There's a narrative bubbling in certain areas of the left which seeks to tie American policing abuses to cross-training exchange programs some police departments do with Israeli counterparts. The narrative has its roots in Jewish Voice for Peace's "Deadly Exchange" campaign, which uses the claim as a means of further its campaign to see Israel isolated and ostracized in global society. As the issue of police violence surges to its place at the top of the public's deliberative agenda, the deadly exchange claim likewise attracted those eager for a anti-Israel or antisemitic hook. Just yesterday, new Labour leader Keir Starmer sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey -- a prominent Jeremy Corbyn ally and one-time rival for party leadership -- from her position in Labour's shadow cabinet after she approvingly shared an article where actress Maxine Peake claimed, without evidence, that "The tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services."
This is not true. Many have cited an Amnesty International report where, they say, it is proven that Israeli police train their American counterparts in human rights violations. But Amnesty has since come out and said explicitly that "Allegations that US police were taught tactics of ‘neck kneeling’ by Israeli secret services is not something we’ve ever reported." This is not surprising, as the content of these exchange programs by all accounts rarely, if ever, focuses on what we might euphemistically call "interpersonal" or "tactical" elements of police activity (it generally concentrates on strategic questions regarding operational responses to mass atrocities -- a subject upon which Israeli security forces sadly carry much expertise).
So what is going on? The stock response from those objecting to the link is the simple but truthful observation that American police hardly need Israeli help on the subject of how to harass racial minorities. Some have argued that, because it is true that there are Israeli and American policing exchange programs (and apparently some Minneapolis officers had partaken), it is ipso facto fair to draw a connection between American abuses and those training seminars -- without any regard to what actually is or is not done in those programs. The argument, in effect, a contagion theory: anyone who associates with Israelis, we can assume, is at least partially corrupted by the contact. They're worse off coming out than coming in.
In apologizing for her comment, Peake said something very interesting: she said "I was inaccurate in my assumption of American police training and its sources." Assumption is the key word there: she had, presumably, read about Israeli and American police training together, and so she assumed that the bad American practices had Israeli roots. But the only evidence was the bare fact of contact -- that's what's driving the narrative. Hence: contagion.
This, I submit, is something antisemitism does. It allows such assumptions to become naturalized. They feel right. American police have done exchange training with counterparts in dozens of other countries, ranging from the UK to Germany to Mexico to Tanzania. Even those who take a dim view of, say, the Mexican police however would likely not jump from mere contacts to causality. If someone said "American police learned chokeholds from Tanzanian police," they'd ask for evidence. If the only evidence is "there are exchange programs between American and Tanzanian police", that likely wouldn't be sufficient. But antisemitism gives a smoother cognitive ride down -- it makes little connections look huge, and implausible leaps seem manageable. It is not accidental that the narrative is about Israeli police exchanges and not German or Mexican or Tanzanian ones.
This is an unorthodox but I think ultimately more accurate way of understanding what antisemitism does. We think of antisemitism often as a motive: because I hate Jews, I think or say or do this thing. But antisemitism is more often a force or process. We usually ask "did Burke or Long-Bailey say what they say because they hate Jews?" The answer to that may well be no. But that's not the right question. The right question is "did a particular way of thinking about Jews render what Burke or Long-Bailey said plausible or resonant in a way it otherwise would not have been?" And there I think it is quite clear that the answer is yes. It is because we think about Jews in a particular way that this contagion theory of Israeli culpability in American policing injustices -- a narrative which objectively stands on such a thin reed -- is plausible when it otherwise wouldn't be. That is the work of antisemitism.
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This really does a lot to highlight the American tendency to first remove details by oversimplifying explanations of current event and then add new details back in as the gossip produces sorta-plausible-sounding nonsense that's not supported by the original set of facts.
We don't just do this to Israel—we mostly seem to do it to ourselves—but I think it's important to address the elements of the comparison you made between Israel and Tanzania, which oversimplifies and mischaracterises the nature of the American public's response in this situation.
The most important reason why this comparison is faulty is that the American public is relatively familiar with current affairs in Israel. We don't know shit about Tanzania. Hearing that American police learned how to be be barbaric from an exchange program with police in Tanzania just sounds strange, at least in part because we stop to puzzle out the idea that American police trained in Tanzania; unlike Israel, Tanzania isn't a major US ally, and American racism makes it super easy to doubt whether anyone in Tanzania has anything to teach an American cop.
Then, once we finish parsing "American cops were trained in Tanzania," we still have to examine the claim that part of that training included kneeling on people's necks. We all know for a fact that kneeling on people's necks has happened, so it's easy to skip over the stupidity of American police having been trained in that "technique" to wonder why the hell we would have had to go to Tanzania for that. The reason the statement is rebuffed is the idea that Tanzania is perceived in the American public consciousness as a less-developed and unimportant nation (if they were important, we'd know more about them) full of black people, and the idea of a bunch of black people teaching American police how to be better at racism is ridiculous on both ends of the political spectrum: on the left, the idea would be rejected because of an anti-racist stance, and, on the right, the idea would be rejected at least in part because of internalized racism.
What's really going on here is a combination of what sounds reasonable and what sounds familiar, and the fact that a claim with both of those qualities is less likely to be scrutinized and more likely to spread. The more we have to slow down when parsing the claim, the more we're forced to think about whether what we're saying is supported by evidence and part of a narrative that makes sense logically.
