling in mass incarceration, and police tactics (e.g. police brutality) have to do with Israel’s war on Gaza?

A great deal, it turns out.

Israel’s System of Incarceration

The racial profiling that drives policing in the U.S. also extends to Israel.

Israeli military courts that rule over the West Bank exclusively try Palestinians. About 40 percent of male Palestinians in the occupied territories have been arrested during their lifetimes, according to prisoner support and human rights organisation Addameer.

The defining characteristics of the American prison system have parallels in the Israeli prison system. It is important to note that the following discussion also includes the West Bank along with Israel proper.

Israel parallels the American trend of higher incarceration of minorities. With a 73.9 percent

Jewish population and a 21 percent Arab minority, Israel has imprisoned about 20 pecent of its Palestinian population since the 1967 war.

Approximately 40% of male Palestinians in the West Bank have been arrested at least once during their lives—double their proportion of the general population.

Additionally, Palestinians’ rate of imprisonment is almost four times higher than that of Israelis.

Like the U.S., then, Isael also deliberately cultivates a carceral system in which they imprison an outsized, population of Indigenous people and people of color, a vast number of which are youth and children.

According to the annual report jointly issued in 2022 by the Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, the Palstinian Prisoners Club, Addameer Association for Prisoner Care and Human Rights, and the Wadi Hilweh Center of Jerusalem (all prisoners’ institutions), the number of Palestinians Israel detained in 2022 alone reached 7,000. A full 4,700 of them are still detained.

Of this number, Israel detained 882 children. Israel holds many Palestinian children in administrative detention, meaning that they have not been charged with any crime or received a trial.

Israel’s detention practices violate the rules of international law and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Between January, 2022 and April, 2023, 73 Palestinian children were martyred in detention.

Israel has a history of employing coercive practices to remove the civilian population.

These can include not just arbitrary arrest and detention, but also murder, torture, rape and sexual assaults, severe injury to civilians, confinement of the civilian population, forcible removal, civilian displacement and deportation, military attacks, threats of attack, land theft, robbery, attacks on hospitals and medical personnel, attacks on schools and refugee areas.

How, then, are the U.S. and Israeli policing systems connected, other than these striking resemblances?

The two actually train together.

The U.S. Police Force Hones Its Techniques in Israel

In August of 2014, during one of the most dangerous nights of protest and police confrontation in Ferguson, Missouri following the police killing of Michael Brown, Palestinian activists shared tips with their fellow activists in the U.S. Mariam Barghouti tweeted, “Always make sure to run with the wind/to keep calm when you’re teargassed, the pain will pass, don’t rub your eyes! #FergusonSolidarity.

Al Jazeera reported that he images from Ferguson, where police in heavy riot gear used tear gas and smoke bombs to subdue protesters, sparked a strong reaction among Palestinians online:

“Many Palestinians said they identified with the tear-gassed protesters, as they felt they too had suffered injustices at the hands of IDF soldiers during protests in the West Bank.”

And Representative Cori Bush recalled that Palestinians helped her deal with tear gas during the Ferguson riots.

It has long been known that the U.S. police forces trains with the Israeli Defense forces, incorporating their punitive tactics.

Since 1992 (that’s over thirty years!) multiple U.S. states have sent their police officers to Israel for training.

These include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Floria, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.

As an example, police departments in Georgia have received grants from the U.S. Department of Justice that subsidize these trainings. The program has trained at least 1,700 participants from Georgia, including officers from the Atlanta Police Department.

In fact, the Zionist organization The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) subsidizes some of these U.S. training programs.

In the summer of 2020, when protests against police brutality and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. reached a peak, the Anti-Defamation League defended its programs in Israel training American police officers from critics who said they imparted violent and militarized tactics.

At the same time, internal memos circulated within the ADL indicated that they were aware of the problems in the program, and had considered pulling funding. Ultimately, they decided not to do so.

Eran Efrati is the director of campaigns and partnerships for the progressive group Jewish Voice for Peace. Efrati states, “The exchanges refine and enhance the militarization rooted in American policing with Israeli tactics and technology of occupation and apartheid that are being tested on Palestinians on a daily basis.”

