Thread by @jvplive

BREAKING: In leaked internal memo, @adl admits its police exchange programs between the US and Israel might militarize police and contribute to police violence.

@adl “paused” the programs after pressure by Black, Palestinian, and Jewish orgs.

Our collective power in action.

🧵

Since 2004, @adl has taken US law enforcement officers to train in Israel. On these trips, US officers learned to treat marginalized people in the US the way Israeli forces treat Palestinians: with racist, militarized tactics developed through occupation and apartheid rule.

For example, a California sheriff interviewed by the @guardian said the systems and tactics he learned on his @adl training in Israel were “Hollywood-esque” and “more invasive.”

Israeli officers’ use of force “shocked” him: “We’d be in jail if we did something like that here.”

Safety comes through solidarity — not violence, racial profiling, and surveillance.

So in 2017, building on Black and Palestinian organizing and in coalition with many orgs, JVP launched the Deadly Exchange campaign to end @adl's trainings and all US-Israel police exchanges.

As @guardian reports, in June 2020 — during Black-led uprisings after the murder of George Floyd — @adl sent an internal memo admitting that, by sending US officers to Israel, it might be part of the "very real problem of brutality at the hands of militarized police."

But instead of actually grappling with its complicity in the police violence that historic masses of people were protesting, @adl's memo maintains it did "nothing wrong" and mostly laments how costly and controversial JVP and other orgs have made its police exchanges in Israel.

As JVP ED @StefanieLFox said to @JewishCurrents, "The ADL admitted their police exchanges might militarize the police, but instead of stopping them and addressing harm they caused, the ADL tried to conceal their assessment, and then recommitted to… law enforcement engagement."

In other words, @adl's decision to "pause" its US-Israel police exchanges is NOT the moral epiphany of a principled civil rights org.

@adl will keep collaborating with racist US police and supporting Israeli apartheid and occupation, as its statements in the @guardian confirm.

As @AROCBayArea ED Lara Kiswani told @JewishCurrents, “The ADL is not a civil rights organization" but a "pro-Israeli apartheid interest group aimed at undermining efforts in solidarity with Palestine in the US, and therefore broader racial and social justice movements.”

WE — a multiracial coalition fighting for an end to the US-Israel alliance and for demilitarization, defunding, and abolition of policing — were the ones who backed @adl into a corner.

WE exacted a political and financial cost for its harm to our communities and our movements.

The crisis our coalition created inside @adl is a testament to the power of solidarity across struggles and communities, of a vision of safety that includes us all.

Our disruption of @adl’s exchanges shows that we can and WILL end them — and all US-Israel police exchanges.

To read the full articles referenced in this thread, go to:

theguardian.com/us-news/2022/m…

jewishcurrents.org/scoop-internal…