Israelizing the American police, Palestinianizing the American people

Israel has not influenced U.S. law enforcement by training it to be more violent, but rather has served as a model in creating the American Security State.

BY JEFF HALPER JUNE 19, 2020

MONDOWEISS

“The “Israelization” of the American police begins in the wake of 9/11, but three key developments in the US explain why. First, by 9/11 the debilitating effects of neoliberalism, starting in the Reagan Administration but already creating huge social and income disparities in the Bush and Clinton years. They began calling for “law and order,” domestic wars (on drugs, on crime, on “radicals”) and a need to control and pacify an ever-growing precariat, under-employed, under-paid middle-class people, the “working poor, and the largely racialized actually poor. Capitalism’s enforcers are the police.

Second, by 9/11 the US had lost the Soviet Union and communism as an external/internal threat that could be exploited to justify repressive, anti-democratic policies at home. While the threat of “terrorists” had become a minor issue in Clinton’s time, it was not tied strongly to the domestic arena. That tie-in, the third source of police “Israelization,” came with 9/11. The Patriot Act, which until today fundamentally curtails American civil rights and due process, was enacted less than two months later. Clearly it was in the drawer waiting for its opportunity. And again, policing becomes the vehicle for a wholly new para-military task: “homeland security.” ….”

“…..So even though US companies have the capability of producing military weapons, the “wall” has placed constraints on them from developing military-style police arms. This opens a huge market for Israel, not only custom-tailoring military weapons for law enforcement, but for the civilian market as well. The Israeli Weapons Industry (IWI) has opened a manufacturing plant in Middletown, PA, where it produces, for example, a pistol-sized Uzi submachine gun or police. That plant produces a wide variety of militarized weapons for law enforcement, including lines of Galil and Tavor assault rifles and a tactical rifle called the Zion-15. (Take a look at the IWI US website.) Israel is also the world’s leader in drones, producing 60% of the global market. Drones are becoming staples of US police departments, but here, too, the “wall” poses a challenge: drones are commonly used for surveillance, but weaponized drones are still forbidden to US police.A second source of Israeli militarization of US police comes from the Israeli experience itself. Zionism, like US “manifest destiny,” is a settler colonial movement. In that all colonized peoples resist their displacement and elimination, the settler community lives in a state of perpetual insecurity, of permanent emergency, in which every aspect of life is militarized. Much of the violence in American culture comes from the genocidal campaigns against the Native Americans (Andrew Jackson is Trump’s favorite president), and many Westerns revolve precisely around sheriffs and marshals, showing just how closely connected policing is to violent colonization. By the 1870s, however, the American settler regime had largely pacified the Native Americans. That made it possible to shift to a more civilian regime; the enactment of the 1878 Posse Act served to “civilianize” the police. In Israel that never happened. The Palestinians remain a potent source of resistance to colonization, and therefore Israel is the only Western country not to separate civilian law enforcement from the military. On the contrary, by criminalizing Palestinian resistance as “terrorism,” Israel combines policing with the military. Thus in Israel the police are not separated from the military but bonded with a variety of para-military units that connect the two, as illustrated like this: