From Occupation to ‘Occupy’: The Israelification of American domestic security

MondoWeiss
Max Blumentha

18 November 2011 UC Davis police pepper spray students  

Originally published in Al Akhbar on 2 December 2011.

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion wasUrban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”

Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was theYamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.

The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.

Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police Department’s disclosure that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics have been used to suppress the Occupy movement in general.

The process of Israelification began in the immediate wake of 9/11, when national panic led federal and municipal law enforcement officials to beseech Israeli security honchos for advice and training. America’s Israel lobby exploited the climate of hysteria, providing thousands of top cops with all-expenses paid trips to Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence officials. By now, police chiefs of major American cities who have not been on junkets to Israel are the exception.

“Israel is the Harvard of antiterrorism,” said former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, who now serves as the US Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Cathy Lanier, the Chief of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police, remarked, “No experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to Israel.” “One would say it is the front line,” Barnett Jones, the police chief of Ann Arbor, Michigan, said of Israel. “We're in a global war.”

Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham School of Law’s Center on National Security and a leading expert on terror and civil liberties, said the Israeli influence on American law enforcement is so extensive it has bled into street-level police conduct. “After 9/11 we reached out to the Israelis on many fronts and one of those fronts was torture,” Greenberg told me. “The training in Iraq and Afghanistan on torture was Israeli training. There’s been a huge downside to taking our cue from the Israelis and now we’re going to spread that into the fabric of everyday American life? It’s counter-terrorism creep. And it’s exactly what you could have predicted would have happened.”

Israel PM says international anti-Semitism spreading

Editor's Note:  See next article "Anti-semitic incidents dropped 46 per cent in 2010, report finds"


XinHuan

JERUSALEM, May 1 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said that anti-Semitism is once again manifesting throughout the world, as lessons of the Holocaust " have not been learned."

"A renewed anti-Semitism is spreading," Netanyahu told ministers at the weekly cabinet meeting, according to a government press release.

"Various forces are joining together and flooding the world with anti-Semitism. The hatred of Jews and the denial of their existence have turned into hatred of the Jewish State and denial of its existence," he added.

The prime minister's comments came hours before the official state ceremony in Jerusalem that marks the beginning of Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day.

The Israeli cabinet on Sunday unanimously voted to establish an umbrella organization that will represent Holocaust survivors in Israel and promote awarding them financial benefits, in a bid to assist thousands that live in poverty.

In a separate decision, a budget of 25 million shekels (about 7. 5 million U.S. dollars) was approved for the renovation of pavilion 27, the main Jewish exhibition at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, whose inauguration is expected in the summer of 2012.

Meanwhile, Israel's Yad Vashem (Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority) on Sunday launched a national campaign encouraging citizens to donate personal Holocaust-period items.

The Prime Minister's Bureau, Education Ministry and Senior Citizens Ministry are also part of the project, which aims to preserve historical evidence of the annihilation of six million European Jews at the hands of the Nazis in World War II.

The project is launched amid fresh data on the dwindling numbers of Holocaust survivors living in Israel.

According to official figures released by the Jerusalem-based Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, 13,000 of them passed away over the past year -- around 1,000 every month. Of the 208,000 survivors currently alive, about two thirds are expected to still be around by 2015.

Holocaust Survivor Accused of Being an Anti-Semite for His Talk about Israel

Sacramento Bee

Dr. Hajo Meyer

Sacramento's carefully cultivated interfaith bonds are being stretched to the limit by an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor who is scheduled to speak at a local mosque about the Nazi Holocaust and Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer makes the 11th stop on his national "Never Again for Anyone" tour at the Sacramento League of Associated Muslims Islamic Center at 7 p.m. tonight.

Meyer has equated the Holocaust to Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, drawing intense fire from Sacramento's Jewish community and the Anti-Defamation League.
 
"Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is repugnant, anti-Semitic and defiles the sacred memory of millions who perished during the Holocaust," said Rabbi Reuven H. Taff, president of the 13-member Board of Rabbis of Greater Sacramento, in a civil but emotional exchange of letters with SALAM's Imam Mohamed Abdul Azeez.

The Board of Rabbis praised Azeez for his bridge-building with other communities of faith, but asked him to either boycott the event or stop it from happening at SALAM. If he doesn't, Taff said in a letter to him, "then all the good work you are doing to foster relations with the interfaith community will be severely undermined."

"The event is not going to be canceled," said Azeez, who encouraged "any of our friends in the Jewish community to attend, ask questions and engage the speakers."

Azeez noted that eight national organizations and nine local organizations are sponsoring it, including the Florin Japanese American Citizens League and the local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Azeez said that a member of American Muslims for Palestine reserved the hall and the event is not sponsored by SALAM. He said SALAM's board investigated the speakers, who in addition to Meyer include UC Berkeley political scientist Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian American.

"You have a Holocaust survivor talking for the first time to the Muslim community about the Holocaust and putting it in a modern context that the rights of all people should be respected," Azeez said. "The world is changing, and it's time for us to have more dialogue about these untouchable idols," such as the Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

Azeez agrees that the rabbis raise a legitimate concern – "any attempt to equate the Holocaust with what is happening in Palestine is an atrocity."

Azeez said SALAM's management will not allow the speakers to compare Israel to the Nazis.
But Taff said Meyer's views are intolerable to the Jewish community, and added that the rabbis could produce Holocaust survivors to talk to Muslim Americans without inciting Muslim-Jewish hostility.
Rabbi Nancy Wechsler-Azen of Congregation Beth Shalom said Meyer's speeches and writings are "most offensive – the program promotes hate. It's an attempt to de-legitimize Israel and Judaism, as opposed to having a meaningful discussion over a political policy."

Wechsler-Azen said the event isn't the way to heal people "who have such profound wounds between them … we have forged a very meaningful relation with SALAM, and we're heartsick about this."
Meyer, in an exclusive interview with The Bee, said he survived 12 years under Hitler and 10 months in Auschwitz.

"I have a number on my arm and they dare to call me an anti-Semite?" he said.

Because he was not allowed to attend high school in Nazi Germany, Meyer said, "I can identify with those Palestinians who undergo slow-motion genocide when they are not allowed to go to their schools," which have been bombed.

"Nearly all Jewish religious organizations in the world have mixed up Judaism – which is universal, humanistic and friendly to anybody – with Zionism," said Meyer, who defined Zionism as an ideology based on a well-defined Arab enemy that must be destroyed.

Jon Fish, president of Sacramento's Interfaith Service Bureau representing major faiths in the region, said Palestine is a social issue, not a religious one.

"The rabbi and the imam have to work it out," Fish said, "But this might be a no-win situation."
Taff said he welcomes a discussion between Jews and Muslims "in an atmosphere of collegiality and respect." But if SALAM hosts an event that Taff believes is "clearly anti-Semitic," he said, "it makes it very difficult to sit down at the same table with anyone who supports or endorses a program of hate."