Last week, the Durham City Council in North Carolina voted to ban its police force from participating in a popular Israeli law enforcement training operation, following pressure from anti-Israel activists. According to the official council statement following the 6-0 vote, “Durham opposes international exchanges with any country in which Durham officers receive military-style training, since such exchanges do not support the kind of policing we want here in the City of Durham”.
The decision makes Durham the first and only council in the United States to forbid local law enforcement from participating in counterterrorism training by the Israel Police security forces. The anti-Israel activists had successfully persuaded city council members that training from the paramilitary Israel Police would lead to a “militarization” of Durham’s law enforcement, in a day and age where police forces across the United States are often vilified for allegedly employing military tactics and equipment against civilians.
“We recognize and share the deep concern about militarization of police forces around the country. We know that racial profiling and its subsequent harm to communities of color have plagued policing in our nation and in our own community,” wrote members of the Demilitarize! Durham2Palestine Coalition who spearheaded the effort.
The program in question is an initiative by the Israel Police to share the extensive counter-terror knowledge it possesses with its US counterparts. Due to Israel’s 70-year battle against Arab terror, its law enforcement is renowned worldwide for its expertise in intelligence gathering, handling active shooters, and riot control.
Israel’s national security apparatus is especially lauded for its vast knowledge regarding border security and hostage rescue situations. Israel’s borders are heavily guarded in myriad ways, making use of drones, cameras, and infantry, as well as special forces troops.
The entire country’s borders are ringed by a smart fence system, and every time it detects motion an alarm is sounded in a control room, which then dispatches heavily armed soldiers supported by trackers to defuse any situation–even if it entails tracking footsteps for many miles. These specially trained trackers know the lay of the land like the back of their hand, and have successfully caught numerous terrorists in the past by leading security forces to their hideouts.
Due to the smart fence’s success, the Trump administration has tasked its makers to build a similar prototype for the proposed border wall with Mexico.
In addition, the Israeli Police’s “Yamam” SWAT team is widely considered one of the world’s finest, and won Oakland’s Urban Shield competition in 2010 and 2011.
The Israel-US police training program was launched in 2004, soon after the multi-year Palestinian suicide bomb campaign known as the Second Intifada left Israel in shambles with over 1,000 civilians killed. Headed by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the effort treats law enforcement to an intensive week-long stint in Israel.
The program received media attention after San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon joined the training, following a mass shooting by Muslim radicals which killed 14 of his constituents and seriously injured 22 others.
“I’ve participated in a number of training environments over my 31-year career,” McMahon said afterwards. “I’ve never had the opportunity to leave the country and actually come to a place that has been dealing with terrorist related activity for years.
“Because we are seeing more of that in California and across the country, it’s important for us to get firsthand knowledge of how those types of activities are dealt with here in Israel, because in our world we consider the Israeli national police definitely the experts in this field,” added Sheriff McMahon.
Despite its popularity, the program has attracted controversy from both anti-Israel activists and left-wing agitators who decry the alleged “over-militarization of police.”
“The focus of this training is on riot suppression, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism — all of which are essentially irrelevant or should be irrelevant to the vast majority of police departments,” Brooklyn College Sociology Professor Alex Vitale told the Intercept.
“They shouldn’t be suppressing protest, they shouldn’t be engaging in counterinsurgency, and almost none of them face any real threat from terrorism.”
However, until last week’s Durham decision, police and politicians across the US repeatedly abutted the anti-Israel accusations, stating that the training they receive in Israel is vital to public safety.
In 2016, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed refused to put an end to coordination with Israel, despite coming under heavy pressure from the Black Lives Matter movement.
“There was a demand that I stop allowing the Atlanta Police Department to train with the Israeli police department,” said Reed. “I’m not going to do that; I happen to believe that the Israeli police department has some of the best counterterrorism techniques in the world, and it benefits our police department from that longstanding relationship.”
Allegations that police officers were learning how to employ heavy-handed policing against minorities were also dismissed by Orlando Police Chief John Mina, who arrived in Israel three months after Omar Mateen killed 49 civilians in the Pulse nightclub back in 2016.
“We’re not here to learn how to kill black people. We’re learning how to fight against terrorism,” Mina told the Jerusalem Post. “Our officers carry their weapons in a very different way from the Israeli police. In the US, police are much more discreet. While Israeli police officers ride their motorcycles with their weapons at the ready, this is not acceptable procedure in the US. We are certainly not learning how to kill black people.
“It only takes Israelis a couple of hours to clear an attack scene, whereas we need a few days. We’re studying investigation methods, because we have such a different way of working,” Chief Mina said.
