What Does It Mean for America If Our Police Forces Learn Their Techniques from Israel, Where Suppressing an Occupied Minority Is Called ‘The Rule of Law’?
Eran Efrati has a personal story to tell. He was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family with roots in Iraq and Iran, on one side, and in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe on the other side. Some of his relatives were Auschwitz survivors. He grew up hearing about the Holocaust. He heard about it continually. His family members were “ultra-Zionists.”
Eran came to Boston University recently to tell the story of his family’s expectations that he would proudly serve in the Israeli army, as like father brothers before him, and help protect his people from another Holocaust. He was taught that if the Jews of Israel did not forcefully and aggressively defend themselves there would be another Holocaust. He grew up believing what he was told — that “the Arabs were the enemy” — and that by following in his family members’ footsteps he was doing the right thing.
But in the end he could not do what was asked of him, Efran told his audience, sharing the most personal of stories: that of the individual who must break from a family he loves. Because what he was being asked to do was destroying him.
Eran’s father, brothers, and other relatives were prominent members of the Israeli Defense Force. Some had fought in the conflicts that created and defended the state of Israel. But by the time he joined the Israel Defense Force, at age 18, the army’s job was to ‘police’ — in realty, rule — “the zone of occupation” (the West Bank and Gaza) and suppress all signs of active dissent or mere grumbling discontent.
After eight miserable months of ‘basic training’ brain-washing, his unit was assigned to police the occupied city of Hebron, the largest of the ‘Arab cities’ in the occupied West Bank then, with a population 180,000.
The Israeli Army is the ‘police’ for the conquered population of an occupied nation. It is also the government, the judiciary, and the executor of punishments. It is the law, the only law, with no avenue for civilian oversight.
In Hebron Eran learned that one of this army of occupation’s chief duties was carrying out nightly raids on Palestinian homes, chosen more or less randomly. The pretext was the army’s need to have intimate knowledge of the layout of each house. But that was a lie.
The Army conducted violent house searches, in which like all his comrades he was ordered to participant, opening all the draws and closets, throwing things around, bellowing at the inhabitants, and conducting baseless “searches” for weapons. If no weapons could be found, searchers would go to the kitchen and pull a few knives from a drawer as a pretext for dragging off the man of the family.
Eran had been told that the nighttime home invasions were conducted so the Army would have detailed house plans in the case some attack was mounted on them from one of these houses. But officers laughed at him when he questioned what happened to the “the drawings” these searches supposedly produced and told him they were thrown away.
“We’ve been here since 1968,” they said. “Don’t you think we have the plans already?”
In fact, the real reason for the nightly raids was “to inflict terror,” Eran said, “so they (the occupied people) would not know where we were coming from next.”
As in any criminal gang enterprise, the ‘soldier’ goes along, because everyone else goes along. Because if you don’t you stand alone, and now you are one of those subject to the system’s violence.
“Everything is military law,” Eran said. “Military courts are the only courts, and defendants have absolutely no rights. You can be detained without a hearing as long as they want.”
The purpose of the army’s raids was “to create fear.” To terrorize the occupied population so badly that they would be too afraid to resist or conspire against their occupiers. To convince civilians that they were totally powerless to resist.
“They would never know where we coming at them next,” he said. “They would be too afraid, too worn out by being afraid all the time to plan anything.”
And this was how generations of ‘the occupied’ have been living since the ’67 war. Day by day, it became harder for the young soldier to reconcile himself to what he was being asked to do.
“I could not recognize himself anymore,” Eran told us. “I’m a broken man.”
He didn’t talk to anyone at home. He could not tell his family anything about his ‘work.’ Did they know what went on in the Occupation Zone? If they did, how could they let him take part in it?
Later, when he helped found the ex-soldier group called “Breaking the Silence,” Eran explained this disconnect: “You don’t speak about the army when you come home to your family. They [the army] tell you that they don’t need to hear about it, that it might upset them. So it is ignored and denied and you pretend to go back to ordinary life”.
This denial, Eran said, is one of the ways in which the true nature of occupation continues to be masked within Israeli society — and hidden from the world. He showed us a slide of new, large, clearly marked street in the Occupied Zone — “a Jewish-only street” in a country of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Americans believe they know something about Israel. But Americans have never seen such clear photographic evidence of what an Apartheid state looks like.
