By Bill Mefford, photo by Free Thought Project
Police shootings, particularly against people of color, have been on the increase over the course of the last decade and while a number of factors play a part in this – including implicit and explicit racism – one reason that has only recently gotten some attention is the role that “trainings” of police forces by the state of Israel have played a part.
And you will never guess who sponsors these trips. Amazingly, an organization supposedly dedicated to rooting out hatred and an organization I have a deep amount of respect for, the Anti-Defamation League, is one of the primary financial sponsors of these “police exchanges” between metropolitan police forces and Israeli terrorist experts. Another sponsor – long before trump took office – has been the Department of Justice.
Though these “exchanges” are publicized as ways in which to provide techniques to provide security against an ongoing threat of terrorism, recent reporting, linked above, shows that this is simply propaganda. The trainings for local police departments – which includes departments from Tennessee, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia – include topics like border policing, urban policing, and community policing.
The real question to ask must be: is Israel and their repression towards many Palestinians, who we want our police departments to learn from in shaping how they patrol our communities? I believe the answer is unequivocally no. According to the article linked previously, human rights activists,
point to Israel’s clear record of human rights abuses and state violence toward Palestinians, Jews of color, and African refugees. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2018 brought a 69 percent increase over the previous year in Israeli settler violence toward Palestinians, and a rise in Palestinian deaths and injuries in Gaza. In the year since the 2018 Great March of Return demonstrations began, more than 190 Palestinians were killed and 28,000 were injured by Israeli Forces.
Over the past seven years, under the political leadership of Prime Minister Netanyahu – who has very publicly linked himself to trump politically, but also morally and ethically as well since Netanyahu has been indicted for corruption – violence against Palestinians has grown considerably.
And when violence and racism are already so prescient as issues facing police departments in so many local communities, do we really want to intensify those issues through arming police departments with weapons of warfare and exposing them to so-called experts whose human rights record is so atrocious?
The good thing is that yes, there is something we can do. Jewish Voices for Peace is leading a nationwide effort to end these police exchanges and you can sign this petition, as I did. Also, we can follow the example of cities like Durham, North Carolina who passed a resolution barring their police department from participating in these exchanges.
Palestinian rights and the rights of those who live in overly policed and under-served communities are human rights that should concern all of us. This is our chance to end these deadly exchanges.