In June 2020, at the height of the national protests against the police in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, two of the highest-ranking officers of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) were engaged in a sober, and somber, assessment of the joint trainings they have been organizing since 2004 between US police forces and Israel. In a memo to ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, which was leaked to the press, the ADL Senior VP George Selim, and ADL VP for Law Enforcement and analysis Greg Ehrie, acknowledged that these trainings are extremely costly, may have led to a militarization of the US police, and have increased resentment of the police among politicized communities and communities of color in the US.
Indeed, earlier that same summer, the Minnesota State Patrol was asking for a “mine resistant vehicle” to engage in what they described as “deployment,” not police work, in Minneapolis. Faced with crowds of unarmed civilian protesters, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety expressed the need for increased law enforcement presence to address what they viewed as “urban warfare” in Minneapolis–using a military term generally reserved for combat against a foreign enemy, not the citizens police are supposed to serve and protect.
Specifically, Selim and Ehrie write that “in light of the very real police brutality at the hands of militarized police forces in the US, we must ask ourselves difficult questions, like whether we are contributing to the problem. That is, we must ask ourselves why it is necessary for American police, enforcing American laws, would need [sic] to meet with members of the Israeli military. We must ask ourselves if, upon returning home, those we train are more likely to use force.” They considered the pros and cons of a number of options, namely, terminating the exchanges, continuing the exchanges, reforming the exchanges, and pausing and reflecting on the exchanges, before coming up with the recommendation that the exchanges, being costly, controversial, counterproductive, and potentially aggravating an already serious situation, should be terminated.
I live just outside Seattle, a city with a notoriously racist police force, which has been under a federal consent decree to redress a well documented pattern of unjustified excessive force and racially biased policing since 2012. Yet over the past decade, the Seattle Police Department has sent numerous police officers on training trips to Israel, including former police chief Carmen Best, and former deputy police chief Nick Metz.
Two years ago, a coalition of 55 local grassroots organizations introduced legislation to end these trips, something that would have been in keeping with Seattle City Council members signing on to a letter urging the Seattle Police Department to demilitarize, and redirect funds from the police budget to community-based programs. As they met with local activists prior to the vote, the council members described the ADL organized trips to Israel as social “wine and dine” events. The leaked ADL memo, listing the impact of these trips, clearly belies the Seattle City Council members dismissal of their nature.
In fact, the ADL was not only providing this training to the police, but also lobbying the Seattle city council against ending the program.
“The leaked memo clearly shows that prior to lobbying against our legislation the ADL questioned the substance and impact of these training while misleading Seattle City Council members to understand them as benign,” End the Deadly Exchange Seattle activist Abby Brook tells me. “We saw this playing out when, in private meetings, Council Member Andrew Lewis reproduced the ADL talking point that these trips are simply wine and dine events. During the full council vote on our legislation, he acknowledged that four out of six past trainings were listed as “tactical trainings,” yet still voted against the legislation, claiming ‘we don’t really know the substance of these trainings’.”
End the Deadly Exchange Seattle activist Aisha Mansour agrees and says, “After Seattle City Council publicly vowed to demilitarize the Seattle Police Department, it was disheartening to watch several council members jump through hoops to justify voting against legislation that would prevent SPD from training with countries who had been convicted of the most egregious human rights violations.”
Mansour continued:
“We knew Israel advocacy groups like the ADL had to be lobbying against our legislation, there was no other logical explanation as to why Seattle City Council would want our police to be trained by human rights violators.
“During the full council vote on September 20th 2021, this was made abundantly clear when Council Member [Alex] Pedersen openly expressed that he had met with the ADL and was voting against our legislation, stating that it was a ‘time consuming distraction from pressing matters.’”
When approached about the leaked memo by journalists Alex Kane and Sam Levin, Selim downplayed its contents, claiming it was merely a draft, and stating that the recommendation to terminate the exchanges, as stated in the memo, was not put forward. Instead, Selim told Levin and Kane, the ADL intends to continue the program “with updated curriculum and content in order to increase the value and impact of this type of law enforcement engagement.”
Even if it was indeed merely a “draft,” the leaked memo confirms one thing: the ADL is fully aware that the joint trainings it facilitates between US police forces and Israeli veterans are counterproductive, unpopular amongst communities at the receiving end of law enforcement violence, and may lead to the hypermilitarization of the US police. That hypermilitarization, as we all witness all too often throughout this country, disproportionately impacts communities of color. The ADL’s decision, nevertheless, and in full awareness of the racism and brutality of US police forces everywhere—and certainly in Seattle–is to continue its alliance with the police. This flies in the face of their stated mission of fighting discrimination and hate crimes, and securing justice for all. And the Seattle City Council’s failure to respond to its own local constituency, by ending the police force’s “wine and dine” trips to a country the world’s most respected human rights organizations have determined engages in apartheid and crimes of persecution, is beyond shameful.
Ultimately, in the leaked memo itself, as well as in their response to that memo, the ADL itself has given us the answer to the question “Whose side is the ADL on?” That answer is “the racist police.” Sadly, that’s also the side the Seattle City Council, and all cities that engage in these exchanges, have chosen.
Anyone interested in learning more about these deadly exchanges can attend a webinar on April 8, entitled “The ADL is NOT a civil rights organization,” in which key organizers from the Drop The ADL campaign will expose the many ways the ADL has hurt communities of color, queer people, immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, by aligning itself with police and other perpetrators of state violence.
The so called ‘training’ by Israel of US police is a totally trumped up campaign of hysteria. It involves no more then 100 or so captains or higher and it’s more like a convention of any business. Security is discussed. Businesses try to make sales but there isn’t a single shred of proof that US police use any ‘Israeli’ tactics to suppress riots. If anybody thinks Israel is imparting ‘brutal’ tactical wisdom on US police it would seem that US police have a big leg up on the use of brutality, murder and other violent crowd control. Did nobody learn about the civil rights protests or the Chicago DNC?