One day, the troubled soldier Eran Efrati came into contact with members of Medicins Sans Frontieres and was invited to go along to a demonstration they were organizing. He went, without telling anyone at home where he was going.
The gathering of demonstrators emerged from a side street and found IDF soldiers waiting for them. Soldiers immediately began firing tear gas and shooting at his small group of protestors with “rubber bullets” — real bullets with rubber tips.
Many forms of tear gas exist; some Americans may have experienced a whiff of one sort of tear gas at one time or another. But Israel has developed tear gas that causes immediate choking when you inhale any of it.
Everyone ran from the bullets and gas. Finding himself alone, Eran said, and not knowing really where he was, he was frightened and confused.
“With all the soldiers shooting and the tear gas, I didn’t know what to do,” he told us. “Finally, I just threw up my hands and shouted, ‘Stop shooting! I am a soldier in the Israeli army!’”
The levels of irony, and paradox, and plain black humor in this encounter are apparent to all.
A doctor with Medicins Sans Frontieres asked him to take a pass to a family in Hebron, so that they could cross checkpoints in order for a grandparent to gain medical treatment. “It struck a human chord with me as my mother was ill at the time,” Eran would recount later to Breaking the Silence, “so I took it to them.”
But on returning to his base he was punished for breaking security rules and spent two weeks in a military prison. Back in his unit, he began taking notes, gathering evidence of what life under Occupation was like, talking to people about what was going on.
One day a visitor in an American uniform showed up where his unit patrolled. “I did not know what was going on,” he recalled. That day his unit fired all the ammunition in their supply house.
What was ‘going on’ was a weapons demonstration for an American in a police uniform, as Eran learned later.
He went to an event organized by “Anarchists Against the Wall” in a place where The Wall of Separation took up half a farming village’s land.
Eventually he left the IDF, and his family. He became a witness for and then the chief researcher of Breaking the Silence, an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers working to raise awareness about the reality of life in the Occupied Territories. He collected testimonies from IDF soldiers, guided political tours to the West Bank, and lectured before Israeli and international audiences.
His researches eventually led him, Eran told us at his Boston University talk, to the close relationship between the Israeli Army and American police departments, and other security organizations.
After the shocking terrorist attack of nine-eleven, American government at all levels could do anything it wanted, and get anything it desired, by asserting that the purpose was to improve security and prevent terrorism. To pursue those goals, some government agencies sought to learn more about Israel’s anti-terrorism strategy.
But the central assumption of that strategy, Eran explained, is to dominate, suppress and harass an oppressed population. By terrorizing the oppressed minority, this reasoning went, you won’t become the victim of a terrorist attack by ‘them.’
Does that principle, he questioned, make sense for America? Should the United States seek to achieve “security” by oppressing its “minorities” to the point that they are incapable of resistance or public protests?
Does America in fact have a domestic terrorism problem? — and if so, can it be blamed on any national, religious, or cultural minority? Recent events suggest the threat of terrorism actually comes from White Supremacists.
When Eran Efrati began researching the weapons and police connection between this country and Israel, eventually helping to found Researching the American-Israeli Alliance (https://www.researchingthealliance.org/), he learned why that uniformed American official was visiting the Occupied Territories the day his unit fired all its ammunition.
What was happening, he concluded, was that “Israel was basically trying out new weapons on the Palestinian population,” he said. And many of those weapons were made in America.
Israel uses American weapons precisely because our government gives Israel the money to buy them. For 10 years, America gave Israel $3 billion a year for armaments, with the proviso that Israel spend 72 percent of that money on American arms. During Obama’s last year the 10-year plan was hiked to $38 billion, with new rule that Israel spend all of that money on American arms.
It is easy to understand why the American armaments industry is a big supporter of aid to Israel.
Top American cops get to see how the Israeli army uses these weapons, and judge how well they work. Israel’s live-fire showplace is of particular interest to American visitors, because American police departments are now in position to acquire some of these weapons for themselves.
That is, American police departments — not only FBI, CIA, big city departments in of New York and Los Angeles, but modest-sized local departments as well — increasingly sent high-ranking officers not only to learn ‘riot-control’ and ‘crowd suppression’ tactics in Israel, but to see they how use weaponry and heavy armaments such as tanks, armed vehicles, and grenade launchers because these departments have a good chance of being given this equipment by the US Military services under a new government program.
Known at the 1033 Program, this federal law requires the Department of Defense to make excess military equipment available to American city and state and local police departments.
