The persistent campaign against U.S. police training in Israel
Mounted units of the Israeli Border Police look on as Palestinians demonstrate in East Jerusalem in 2017. Photo by Micah Danney.
As Jews worldwide celebrated Sukkot last month, the weeklong holiday marking the end of the agricultural year, a progressive Jewish activist group chose the occasion to protest the Anti-Defamation League’s support for programs that send U.S. police to Israel for training.
About 250 people gathered outside the ADL’s Manhattan headquarters on Oct. 15 in front of a makeshift sukkah, Hebrew for the temporary hut where farmers in ancient Israel lived during harvest season. It was the latest public display in a campaign launched by activists in 2017 to end what they call a “deadly exchange” between American and Israeli police.
“The ADL is not a civil rights organization,” Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour told the demonstrators. “They masquerade as a progressive organization in our movement and we are tired of it.”
The campaign is a project of Jewish Voice for Peace, a group that “opposes anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab bigotry and oppression” and “seeks an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; security and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians; a just solution for Palestinian refugees based on principles established in international law; an end to violence against civilians; and peace and justice for all peoples of the Middle East,” according to its website.
JVP’s founder and outgoing executive director, Rebecca Vilkomerson, left, and Linda Sarsour. Photo courtesy of JVP.
JVP chose to focus on police training programs as an outgrowth of the larger Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which urges the international community to refrain from cooperating with or investing in Israeli companies and institutions in order to end “oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law.”
The choice was made after consulting with Palestinian BDS leaders and others, according to Leila, the JVP campaign coordinator. She uses only her first name publicly because she is Palestinian-American and could be barred from entry into Israel and the Palestinian Territories where she visits family due to her BDS work, per Israeli law.
“There was a really strong sense that this particular set of programs — which are predominantly run by Jewish organizations in the U.S. that bring together ICE and police officers with the Israeli police and military — that this particular set of programs was really important to target, especially for JVP as a Jewish organization,” Leila said. Her campaign labeled the programs the “Deadly Exchange.”
That’s a mischaracterization of the trainings, according to the ADL. Founded in 1913 to counteract growing anti-Semitism in the U.S, it is one of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the country. It was active in the Civil Rights movement and has taken a strong stance against bigotry in various forms throughout its history. Its stated mission is “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.”
The ADL office in New York did not respond to several requests for comment. A national representative directed Religion Unplugged to a report on its website that describes JVP as a radical anti-Israel activist group. The ADL has run an annual week-long program called Leadership Seminar in Israel: Resilience and Counterterrorism since 2003. Leaders from nearly 200 federal, state and local U.S. law enforcement agencies have participated, including almost every major city police department in the country. The Israel National Police lead sessions on topics like protecting public spaces and transportation and responding to active shooters and mass casualty incidents, the ADL says.
Its website states that the junkets include no military training or sessions led by the Israeli military.
“Given its experience as a civil rights organization that works closely with law enforcement, ADL is in a unique position to facilitate these educational opportunities for American law enforcement with Israeli experts,” it says.
Getting any information beyond an overview description is difficult, Leila claimed. It was only through records requests via collaboration with a local group, Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, that JVP learned the Vermont State Police were signed up for a trip last year. The department pulled out after JVP’s public pressure.
“We know nothing about these exchange programs before they happen because they’re not advertised,” Leila said. “It’s extremely hard to get information from police departments, which is disconcerting.”
When she speaks to them, she said, some departments deny their participation. Other times, the people she reaches act confused about the issue. Many just don’t respond. Someone at one department told her their participation was not a statement about the political situation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, but was “just to take the good lessons.”
“For us, it is absolutely a political statement to travel and to learn from an occupying police force and an occupying army,” Leila said.
Best or worst practices?
JVP detailed its criticisms of such partnerships in a 36-page report. “Upon their return, U.S. law enforcement delegations implement practices learned from Israel’s use of invasive surveillance, blatant racial profiling, and repressive use of force that endanger us all,” the report states.