We can't get to the end of the sentence about Tanzania without wallowing in our head-scratching ignorance regarding the nation in general: we're generally open to believing bad things about our own police and the specific reference to kneeling on someone's neck happened, so the outrageous part of the claim sounds familiar—but being forced to think, even just a little bit because most of us probably can't name a single fact about Tanzania other than its location in Africa, gives us time to decide whether the outrageous claim that police have been trained to kneel on necks makes sense in the context we're given.
In striking contrast, the American public knows a lot more about Israel. For one thing, we know that terrorists are constantly trying to blow shit up, which means that the badassery of the Israeli police is implicit. That perception will be accepted as a premise in any conversation about Israel, pretty much no matter what you want to say. We also know that Israel is our buddy. Based on our general awareness of Israel's constant and harrowing battle to survive against terrorism, it's super plausible that Israeli law enforcement could have something to teach American cops, and the knowledge that we're allies makes it plausible that we might want to learn.
Unfortunately, that's not all we know about Israeli police, military, and domestic policy. The key bit at the center of this discussion comes from the fact that we know that Israel accepted the logic of "we need to get rid of Hamas, but Hamas has a habit of hiding among ordinary Palestinians and using them as human shields, so our plan will require killing a whole bunch of Palestinian civilians until Hamas is wiped out, and that's an acceptable level of collateral damage."
Thanks to the obliteration of Gaza and its coverage by American news media and
the plethora of public remarks made by the government, the idea that Israelis are "badass" is easily refined to "ruthless," and while the argument that there's a value judgment being made there is absolutely correct, what exactly that judgment is varies widely among the American public. Plenty of Americans are firmly behind Israel and happily trying to destroy the lives of anybody who espouses support for Palestine; plenty of Americans keep learning more about the conflict between Jews and Palestinians in Israel and Israeli-occupied territories and have a principled and fact-based opposition to the current Israeli leadership and policies, in addition to plenty of Americans who are willing to accept that the political position in opposition to Trump has been adequately supported by people who care more about thinking than they do; and a much smaller but not insignificant number of Americans still think Holocaust jokes are funny, and what they think about Israel is based in racist stereotypes.
You don't seem to take issue with the first group, and I firmly stand with not only Israel but every Jew against members of the third group and the ideology they espouse. It's members of the second group who are most likely to believe something as ludicrous as the idea that Israeli police trained American cops to kneel on people's necks: they accept the idea that American police might train in Israel just like most everybody else, they recognize the whole kneeling thing as a source of legitimate outrage, *they believe that the Israeli government supports or at least is as capable of as much brutality as the American government,* and they skip right over thinking in their haste and zeal to spout imprecations against Trump as they hurry to tell all their friends about the latest source of outrage to appear on their Facebook feed.
It's also members of the second group who aren't dumb enough to spread such a nonsensical claim, but are informed enough to respond to it by acknowledging the bullshit and then listing some fact-based bones they'd like to pick with the Israeli government.
They're likely to mention the fact that non-citizens are routinely, arbitrarily, and indefinitely detained without ever being charged with an offense; they'll probably add that human rights groups don't have good things to say about the quality of the detention centers. Illegal Israel settlers in the West Bank operate with tacit government approval and relatives in impunity, whether they're running the previous occupants off of the land they have discovered and would like to "settle," beating teenage boys to death and deliberately preventing an ambulance from reaching them, or and generally relying on the Israeli mlitary to back them up, which it does, including by shooting American citizens for throwing rocks. I think we all agree that they probably wouldn't have shot the kid if they knew he was an American, but that really doesn't make it better. To my knowledge, none of these facts are really in dispute, and the question of whether the Israeli government's actions are justified or racist will be answered by a synthesis of personal values and ethics.
The last point I'd like to addressed is not one that you made, but the most common response I get from "reasonable" people who insist that, even if Israel is being bad, they're being singled out for criticism because of anti-Semitism or internalized anti-Semitic tropes. The argument usually goes that human rights violations are happening all over the place in all kinds of egregious ways, so fixation on Israel's behavior instead of any/all of the alternatives must be a result of bias against Jews.
Americans who take the time to publicly discuss this sort of thing absolutely have to make choices about what specific atrocities to deplore. It's a mistake to believe that the choice must either be random or racist: we have plenty of problems with Iran and China and Russia and and and, but the media coverage in the United States of almost any foreign power is more sporadic, less detailed, and less relevant to Americans. Yes, it's the constant media blast that has presented the American people with a gift-wrapped controversy, but what guarantees the continued interest is that not only is Israel a close ally of the United States, but the American government has been all up in their business for a couple of years now. The political situation in Israel has become a political situation here as protesters in any way aligned with Gaza are arrested, deported, and generally subject to having their civil rights violated because the current government...can.
The American public is not going to get bored with this until the American presidency does.
Instead of asking why some Americans seem to want to criticize Israel instead of Tanzania, ask us why we're mad at the apparent lack of due process in the Israeli criminal justice system instead of being mad at the destruction of due process in our own; why we are so moved to comment on Israel's treatment of Palestinians like we didn't deliberately infect the Cherokee with smallpox; how IDF soldiers shooting random Palestinians without any real justification is different from the American police and qualified immunity; and where we think we get off telling Israel who they're allowed to attack and how while we are blowing up random boats in the Caribbean.
Honestly, my best excuse has two parts: when a problem doesn't affect us and also isn't our fault, bitching about it is free, and there are only 24 hours in a day. I just spent about an hour trying to give you a thoughtful and rational response to your take. If I did that for every civil rights issue that pisses me off, I wouldn't have time to sleep.
(I'm sorry that this was like four comments, but I thought that your blog post deserved a complete response.)
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