The multigenerational relationship between the U.S. and Israelt is bolstered by the exchange of wealth and arms. The U.S. has given Israel $134.7 billion in aid and missile-defense funding, making the nation the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.
Along with their relationships around money and weapons, Israel and the U.S. share a history of deploying over-militarized policing practices. In America, that style of policing gained attention during the St. Louis police department’s response to the 2014 Ferguson uprising, which followed the death of Mike Brown. While it was jarring to watch local police officers wearing military equipment and armed with military-grade weapons, accompanying tanks rolling through local streets, and shooting teargas at distraught citizens, it was even more troubling when a Twitter user alleged that the gas canisters shot at Ferguson protesters were the same ones that had been fired at Palestinian protesters just days before, both made in the U.S.
Three years before the Ferguson protests, Tim Fitch — the chief of the very same St. Louis County Police Department responsible for firing teargas at activists and concerned citizens — had flown to Israel to receive training from Israeli police, intelligence, and military in a weeklong course on terrorism-focused policing.
In fact since 2004, thousands of American law enforcement officers frequently travel for training to Israel, one of the few countries where policing and militarism are even more deeply intertwined than they are in the U.S.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Israel seized on its decades-long experience as an occupying force to brand itself a world leader in ‘counterterrorism’. U.S. law enforcement agencies took the Jewish state up on its expertise by participating in exchange programs sponsored by an array of pro-Israel groups like AIPAC, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Over the past decade and a half, scores of top federal, state, and local police officers from dozens of departments from across the U.S. have gone to Israel to learn about its policing.
Israel’s primary policing purpose is the occupation. Israel has carried out a half-century of military rule in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. The country’s police and security forces also regularly violate Palestinians and immigrants inside of Israel’s 1967 borders.
In 2017, a delegation of top American law enforcement officers is in Israel for the ADL’s National Counter-Terrorism Seminar, which included training on topics such as “leadership in a time of terror” and “balancing the fight against crime and terrorism,” according to literature by the group advertising the trip. More than 200 law enforcement executives from over 100 departments in the U.S. and abroad, immigration enforcement agencies, and campus and border police have participated in the ADL program since it launched in 2004.
The most recent delegation was in Israel during the historic October 7, 2023 attack by the Palestinian Resistance.
In addition to meeting with their Israeli counterparts, American police on the delegations also visit representatives of the Israeli Defense Forces, as well as border security and intelligence services — essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule.
The focus of this training is on riot suppression, counterinsurgency, and ‘counterterrorism’. The trainings in Israel also fit within a broader militarization of U.S. law enforcement that is well underway back home. President Donald Trump issued an executive order rescinding limitations imposed by former President Barack Obama on a military program, known as 1033, that allowed police departments to make discounted purchases of excess military equipment like armored vehicles and grenade launchers.
Marketing the Occupation
Founded amid a campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948, Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza in 1967’s Six Day War and has since maintained its occupation — including by building civilian Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory. Now, the same security forces accused of mistreating citizens and stateless Palestinian subjugates are training American cops.
Last year, the ADL’s training included meetings with officials from Israel’s internal security service, known as Shin Bet. The security agency was allegedly behind the surveillance — as well as torture and targeted assassinations — of Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied territories.
The U.S. law enforcement officials on tour with the ADL also met with Israeli police special patrol units known as “Yasam” — paramilitary, riot police whose excessive force and abuse of Palestinians is well-documented — and traveled to checkpoints, prisons, and Hebron. In Hebron, a city in the West Bank, some 200,000 Palestinians are barred from entering the old city center, where fewer than 1,000 Jewish settlers are protected by the same number of Israeli soldiers.
These programs transform Israel’s 70 years of dispossession and 50 years of occupation into a marketing brochure for ‘successful’ policing. Under the banner of ‘counterterrorism’ training, high-ranking police and immigration officials visit checkpoints, prisons, settlements, police stations, and other key sites that are central to Israel’s policies of occupation and apartheid.
Law enforcement exchanges are marketed as an opportunity for American police to learn about ‘counterterrorism’ from the field’s self-appointed leader, but, for Israel’s advocates, they are also seen as a way to sell a particular audience on pro-Israel ideology.
That may just be the intended outcome.
To date, Israel has already been an inspiration to some police initiatives like the infamous NYPD Muslim surveillance program, which was modeled in part on the surveillance of Palestinians in the West Bank. Thomas Galati, the chief of the NYPD Intelligence Division at the time, had participated in one of the ADL trainings in Israel.
Israeli police and security forces may also be learning a thing or two from their American counterparts. In 2016, for instance, Israel passed a “stop and frisk law” modeled after its American equivalent, allowing police to “search anyone, regardless of behavior, in a location that is thought to be a target for hostile destructive actions.”
Palestinian residents of Jerusalem said the legislation is applied with “blatant racism.”
We see Israeli police taking on U.S. stop-and-frisk policies, further adding to the state violence already facing Palestinians. This deadly exchange goes both ways, and encourages worst practices such as racial profiling, mass surveillance, police brutality, and suppression of political dissent that already exist in both countries.