If it wasn’t for the bodycam footage, the murder of 36 year-old black american Sonya Massey at the hands of a white police officer would likely have been written off as a ‘good shoot,’ to use the parlance of American law enforcement.Suspecting that someone had broken into her house, Massey had called the police and the responding officers entered her house and searched it, while asking her to provide identification. Then the footage shows Massey heading to the kitchen to remove a pot of boiling water from the lit stove, saying that she didn't want to cause a fire. At this point the Sheriff's deputy Sean Grayson - who is standing at least a dozen feet away from her - points his gun at Massey and threatens to shoot her in the face. She ducks behind the counter and Grayson walks over and makes good his threat, shooting the defenseless Massey dead and then tells his partner to not bother seeking medical help for the woman he shot.
Massey joins the grim ranks of Atatiana Jefferson and Breonna Taylor, two other black women who were shot and killed by police in their own homes, but in in Massey’s case there is an additional layer of tragedy; she herself is a descendant WIlliam K donnegan, an African American shoemaker and a conductor of the ‘Underground Railroad,’ a network dedicated to rescuing black slaves. He was lynched by a white mob in 1908; his throat was slit and he was hanged from a tree in what Mark Twain calls ‘the dark Southern fashion’.
As for Grayson, he’s been sacked from the police and has been charged with murder, but questions are being raised as to why he was allowed to join and remain in the police force to begin with. After all, Grayson had previously been discharged from the military for ‘serious misconduct’ and had a history of drunk driving. Even as a member of the police force he had refused to obey direct commands and was singled out for an inability to make ‘high-stress’ decisions with none less than the Illinois chief of bully saying he had a history of ‘acting like a bully’ and abusing his authority.
Massey has been buried and Grayson will go to trial, but the fact is that his actions, and the fatal abuse of authority he displayed is by no means atypical of the US police force. Quite the contrary, it is indeed baked into the very DNA of policing in the United States of America, and for a recent example one needs look no further than the Pro-palestinian campus protests that swept America.
Clad in full riot gear and armed to the teeth with rubber bullets, flashbangs and stun grenades, the New York Police Department advanced like a Macedonian phalanx of old on students peacefully protesting for the Palestinian cause. Encampments were demolished, students and professors alike were beaten and arrested en masse in scenes repeated at American campuses across the country that, had they occurred in less-enlightened parts of the world, would have the White House calling for regime change.
Arrested students reported being kept in vermin-infested cells along with hardened criminals, while also being deprived of food and water for up to 16 hours. Some students were also kept in solitary confinement, a punishment usually reserved for those who are a danger to themselves or others.Given that the students, all of whom hailed from the Ivy League Columbia campus, were certainly not in the above category, it is clear that the objective was to intimidate and frighten them enough to make them quit what the NYPD and the Mayor of New York saw as subversive behavior.Now, the task was to convince the rest of the United States that these students were not simply answering the call of conscience but were in fact the vanguard or else the unwitting dupes of forces out to destroy everything America holds dear.
AN ALL TOO FAMILIAR SCRIPT
“Who is funding this?” asked the NYPD patrol chief in a tweet. Which “unknown entity” is “radicalizing our vulnerable students [and] taking advantage of their young minds?” he pondered as he vowed to “follow the money” and to use the “use the might of our Intelligence Bureau and our Federal partners to connect the dots”Then came a media blitz with scenes all too familiar to those of us who live in the ‘developing’ world: NYPD deputy commissioner Tarik Sheppard held up a chain on a morning show as proof of the deadly weapons the students were carrying. He did not of course mention that this was a bicycle chain that was sold on Columbia’s own campus. Police laid out a table laden with bicycle helmets, a few knives, sanitary products, vitamins, goggles, a few knives and tapes; displaying them like trophies from a raid on a terrorist den.To clinch it, NYPD deputy commissioner held up a book on terrorism, explaining its presence in the encampment as proof of the anti-state linkages of the students. What he didn’t mention or perhaps didn’t realize is that this book wasn’t a manual or how-to…it was a scholarly work by noted historian Charles Townshend titled terrorism: a short introduction.Ham-handed and laughable as these smear tactics were, it wasn’t lost on observers that these were also an almost exact copy of the Hasbara propaganda tactics used by Israel and Zionists. In fact, not too long-ago Israeli President Isaac Herzog displayed a ‘manual’ he claimed Hamas fighters were carrying which not only displayed ‘Al-Qaeda’ in the title but also carried the logo of the so-called Islamic State – despite the two being ideological enemies. Similarly, IDF soldiers have been seen brandishing brand new and unblemished copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf that they claim to have recovered from bombed out houses in Gaza. Miraculously, while all else around them was decimated, the books weren’t even singed.
