Israel’s police minister recently visited a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank and posted a video showing border police training at a staged set of Damascus Gate there, so as to be able to respond to the “Arab street.” The training appears to include Jews playing Palestinians going about their lives in East Jerusalem. Actors in the training are wearing yarmulkes, in the screenshot below.
The police minister, Omer Bar-Lev, is in the Labor Party and represents the so-called left in Israeli politics. The training facility is said to be in the illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Mikhmas, which is deep in the West Bank, east of Ramallah.
The video is a colorful proof of two political realities that Israel’s friends in the U.S. don’t like to acknowledge.
One, there will not be a two-state solution. Bar-Lev surely made the visit and bragged about it to cover his right flank– and preserve his own life. Last month Bar-Lev had discussed the problem of “settler violence” with an American envoy, and he promptly became the “enemy” of the settlers and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett implicitly criticized Bar-Lev for the discussion.
Bar-Lev has since required 24/7 security, he reported. That’s not surprising because Israel is a besieged society, dominated by rightwing authoritarian figures. Left-leaning politicians are afraid to stand up for Palestinian rights, or even the two-state solution, for fear of taking on the pro-settler community. In 1995 a rightwinger killed a Labor Prime Minister for concessions to Palestinians and is regarded as a hero in portions of Israeli society.
The other reality is that, as leading human rights group have reported, Israel is an apartheid state. The systematic separation of Jews and Arabs is perfectly illustrated by the need to erect a fake Damascus Gate, one of the glories of Ottoman architecture, in a Jewish-only colony on occupied Palestinian land in order to train the policing of the subject population.
Last month, Bar-Lev approved the extrajudicial execution of a Palestinian man who had stabbed an Israeli Jew near the Damascus Gate. The Palestinian was on the ground when border police killed him. In this training, a man who appears to be playing a Palestinian gunman is knocked to the ground by a dog and surrounded by border police.
Here is a translation of Bar-Lev’s own narration of his visit to the Border Police – “the most sought after corps among those drafted into the security forces.”
“I arrived together with the chief [of police] and with the commander of the Border Police to the Border Police training base in Mikhmas [in West Bank, OPT]. The more the threats to Israel’s internal security grow, so does the part that the Border Police play in maintaining this security grow. The Border Police has turned in recent years into one of the most skilled and important forces in the national security setup. It is not incidental, that in a large number of the [terror] attacks in the recent years, male and female combatants of the Border Police were there to end the event. These days, when we move from defense to attack in all that concerns dealing with the crime and violence in the Arab street, the male and female combatants of the Border Police are bestowed with the mission to be the head of the arrow, and to return the security and quietness to the state.”
“Here is a translation of Bar-Lev’s own narration of his visit to the Border Police – “the most sought after corps among those drafted into the security forces.” ”
The Border Police – Max Blumenthal has a chapter on them in his classic “Goliath” (2013), which is now available in its entirety online: https://lawanddisorder.org/wp-content/uploads/9781568586342-text-LOW-RES.pdf
From page 255, here’s some insight into the sociology of the Border Police, emphasis mine:
Today, a disproportionate percentage of Border Police commanders are Druze seeking to consolidate their citizenship rights through service to the Jewish state. Their units are supplemented with Jews from the lower rungs of Israeli society, from Ethiopians to Russians to Jews from the Arab world, all seeking status in a society that treats them as second class. Denigrated by the Ashkenazi elite as arsim, or Israeli rednecks, and regarded as the least prestigious arm of the country’s armed forces, many Magav members project their resentment against the only groups more poorly regarded than they: Palestinians, leftists, and African migrants. As Israel’s frontline occupation maintenance force, the Border Police exceeded the rest of the army in documented abuses committed in the West Bank between 2000 and 2011. Of the 244 reported abuse cases—most abuses are not documented—only 12 were prosecuted.
“to return the security and quietness to the state”
Security? I doubt it. Quietness? Does anyone think so?
The chickens are coming home to roost. What we do to THEM eventually, and probably sooner, we will do to US.
As reality dictates one state, reality dictates rocks, knives, and car ramming are no longer effective tactics. Police training against internal violence is ever more sophisticated and aggressive, making violence counterproductive while justifying the gloves off. Better tactics are deliberate ones, like cameras and placards, to shape American public opinion.
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972 Magazine, The Landline, Cruelty by Design, by Amjad Iraqi, January 22, 2022
“Cruelty is baked into Israeli apartheid. On Wednesday, in the dark hours before dawn, Israeli police cut power to the home of the Salhiyeh family in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The authorities had been there two days earlier, ready to expel the family under the pretext of building a school on land expropriated by the municipality in 2017, until several residents carried gas canisters to the roof and threatened to blow up the house. Faced with such resistance and surrounded by reporters & diplomats, the police eventually backed down — but they clearly had other plans.
“Upon cutting the electricity on Wednesday, officers stormed the house at 3:15 a.m., throwing stun grenades, dragging out the family members, & violently arresting several residents. Shortly afterward, a bulldozer began hacking away at the building; by sunrise, the home had been turned into rubble. Amid the wreckage & the freezing cold, Lital Salhiyeh, the mother of the household, asked: ‘How do they expect my children to grow up & not be full of anger and hatred against them?’
“The destruction of the Salhiyeh home was designed to be cruel, both to the family & to all Palestinians watching. Cruelty is meant to terrify, demoralize, & incapacitate the colonized society. The state needs Palestinians to feel powerless, to feel trapped by the sense of failure, to feel robbed not just of the will to resist, but the will to live. It needs either their total submission to Israeli diktats or their complete erasure from the landscape. When the Salhiyehs refused the former, they were brutally subjected to the latter.
“The policy of intentional cruelty was on stark display across the land this past week. A day before the Salhiyeh demolition, in the village of Umm al-Kheir in the South Hebron Hills, thousands attended the funeral of Haj Suleiman Hathaleen, an elderly nonviolent activist who was run over by an Israeli police tow truck while trying to stop the confiscation of unlicensed vehicles; the police simply drove away, leaving the beloved elder’s bones shattered while his family rushed to get him to the hospital.” (cont’d)
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“A few kilometers away, on the other side of the Green Line, Israeli police continued arresting scores of Bedouin citizens in the Naqab who had been protesting the seizure of agricultural land near the village of a-Sa’wa al-Atrash, which the Jewish National Fund is excavating for a forestation project. A week earlier in the West Bank village of Jiljilya, Israeli soldiers arrested 80-year-old Palestinian-American Omar Abdulmajid As’ad, beat him, tied his hands, and abandoned him at a construction site in the freezing cold, leading him to die of a heart attack. All the while to the west, Israel kept the gates of Gaza shuttered, leaving two million Palestinians under a choking siege that is now entering its 15th year.
“Palestinians are no strangers to such violence. Yet watching the ruins of the Salhiyeh home on Wednesday morning, many spoke of feeling a particularly searing pain, sunk by helplessness after the brief flicker of hope just days before. But then came their rage. And then came their resolve. Palestinians are always praised for their sumud, or steadfastness — but a resilient society is also a tortured one, often relying on plain stubbornness to pull through. Still, with foreign diplomats delivering little more than photoshoots at demolition sites and Jewish Israeli society remaining unperturbed by the costs of its supremacy, that stubbornness is the only thing that defies the cruelty when nothing else does.”