The critique cites examples of the sharing of controversial methods, like Israel’s adoption of the practice of stop-and-frisk that is central to the “broken windows” policing used by some U.S. police departments. The overall strategy targets low-level crime in order to prevent more serious offenses. Critics charge that it is applied disproportionately to black and brown communities.
Israeli police stop and frisk a Palestinian man in East Jerusalem. Photo by Micah Danney.
The report details specific Israeli police and military tactics and technologies that are shared with American police. One example is “skunk water,” a foul-smelling liquid billed by its manufacturer as a humane method of crowd-control. The substance is designed to cause nausea and is hard to wash out of clothes and off skin, often lingering for days. The report cites left-wing Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which claims that the Israeli military uses the liquid “as a tool of collective punishment that is deliberately sprayed into stores, schools, houses, yards and fruit orchards of communities whose members participate in demonstrations.”
American police departments have reportedly purchased the product, JVP says. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police did after the 2014 protests in Ferguson. The report cites this as evidence of a pattern of militarization that scales up in severity in response to various forms of political dissent.
Most of the campaign’s efforts are focused on trying to track the programs and doing outreach to city councils in the hope that they’ll adopt resolutions prohibiting their police forces from traveling abroad for training. Public displays like the Sukkot gathering in October are an important component, Leila said. It was meant to apply pressure directly to the ADL as a primary supporter of the programs and to force it to talk publicly about them.
Talia Baurer of JVP spoke at the demonstration, saying the timing was significant because Sukkot, with its ramshackle shelters where people gather for meals and prayer, is a celebration of togetherness, temporality and openness to the elements, “which teaches us that safety comes not by building a wall around us, with cops and borders, but by building structures of sanctuary and community.”
Another speaker, Sierra Mohamed, said the ADL is acting in contradiction of its stated values. “If you say you stand for justice, if you say you stand for safety, if you say you stand for civil rights, if you say you stand against anti-Semitism, then you have no place bringing two repressive governments together to trade tactics,” she said.
Jewish Voice for Peace members demonstrated outside Anti-Defamation League’s New York City offices during Sukkot. Photo courtesy of JVP.
While the ADL did not address the demonstration specifically, its online statement about JVP discusses the allegations: “JVP’s so-called ‘Deadly Exchange’ campaign seeks to blame Israel for police brutality on American streets. This strategy has allowed JVP to establish common ground with activist groups dealing with American social justice issues, while also demonizing Israel among new constituencies.”
It calls JVP dismissive of Israeli anxieties about threats of violence from Palestinians, and one-sided in its framing of the conflict. The ADL notes that in 2007 the group called for “even-handed pressure” that would push both sides toward honest negotiations, but by 2014 had adopted the position that negotiations were impossible as long as an imbalance of power exists between the parties.
The ADL report dissects JVP statements in detail, taking particular umbrage with connections drawn between Zionism and American white supremacist ideology and Jim Crow laws. The result, it says, is a demonization of American Jews, a majority of whom express support for Israel.
Shifting perspectives on Zionism
Sonya Meyerson-Knox, media program manager for JVP, said the ADL’s characterizations are familiar. There are JVP members who used to work there and at other organizations that support exchange programs. Most Jewish Americans have at some point been part of mainstream Jewish community institutions and organizations, she said.
“Every JVP member and staff has their own journey that led them to taking a position in defense of Palestinian rights,” she said.
About 2.2 percent of the American population is Jewish, with estimates putting the number roughly somewhere between 6 and 7 million, debatably. Eighty-six percent say they are sympathetic to Israel. Sixty-two percent say caring about Israel is an important part of their Jewish identity. Thirty-five percent say it isn’t.
Sixty-six percent think Israel should be willing to dismantle some or all Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Twenty-eight percent opposed that idea.
