Deadly influence

The banning of deadly police practices by many American states and cities following the murder of an African American man, George Floyd, at the hands of Minneapolis police officers is, once more, shedding light on US-Israeli collaboration in the fields of security and crowd-control.

From California to New York, and from Washington State to Minneapolis, all forms of neck restraints and chokeholds that are used by police while dealing with suspects are no longer allowed by local, state, or federal authorities.

This is only the beginning of what promises to be a serious rethink in police practices, which disproportionately targets African Americans and other minority and marginalized communities across the United States.

The refashioning of the American police, in recent years, to fit some kind of a military model is a subject that requires a better understanding than the one currently offered by mainstream US media. Certainly, US racism and police violence are intrinsically linked and date back many years, but the militarization of the US police and its use of deadly violence against suspected petty criminals, or even non criminals, is a relatively new phenomenon that has been largely imported from Israel.

While an urgent conversation is already under way in US cities regarding the need to reimagine public safety, or even to defund the police altogether, little is being said about the link between the US’ ‘war on terror’ and the American elites’ fascination with the ‘Israeli example’ in its dealing with besieged Gaza and occupied Palestinians in the West Bank.

“The Israeli example (could serve as) a possible basis for arguing … that ‘torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm’,” the CIA General Counsel report of September 2001 read, as quoted by Slate magazine.

Equally important to the argument made by the CIA above, was the actual date – only a few days after the terrorist attacks of September 11. That was the beginning of the Israeli-American love affair, which entirely redefined the nature of the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv, removing Israel from the category of ‘client regimes’, into a whole new one – as a model to be mimicked and a true partner to be embraced.

The language used by the CIA, and other facets of US intelligence agencies, quickly seeped into the military as well, and eventually became the uncontested political discourse, epitomized by former US President Barack Obama’s words in June 2010 that “the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable.”

‘Unbreakable’ indeed, since Israel, the long-time recipient of American financial support and military and intelligence secrets became a major exporter of ideas, security technology, and ‘war on terror’ tactics to the US.

It is critical that we do not reduce our understanding of this troubling rapport between the US and Israel to military hardware and intelligence sharing. The American infatuation with Israel is essentially an intellectual one, as the US began viewing itself as inferior to Israel in terms of the latter’s supposed ability to navigate between sustaining its own democracy while successfully defeating Palestinian and Arab ‘terrorism’.

Excerpted from: 'The ‘Palestinian Chair’: Exposing Israel’s Direct Role in US Violence'.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org