Electronic Intifada
Since the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson
police in Missouri last weekend, the people of Ferguson have been
subjected to a military-style crackdown by a squadron of local police
departments dressed like combat soldiers. This has prompted residents to
liken the conditions on the ground in Ferguson to the Israeli military
occupation of Palestine.
And who can blame them?
The dystopian scenes of paramilitary units in camouflage rampaging
through the streets of Ferguson, pointing assault rifles at unarmed
residents and launching tear gas into people’s front yards from behind
armored personnel carriers (APCs), could easily be mistaken for a
Tuesday afternoon in the occupied West Bank.
And it’s no coincidence.
At least two of the
four law enforcement agencies
that were deployed in Ferguson up until Thursday evening — the St.
Louis County Police Department and the St. Louis Police Department —
received training from Israeli security forces in recent years.
Brute force
It all started when a yet to be named Ferguson police officer killed
Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. According to witnesses, Brown
was attempting to surrender with his hands up when a Ferguson police
officer
emptied his clip into Brown’s body, shooting the teen up to ten times.
For hours police left Brown’s lifeless body sprawled in the street
uncovered as a growing number of residents gathered nearby, demanding
answers from authorities. Police responded by deploying K-9 units and
riot squads to crush the crowd, predictably inciting a riot, which
police used to justify more brute force.
But the people of Ferguson refuse to submit and have mobilized every single day to demand justice for Brown and an end to the
racist, undemocratic regime they live under.
“
Hands up, don’t shoot” has become their rallying cry, a symbol of Brown in his last moments and what it means to be black in America, where
every 28 hours an African-American is killed by a self-styled vigilante, security guard or police officer.
Still, police did not relent, prompting one Ferguson protester to
shout at a row of military-style tactical vehicles, “You gonna shoot us?
Is this the Gaza Strip?”
“Will we as a people rise up like the people of Gaza? Will our
community be bombed like last night with tear gas? That was a terrorist
attack,”
remarked another Ferguson protester to
The Daily Beast.
Meanwhile, journalists were
manhandled and detained. Police were caught on video
deliberately firing tear gas at an Al Jazeera America film crew as they were setting up their equipment.
Even elected officials weren’t spared. Missouri state Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal was
tear gassed
and St. Louis Alderman Antonio French, who had been documenting the
unfolding police repression in Ferguson on social media since just after
Brown’s murder, was
arrested.
As the situation spiraled further out of control, Palestinians began
tweeting advice on dealing with tear gas to the people of Ferguson.
Cops become soldiers
Domestic policing in the US has a long and sordid history rooted in
the violent control and subjugation of communities of color, so the
police violence directed at the predominantly black residents of
Ferguson is nothing new.
But the widespread militarization on display in Ferguson is part of a more recent
trend
that began three decades ago with the introduction of the disastrous
“war on drugs” and dramatically escalated with the “war on terror” —
leading directly to the counterinsurgency-like tactics deployed against
the people of Ferguson by civilian police officers who more closely
resemble combat soldiers in Afghanistan than domestic cops.
This
cop-to-soldier transformation
has been facilitated by the US government through mechanisms like the
Pentagon’s 1033 or military surplus program, which funnels excess
military gear to law enforcement agencies across the country. The
program’s motto: ”From warfighter to crimefighter.”
In 2013 alone, the program showered US police departments with nearly
$450 million worth of military equipment.
St. Louis County law enforcement agencies, including the Ferguson Police Department,
participate in
this program and have received military-grade rifles, pistols and night
vision equipment in recent years, though it’s unclear if the equipment
is being used in Ferguson now.
As
The New York Times reported
in June, the scaling down of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan means
“former tools of combat — M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and
more — are ending up in local police departments, often with little
public notice.”
“During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police
departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly
200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and
night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and
aircraft,” the newspaper added.
Ferguson police also receive money from the Department of Homeland
Security as part of a grant program that has doled out billions to US
law enforcement agencies to purchase military-style equipment, like the
APCs charging through the streets of Ferguson.
In the last five years alone, Missouri has received nearly
$70 million in DHS money for law enforcement related programs.
Emulating apartheid
While there is a wealth of scholarship on police militarization in
the US, there has been little to no examination of the ways Israel’s
security apparatus facilitates it.
Decades of testing and perfecting methods of domination and control
on a captive and disenfranchised Palestinian population has given rise
to a booming “homeland security industry” in Israel that refashions
occupation-style repression for use on marginalized populations in other
parts of the world, including St. Louis.
Under the cover of counterterrorism training, nearly every major
police agency in the United States has traveled to Israel for lessons in
occupation enforcement, a phenomenon that journalist Max Blumenthal
dubbed “the
Israelification
of America’s security apparatus.”
Israeli forces and US police
departments are so entrenched that the New York City Police Department
(NYPD) has opened a
branch in Tel Aviv.
In 2011, then St. Louis County Police Department chief
Timothy Fitch attended the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL)
National Counter-Terrorism Seminar,
an annual week-long Israeli training camp where US law enforcement
executives “study first hand Israel’s tactics and strategies” directly
from “senior commanders in the Israel National Police, experts from
Israel’s intelligence and security services, and the Israel Defense
Forces,” according to the ADL’s website.
Until Thursday night, the St. Louis County Police Department appeared
to be the largest most militarized and brutish force operating in
Ferguson. “St. Louis County Police” was scrawled across the side of most
of the
tactical unit vehicles and appeared on the combat-style
uniforms of officers aiming assault rifles at peaceful protesters.
The ADL boasts of sending more than 175 senior US law enforcement
officials from 100 different agencies to the seminar since 2004, which
are “taking the lessons they learned in Israel back to the United
States.”
The ADL is just one of several pro-Israel groups forging close ties
between US cops and Israel’s security and intelligence apparatus.
Another is the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs (JINSA), a neoconservative think tank that claims to have hosted
some
9,500 law enforcement officials in its
Law Enforcement Exchange Program (LEEP) since 2004.
LEEP “takes delegations of senior law enforcement executives to
Israel to study methods and observe techniques used in preventing and
reacting to acts of terrorism” and “sponsors conferences within the
United States, bringing Israeli experts before much larger groups of law
enforcement leaders,” according to JINSA’s
brochure.
Former St. Louis Police Department police chief Joseph Mokwa is listed as having
traveled to Israel as part of a LEEP conference in
February 2008.
Following nationwide outrage and embarrassment, Missouri Governor Jay
Nixon pulled St. Louis County Police forces out of Ferguson and placed
the Missouri Highway Patrol in charge of policing demonstrators. The St.
Louis Police Department voluntarily removed its officers from
Ferguson.
As a result, Ferguson no longer looks like
occupied territory, though the underlying issue, Michael Brown’s murder, has yet to be addressed.
Meanwhile, the scope of Israel’s influence on US law enforcement
remains virtually ignored by the media despite the troubling
implications of emulating an apartheid regime actively engaged in ethnic
cleansing and war crimes.
The culture of racism and impunity that has long plagued American
policing is deadly enough as it is. Adding Israeli-style repression to
an already dangerous mix guarantees disaster.
*Photo by Jeff Robertson courtesy of the Associated Press