While most express general support for Israel, younger American Jews tend to have more differentiated views than older generations. Jay Ruderman, president of a foundation that works to strengthen ties between Jewish Americans and Israel, wrote an op-ed for the Israeli news outlet Haaretz in August that lamented the number of young people not caring about Israel. He placed partial blame on homogeneity of the leadership of mainstream Jewish organizations.
“The average American Jewish organization is managed by extremely wealthy older men,” he wrote. “This image does not reflect the gender and ethnical diversity that exists within the community.”
JVP partners with other groups working at the national level to address grievances against law enforcement. Among them are The Movement for Black Lives and Black Youth Project 100, which seek changes to policing methods that target communities of color. For JVP, police exchanges with Israel are part of a larger issue of policing and racial inequity.
‘It’s a lie’
That view grates on Steve Pomerantz, who runs an annual police exchange program he designed in 2002. A retired FBI agent and counterterrorism expert, he was asked by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs to create it in reaction to 9/11.
He isn’t oblivious to the problems in American law enforcement, he said, but he strongly objects to JVP’s characterization of police as oppressors of minorities. “It offends me on about every level that it could possibly offend me,” Pomerantz said.
The JINSA program doesn’t involve anything like military training or crowd control tactics, he said. It focuses on teaching better communication and coordination between agencies and best practices in evidence collection and investigation, he said. “There’s nothing that’s secret about this - not a damn thing.”
Pomerantz provided a copy of last year’s itinerary. The trip’s 15 participants included senior police officials from New York, Chicago, Fort Worth and Miami, among other places, and top brass from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. They visited an Israeli police academy and stationhouses, a border crossing, and received various lectures and meetings with police commanders. There were also several tours of holy sites and other standard tourist attractions, like a Jerusalem market popular for its dining and nightlife.
“Do we give them a little bit of, you know, cultural awareness, etcetera, etcetera?” Pomerantz said. “Yeah, yeah we do, but there’s nothing like what Jewish Voice for Peace are saying.”
Israeli Border Police detain two Palestinian men during clashes between protesters and police in 2017. Photo by Micah Danney.
A main point of contention for Leila is that the Israeli police and military have little separation between them. In that light, the close inter-agency coordination that exchange programs tout is cold comfort. The concern is over different forces having different missions and methods — tactics used by the military may bleed into areas of society they’re inappropriate for, critics say. Israel’s police have used skunk water, initially limited to use in the West Bank, against its own citizens in Jerusalem during ultra-Orthodox protests against compulsory military service.
Pomerantz was adamant that his trips don’t involve anything resembling military training; they never enter the Israeli-military-controlled West Bank. There are no sessions on riot control techniques or equipment. Any suggestion to that end is misleading, he said. “It’s a lie as far as the content of my program is concerned.”
Big ideas, small gains
Victories so far have been few — but significant, JVP says. Perhaps the biggest was the city of Durham, N.C. voting in 2018 to prohibit its police from participating in “military-style training” in other countries, citing concern about increasing militarization of police. There were program drop-outs in Vermont and in Massachusetts.
When the ADL rebranded its program, formerly called the National Counter-Terrorism Seminar in Israel, as the Leadership Seminar in Israel: Resilience and Counterterrorism, JVP considered it a victory. Any impact counts for a group whose resources are so dwarfed by its opponents’. JVP had a $2.7 million budget in 2016; the ADL’s net assets are worth nearly $100 million.
If JVP’s recent growth is any indicator, though, the campaign could gain steam. The organization was founded in 1996. Of its 15,300 members, 5,100 joined this year. It has chapters in all 50 states and expects to have the support of five percent of American Jews in five years.
“Learning the truth about a topic that is emotionally charged is hard work, and JVP members have been doing that work for decades and are educating each other and other people continually,” said Meyerson-Knox.
Pomerantz worries about the implications. These programs work, he said. American communities are more safe because of them. He called JVP’s depiction of Israel “propaganda” that is not only anti-Israel, but anti-police.
“If they’re successful, who they’re hurting is the American citizens who benefit from the expertise that these guys bring home,” he said.