These “transfers” have been going on since 2002. So when a police department in a city such as Ferguson, Mo. causes the death of an unarmed black man and faces a street protest as a result, we now see armored vehicles rolling down the street to confront American citizens exercising the right to assemble and petition their government for the righting of wrongs.
In such encounters the military mind is on full view for all: Why bother ‘righting wrongs’ and investigating racist shootings of African Americans when you can send out a tank?
Various programs funded by both American and Israeli sources pay for these police junkets to Israel to watch the Israeli army employ the latest weaponry in the endless job of ‘controlling’ a permanently Occupied civilian population. While in Israel, police officers may also go to the beach and perhaps visit a museum.
One of the organizations that sponsors these training junkets, Eran’s research found, is the Anti-Defamation League, a non-profit that works to combat anti-Semitism — work most Americans heartily applaud — and “to advocate for Israel,” which is something else altogether. According to Researching the American-Israeli Alliance, the Anti-Defamation League “has sent hundreds of top ranking officials to Israel” and “brings delegations of Israeli law enforcement to speak to American law enforcement officials, involving over 1,000 U.S. participants since the program began [in 2003].”
The New York City department has sent delegations to Israel. The LAPD. The Boston Police. So have mid-sized and smaller police departments, campus police, and private security firms. Boston University’s campus police visited Israel in 2017.
The website https://palestineishere.org/ characterizes “the close alliance” between Israeli and American uniformed services this way:
“While framed as an opportunity for US law enforcement to learn policing strategies from a closely aligned democracy with counter-terror experience, in fact these are trainings with an occupying force that rules a population deprived of human and civil rights. Rather than promoting security for all, these programs facilitate an exchange of methods of state violence and control, including mass surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest and dissent.”
For example, we learn that Baltimore police, infamous for their racist treatment of African Americans and for throwing oil on public protests to turn them into riots, has been sending top cops to Israel since 2002.
For Boston residents, the frequency of police chief pilgrimages to the Israeli army to learn about ‘fighting terrorism’ should raises alarm bells. The site reports: “Over the years the department has sent Commissioner Paul F. Evans, Superintendent Fitzgerald, and the current Police Commissioner [‘chief’] William Gross to train in Israel.” That’s the full roster of Boston’s 21st century top cops.
The website quotes recently retired Chief Evans’s smarmy and appallingly naive rationale for sopping up Israeli protest-suppression tactic: “We went to the country that’s been dealing with the issue for 30 years. The police are the front line in the battle against terrorism. We were there to learn from them — their response, their efforts to deter it. They touched all the bases.”
About those efforts to ‘battle’ terrorism, chief? “All the bases”? Arresting civilians without charge — and jailing them indefinitely without charge or hearings? Preventive detention for minors? (Since his older brother threw rocks, he probably will too.) Torture of subjects under detention?
Just two months ago soldiers shot dead a 16-year old for hurling stones at vehicles near Ramallah in the West Bank. [https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-teen-rock-thrower-shot-dead-by-israeli-army-in-west-bank/ ]
What is Evans’s position on these “responses”? these “efforts to deter” terrorism? Should we expect Boston police to follow suit?
Did his Israeli hosts give him a tour of their jails?
As for his successor Gross, he has so far evinced more willingness to cooperate with ICE than to protect the public interest by encouraging immigrants to cooperate with courts and police without fear of being jailed and deported. Many of us may have cause to wonder what this department veteran learned in Israel.
Police department’s weapon caches aren’t the only beneficiary of the Federal government program to share with them its surplus armed vehicles and other heavy weapons. Among the other beneficiaries are this country’s major armament manufacturers such as Raytheon, based in Massachusetts.
Armament makers love any connection that creates a demand for more weapons. They also applaud Israel’s efforts to show the world how to use these weapons. When the IDF shows off our weapons to the world— and, of course, their own, as Israel has now become the world’s sixth largest supplier of armaments —other international buyers become our customers.
Is this the world we desire to live in? Eran Efrati asks.
Where governments use guns and tanks to oppress captive populations, suppress protests by mistreated minorities, and maintain enormous gaps between rich and poor?
And where all political power, as Mao famous put it, comes from the barrel of a gun?
And where that’s OK, as long as we’re the people who make them?
If not, then, as Eran Efrati — the man who once wore a uniform and carried a gun to terrorize civilians — said to his Boston University audience, “It begins here.”