‘EVERY ACCUSATION IS A CONFESSION’
It is of course true that there was violence at the encampments and protests, and also that there was foreign funding as well as actual foreign nationals involved in it. Except that they weren’t on the side of the pro-Palestine protests. The pro-Israeli protestors at UCLA were funded by billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman and others, including Jessica Seinfeld, the wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who collectively raised at least $93,000 to bankroll the protests.Prior to the police action, pro-Israel counter-protestors gathered at the site earlier had hurled rape threats, racial epithets and abuse at the students. One of those was none other than Israeli boxer David ‘Lion of Zion’ Kaminsky. Worse yet, Aaron Cohen, an ex-Israeli special forces agent proudly announced that he had infiltrated the UCLA encampment and was now liaising with the Los Angeles police which was preparing to take down the ‘antisemitic’ encampment.
That’s not the only link between LA cops and Israeli force: Magen Am – an exclusively Jewish militia/ mercenary outfit/ security company – also met with the LAPD prior to the attack on the students. Many of their heavily armed members are also active-duty IDF soldiers. At UCLA, a mob of masked pro-Zionists attacked the student encampment in the cover of night, using fireworks, pepper spray, wooden boards and metal pipes sticks and boards to attack the students and brutally beating the students they managed to corner. Interestingly, the police – who were present at the campus besieging and intimidating the students just hours ago – were nowhere to be seen during this assault. Nor have the attackers, many of whom have been identified on social media, been arrested despite the fact that the LAPD used cutting edge facial recognition software to track down peaceful pro-Palestine protestors.
UNHOLY ALLIANCES
So, what’s the reason behind the US police simply turning a blind eye to actual violence and seemingly allying with violent Zionists? Perhaps this has something to do not just with US state policy, but also the long history of cooperation between the US police force and the Israeli Army. Since the last 18 years, police departments across America have routinely sent their officers – including police chiefs - to train with the Israeli army on trips that have been funded by the US taxpayers and also by pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League.
In Israel, these cops are then trained in crowd control, use of force and surveillance by Israeli police, military and intelligence agencies who have honed their dark craft while brutalizing the Palestinians and committing countless human rights violations and extrajudicial killings. Eran Efrati, the director of Researching the American-Israeli Alliance (RAIA) tell us that these trainings involve “live demonstrations of repressive violence in real-time, in protests across the West Bank, patrols in East Jerusalem, and visits to the Gaza border…delegates meet with the Shin Bet and chief officers in Israeli military prisons to discuss investigation tactics, with Palestinian Authority agents and police, to learn about how Israel uses their collaboration in suppressing Palestinian dissent, and with representatives from the Department of Defense and others to learn about Israel’s security expertise,” The result of such military-style training, and that too by Israelis, leads a civilian police force to imbibe the mindset of an occupying army and, by extension, turns the public into the enemy which must then be crushed by all means necessary. The results have been a dramatic increase in militarized police violence, racial profiling and the use of excessive force against peaceful protestors.
BROTHERS IN ARMS
This isn’t new: the nature of the American police force also makes it a natural ally of Israel, given that it was originally formed as a “slave patrol” in North Carolina in the early 1700s with its primary mission being to quell slave uprisings and to pursue, apprehend and return escaped slaves. That origin story still informs the way the police work: black communities tend to be over-policed and black Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites. Blacks also receive longer and more severe sentences, and are far more likely to be at the receiving end of police violence. Police killings are the sixth leading cause of death for young black men in America. With a mindset like that, it comes as no surprise that law enforcement officials in the United States are often found to have links with right-wing civilian militias, dating all the way back to when local police would ally with, and sometimes even be controlled by, the Ku Klux Klan.
