Ten years ago last month, the world watched militarized police forces ‘manage’ the collective outcry of civilians protesting the police killing of Michael Brown. In uniform and weaponry, the police were indistinguishable from combat-ready soldiers.
Another event, also a decade old last month: Operation Protective Edge, the Israeli military’s 2014 action in Gaza. From its official start in June to its cessation on August 26, 2014, the summer’s war left thousands of Palestinians and scores of Israelis dead.
As scholars like Angela Davis have noted, these events — in Ferguson and in Gaza — are connected in ways that St. Louisans should know about and act upon.
For example: As police fired tear gas at demonstrators in Ferguson, the demonstrators received advice from Palestinian activists on social media about how to manage their reactions to the gas. “Solidarity with #Ferguson. Remember to not touch your face when teargassed or put water on it. Instead use milk or coke!” wrote Ramallah-based journalist Mariam Barghouti. “And of course DON’T wash your eyes with water,” added Palestinian doctor Rajai Abukhalil. Like Black Americans, Palestinians are a population familiar with the state repression of protest.
But the impact of Israeli policing of Palestinians on policing in St. Louis County runs deeper than social media. More than 100,000 police officials across the United States have made professional visits to Israel as part of an international “police exchange,” as the activist group Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) documented in a 2018 report titled Deadly Exchange. These visits are funded by pro-Israel lobbying groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
According to the St. Louis Jewish Light, the St. Louis chapter of the ADL “organized four trips for St. Louis-area police officers” as of November 2017. One trip alone, in March 2017, included “top law enforcement officers from Creve Coeur, Florissant, Frontenac, Olivette and St. Ann.”
The JVP report finds that U.S. police on trips to Israel examine Israeli policing infrastructure and attend conferences on policing strategy. On the March 2017 trip, area police met “with Israel Defense Forces commanders” and “spoke with Israeli officials at border checkpoints separating parts of the West Bank controlled by the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. They also visited an Israeli prison”, as recounted in the Jewish Light.
U.S. police delegations have also met with senior members of the Israeli security state, including figureheads of Shin Bet, the security agency whose regular torture of Palestinian detainees has been documented for decades by human rights groups and news outlets inside and outside of Israel.
The ADL “quietly paused” its funding for U.S. police trips in 2019, but the group insists that it is only a pause, and that funding might resume at any time.
This possibility is alarming for many reasons. Human Rights Watch (HRW) declared Israel an apartheid state in 2021; Amnesty International followed suit the following year. The advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), issued this July, found Israel in violation of the United Nations convention condemning racial discrimination – specifically, the convention’s article “condemn[ing] racial segregation and apartheid.” As the HRW report exhaustively documents, Israeli policing plays a crucial role in the maintenance of this apartheid.
The role of prisons in these visits is also gravely concerning. The UN released a new report on July 31 about the detention of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. In a press release, UN human rights chief Volker Türk said: “The testimonies gathered by my office and other entities indicate a range of appalling acts, such as waterboarding and the release of dogs on detainees…in flagrant violation of international human rights law.” Surveillance footage was recently leaked of Israeli prison guards gang-raping a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman military prison.
Finally, St. Louis-area police met not only with Israeli police, but also with officials from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). If this happens again, local officers will likely meet with a military that the ICJ’s January decision found to be “plausibl[y]” failing to protect “Palestinians in Gaza…from acts of genocide.”
The solution to this problem is simple, and it was modeled by Durham, North Carolina. In April 2018, the Durham City Council voted 6-0 to “bar the city’s police department from engaging in international exchanges” featuring “military-style training.” The resolution was prompted by the Durham Police Department’s participation in police exchanges with Israel, like those undertaken by St. Louis-area officers.
Mayor Tishaura Jones and the St. Louis Board of Aldermen should work together to draft and pass a similar resolution with respect to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and encourage other area boards to do likewise. By doing so, the Board would demonstrate continued leadership after its principled passage of a ceasefire resolution in January.
Clearly, visits to Israel are not the only source of America’s over-militarized policing; nor are they the main source. But they are one source, and in the light of Gaza’s ruination, those visits must end. A decade after Michael Brown’s killing, it is long overdue.
Nicholas Dolan is a PhD student in the Department of English at Washington University in St. Louis. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect the views of any institution or organization.