The relationship between the U.S. police and Israeli military is reciprocal. Hacked police files indicate that U.S. law enforcement agencies have received analysis of incidents in the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict directly from the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli thinktanks for decades. These reports have offered training on domestic “Muslim extremists” from pro-Israel non-profits, and surveilled social media accounts of pro-Palestine activists in the U.S.

Dawn O’Neal of Us Protecting Us, formerly Black Lives Matter Atlanta, spoke with the organization The Progressive via email. “As long as these programs exist,” O’Neal said, “as long as police are sent into war zones to train, there will continue to be Tamir Rices and Trayvon Martins. There will continue to be Kathryn Johnstons.”

Where We Go From Here

On March 9, 2024, a sheriff’s deputy in San Bernardino, California shot and killed Ryan Gainer, a 15-year-old Black boy with autism, who was brandishing a garden rake. The deputy sheriff shot Ryan three times, and the officers on the seen failed to give medical assistance to the boy. This is just one in a long string of similar incidents: In February of this year, the L.A. police fatally shot a man holding a plastic fork, and have shot others holding a phone, a bike part, and an automobile part.

Any activism we undertake in the U.S. to address police brutality and to advocate for alternatives to individual and collective punishment can and should include efforts to end the long collaboration between the U.S. and Israel in that have honed a violent, punitive system of policing.

UPGRADE TO PAID

Sources:

According to History.com: Jim Crow Laws: Definition, Facts & Timeline. (2024, January 22). HISTORY. https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws

Former Confederate soldiers worked as police officers and also as judges: Black Codes—Definition, Dates & Jim Crow Laws. (2023, March 29). HISTORY. https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-codes

The U.S. prison population ranks second highest in the world: Highest to Lowest—Prison Population Total | World Prison Brief. (n.d.). Retrieved March 12, 2024, from https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-population-total?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All

In other words, despite comprising just 5% of the global population: Hammad, N. (2019) “Shackled to Economic Appeal: How Prison Labor Facilitates Modern Slavery While Perpetuating Poverty in Black Communities.” Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law, no. Summer 2019.

In the U.S., the average cost of incarceration for taxpayers is close to: Initiative, P. P., & Rabuy, P. W. and B. (n.d.). Following the Money of Mass Incarceration. Retrieved March 12, 2024, from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html

Meanwhile, corporations in the private prison industry bring in an estimated: Initiative, P. P., & Rabuy, P. W. and B. (n.d.). Following the Money of Mass Incarceration. Retrieved March 12, 2024, from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html

According to The Sentencing Project, Black Americans are 6 times more: Trinka, N. G., Ph D., Celeste Barry and Luke. (2023, December 7). One in Five: Racial Disparity in Imprisonment — Causes and Remedies. The Sentencing Project. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/one-in-five-racial-disparity-in-imprisonment-causes-and-remedies/

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the U.S. incarcerates First Nations: Home | Bureau of Justice Statistics. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2024, from https://bjs.ojp.gov/%3Cfront%3E

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the U.S. incarcerates First Nations people at a rate 38 percent higher than the national average: Initiative, P. P. (n.d.). Breaking Down Mass Incarceration in the 2010 Census. Retrieved March 26, 2024, from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/rates.html

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 45% percent of people incarcerated in tribal jails: Over-Incarceration of Native Americans: Roots, Inequities, and Solutions. (n.d.). Safety and Justice Challenge. Retrieved March 26, 2024, from https://safetyandjusticechallenge.org/resources/over-incarceration-of-native-americans-roots-inequities-and-solutions/

Despite accounting for only 1 percent of the national youth population, a staggering 70 percent: ICT, K. K. (2023, January 13). Natives incarcerated at alarming rates, report shows • Source New Mexico. Source New Mexico. https://sourcenm.com/2023/01/13/natives-incarcerated-at-alarming-rates-report-shows/

Despite accounting for only 1 percent of the national youth population: Greenfield. "American Indians and Crime" (PDF). Bureau of Justice Statistics. US Department of Justice.

Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and American Indian/Alaskan Native youth are more likely: Wen, A., Gubner, N. R., Garrison, M. M., & Walker, S. C. (2023). Racial disparities in youth pretrial detention: A retrospective cohort study grounded in critical race theory. Health & Justice, 11(1), 14. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40352-022-00203-8

And the pretrial detention setting itself exposes confined youth to experiences that present direct harm: Trauma and the Environment of Care in Juvenile Institutions | Office of Justice Programs. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2024, from https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/trauma-and-environment-care-juvenile-institutions

For youth with little prior contact with the carceral system, pretrial detention: Walker, S. C., & Herting, J. R. (2020). The Impact of Pretrial Juvenile Detention on 12-Month Recidivism: A Matched Comparison Study. Crime & Delinquency, 66(13–14), 1865–1887. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011128720926115

In August of 2014, during one of the most dangerous nights of protest and police confrontation in Ferguson, Missouri: Jackson, I. J. (n.d.). How Palestinian protesters helped Black Lives Matter: Column. USA TODAY. Retrieved March 26, 2024, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/spotlight/2016/07/01/how-palestinian-protesters-helped-black-lives-matter/85160266/

Al Jazeera reported that he images from Ferguson: Staff, T. & AP. (n.d.). Palestinians tweet support for Ferguson protesters. Retrieved March 26, 2024, from http://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinians-tweet-support-for-ferguson-protesters/

And Repesentative Cori Bush recalled that Palestinians helped her: Rep. Cori Bush Recalls Palestinian Delegation Helping Her Deal with Tear Gas During Ferguson Riots | C-SPAN.org. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2024, from https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5092635/rep-cori-bush-recalls-palestinian-delegation-helping-deal-tear-gas-ferguson-riots

According to the annual report issued in 2022 by the Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs: PCBS | Dr. Awad, highlights the Palestinian children’s situation on the Occasion of the Palestinian Child Day, 05/04/2023. (n.d.). Retrieved December 4, 2023, from https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/site/512/default.aspx?lang=en&ItemID=4484

With a 73.9 percent Jewish population and a 21 percent Arab minority, Israel has imprisoned The Problematic Prison Systems in America and Israel. (2023, May 22). Virginia Review of Politics. https://virginiapolitics.org/online/the-problematic-prison-systems-in-america-and-israel

These can include not just arbitrary arrest and detention, but: United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2023, from https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/ethnic-cleansing.shtml

Since 1992—that’s over thirty years—multiple U.S. states have sent their police officers to Israel for training: Shahshahani, I. B. C., Azadeh. (2019, October 7). U.S. Police are Being Trained by Israel—And Communities of Color Are Paying the Price. Progressive.Org. https://progressive.org/api/content/1ddca5dc-e3b9-11e9-afd4-12f1225286c6/.

See also: Maza, C. (n.d.). Prison systems in the US and Israel have something in common. Al Jazeera. Retrieved March 12, 2024, from https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2019/9/27/prison-systems-in-the-us-and-israel-have-something-in-common

In fact, the Zionist organization The Anti Defamation League (ADL) subsidizes some of these U.S. training programs: Cramer, P. (n.d.). ADL considered scrapping its US police training trips to Israel, decided not to. Retrieved March 12, 2024, from https://www.timesofisrael.com/adl-considered-scrapping-its-us-police-training-trips-to-israel-but-decided-not-to/

Efrati states, “The exchanges refine and enhance the militarization rooted in American policing with Israeli: https://theintercept.com/2023/02/02/memphis-police-israel/# Speri, A. (2023, February 2). Memphis Police Chief Trained With Israel Security Forces. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2023/02/02/memphis-police-israel/. See also: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/12/how-the-us-and-israel-exchange-tactics-in-violence-and-control

Hacked police files indicate that U.S. law enforcement agencies have received analysis of incidents: Wilson, J. (2023, December 8). US police agencies took intelligence directly from IDF, leaked files show. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/08/us-police-agencies-idf-files-blueleaks

Dawn O’Neal of Us Protecting Us, formerly Black Lives Matter Atlanta, spoke with the organization The Progressive via email: Shahshahani, I. B. C., Azadeh. (2019, October 7). U.S. Police are Being Trained by Israel—And Communities of Color Are Paying the Price. Progressive.Org. https://progressive.org/api/content/1ddca5dc-e3b9-11e9-afd4-12f1225286c6/

Just a day ago, a sheriff’s deputy in San Bernardino, California shot and killed Ryan Gainer, a 15-year-old Black boy: Levin, S. (2024, March 11). California officer shoots and kills boy, 15, holding gardening tool. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/11/california-san-bernandino-sheriffs-deputy-kills-teenager

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