That tradition has survived and thrived: in 2006 the FBI warned that “white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement” was on the increase, and a 2022 Reuters investigation revealed that “a significant number of U.S. police instructors have ties to a constellation of armed right-wing militias and white supremacist hate groups,” and that police trainers would often endorse and interact with white supremacist criminal groups like the Proud Boys. Another such group, the Oath Keepers, was accused of playing a key role in the Jan 6th 2021 attack on the Capitol, and a subsequent investigation revealed that its membership rolls included serving police chiefs and sheriffs. There is a long-standing institutional culture in the US police forces that promotes and indeed rewards right-wing militarism and white supremacy. In turn, this makes such forces natural allies of Israel and unusually receptive to Israeli tactics. After all, Israel is the very model of the highly militarized, incredibly brutal and absolutely unapologetic ethno-state that such groups aspire to create.
THE AXIS OF THE OPPRESSED
However, just as Israel and the US police have forged a partnership, so too have those on the receiving end of this unholy alliance. In the summer of 2014, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, destroying many Palestinian homes and businesses and killing over 2000 people. Later that same year, riots engulfed the American city of Ferguson before spreading across other urban centers in the wake of the death of a young black American at the hands of a white police officer. Here, the tactics that the US police learned in Israel were on full display: widespread use of rubber bullets, tear gas and stun grenades were used by the police on African-American protestors. While the American state and media demonized the protestors in much the same way as they demonise today’s pro-Palestinian voices, it was Palestinians who displayed solidarity with black activists, reviving an alliance that dates back to the civil rights movement in the United States.
A year later, over 1000 black organisers and intellectuals came out with a statement of solidarity with Palestine, condemning Israel’s ongoing assaults on Gaza and settlements in the West bank. The same year singer Lauryn Hill and activist Angela Davis – among other prominent African Americans - released a video titled “When I see them I see us” to emphasize the “similarities but not sameness” of the black and Palestinian struggles. Four years later in 2020, riots once again engulfed American cities in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by American police. When activists were brutalized by militarized law enforcement agencies, it was Palestinian activists who shared tips and tricks for countering repressive tactics on social media. Palestinian activist Mariam Barghouti was one of those; during the worst of the police attacks she tweeted: “Always make sure to run against the wind/to keep calm when you’re teargassed, the pain will pass, don’t rub your eyes!” Thousands of miles away, in Haifa, Palestinian activists shouted “Justice for Eyad, Justice for George,” equating the death of George Floyd to the murder of Eyad Al-Halak, an autistic Palestinian man murdered by the Israeli police just days after George Floyd was killed.
Today, this solidarity with Palestine has stretched to encompass alliances with all those nations and peoples who have felt the colonial boot on their neck, who have felt the truncheons of racial supremacy beat them to the ground. We see indigenous protestors in Tacoma block US military ships bound for Israel with their canoes. We see Vietnamese activists revive their own memories of occupation through the lens of Palestine. We see Palestinian writer Refaat Alaleer’s poem is translated into dozens of languages around the world. We see that tyranny breeds rebellion, and that even as the forces that glory in their dark vision of what the world should be tighten their grip, more and more souls break out of their grasp as entire generations shake off their conditioning. It’s tempting to seek the solace of platitudes and tropes, to imagine that a final apocalyptic battle approaches between the forces of oppression and resistance. That is the realm of fantasy fiction, and in the harsh light of reality such notions tend to dissipate like mist under a scorching sun. But it is also difficult to ignore the feeling that we are, at the very least, at an inflection point in human history; one that will determine the course of the decades to come, for good or for ill.
Zarrar Khuhro is a journalist who has worked extensively in Pakistan’s print and electronic media.
