Palestine Solidarity Network

Please join the Canada Boat to Gaza on July 5 for a webinar focused on "Canadian Perspectives on Israeli Annexation of Palestinian Lands," featuring Rehab Nazzal, Lia Tarachansky, Michael Lynk, and Dimitri Lascaris. Register below.

"We have been inconsistent in our support for human rights, going so far as to vote against almost every UN resolution upholding Palestinian rights and signing a new arms export agreement with Saudi Arabia, despite their egregious human rights abuses."

A lot of attention has been directed recently at the "training" American police receive from Israel. Its extensive and pervasive. A lot of the violent and milit...arized police culture we see has either been generated by Israeli tactics and weaponry - or has been reinforced by it (American police forces being violent well before Israel). We should focus on three main sources of Israeli influence on US (and global) law enforcement. First, Israel trains police to see citizens as terrorists. Counterterrorism is the "mentality," partly because the Israeli police, highly militarized, subscribe to the notion "shoot first, ask questions after." Engaging with the "enemy/criminal/protester/terrorist," as both Israeli & US police culture see us, is unthinkable and dangerous, since it gives the bad guys (all of us) a chance to strike first. (My book "War Against the People" gets into much of this, Chapter 12.) Second, Israel produces and exports weapons to police departments that are merely scaled-down versions of military weaponry. For example, an Uzi submachine gun custom-tailored for police (see pic below). And it exports the technology as well as the weaponry. The Israeli Weapons Industry (IWI) has opened a manufacturing plant in Middletown, PA where it produces Uzis and other weapons, including a tactical rifle called the Zion-15. Israel has at least two police training academies in the US: IWI's police academy in Pauldon, AZ (open to the public as well as police), and the GILEE Center in Atlanta. Third, and not least,Israel is exporting a whole concept, that of a Security State. A Security State is a state that places security above all else, which considers democracy and human rights liberal luxuries in a world awash in terrorism. Its an easy sell to the Trump Administration (although Israel has had great success with previous American administrations as well). Europe is buying, and so is the rest of the world. The Israeli Security State idea reinforces autocracy in regimes like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Philippines, India, China and many African and Latin American countries, providing them with the "professional" rational that they are right and good in prioritizing "security." In fact, security is just a fancy word for pacification. Corporate states use governments who use police forces to pacify us. (I've attached a diagram of that.) The Security State being peddled by Netanyahu is merely a form of a police state whose populace is easily manipulated by an obsession with security as Israel has succeeded in instituting at home. It is a state driven by the logic permanent war, of absolute security that trumps all democratic protections. If the US and other countries can be persuaded to buy into that dystopian notion of security, it offers Israel both a major market for security technologies and a reliable ally that buys into its self-serving paranoia. And produces more George Floyds and Breonna Taylors.

Today marks the 53th anniversary of #AlNaksa when Israel occupied the remainder of mandate Palestine expelling once again hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Since then, #IsraeliIllegalSettlement expansion and ghettoization of Palestinians have never taken a break.