Becoming the Enemy of the Police?

A deeply emotional talk by an ex Israeli soldier from a family militarised by experiences of the holocaust. He described his army service policing Palestinians. Though brutal what disturbed him most was the inculcated assumption that that they, ordinary Palestinian men, women and children, were ‘the enemy.’ Any disobedience of Israeli rule was perceived as an act of war by this ‘enemy.’ His moral self came into conflict with his militarised self, and, mimicking this in reality, when he protested he was shot at and tear-gassed by his own army. After his army service his research showed that the Israeli arms industry was using the Palestinian conflict to develop and test new weapons and strategies of suppression. For a small ‘peaceful’ country Israeli arms exports are huge (10% of the world total in 2007) and contribute much to the country’s wealth. He moved to America and in a chance conversation with an NYPD police officer he mentioned he was ex Israeli army. The police officer replied, “Wow man you guys are bad ass. We’ve been over there doing training. (in methods of public suppression)” He was horrified. These police will have been trained as he was and come back believing the public are ‘the enemy’. From their fear of being vulnerable to another holocaust the Israelis have grown a huge arms industry dedicated to suppressing their enemy, ordinary Palestinians, and were now exporting both products and techniques of suppressing the public to police forces around the world; a perfect mirror of what happened to them in the German holocaust. My concern here is that the UK police are also being trained in Israel.