4 ms·

The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale. The

by wk_end 7mo ago

The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale. The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do. Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.

C6JEsQeQa5fCjE 7mo ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are IDF trains them. https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-training-with-a-chronic-human-rights-violator-israel/ https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...
- mupuff1234 7mo ago
  Pretty sure police brutality was invented way before Israel existed.
  - juliusceasar 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - 6510 7mo ago
      In the 1200's British colonizers invaded Ireland, in 1920's the same colonial oppressors were moved to Palestine. Arthur Balfour was Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1887 till 1891 and it was his idea to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Ship out the jews, radicalize the natives, have the two of them fight for hundreds of years. It couldn't be a more British idea.
      - wk_end 7mo ago
        It was absolutely not Balfour's idea to create a Jewish state in Palestine. The Balfour declaration was from 1917. But the Zionists first started to move to the region in the hopes of establishing a homeland in the early 1880s, based on their belief that a Jewish state (anywhere; Argentina was another candidate) was necessary for their long-term survival due to the long history of antisemitism in Europe - getting worse by the day - and their (correct, it turned out!) fear that it could reach cataclysmic levels. It was very much their idea. Balfour's declaration, which wasn't official law, didn't single-handedly dictate British policy for the next 30 years and 14 governments; people vastly overstate the importance of it. Britain did not "ship out" the Jews - most Jewish migrants to Mandatory Palestine were from Eastern Europe and came to Mandatory Palestine very much of their own volition, without British help. And in 1939 - just in time for the Holocaust - Britain cracked down hard on Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine to try to quell Arab unrest; Jews continued to migrate illegally anyway, despite what the British wanted. Of course Britain had its role in contributing to the violence in the region, but to characterize Israel as a British colony is to deny Jews agency. It is curiously antisemitic, even as it (implicitly) absolves them of some of the blame for how things have gone.
        6510 7mo ago
        > people vastly overstate the importance of it. Fascinating, thanks for pointing this out. > to characterize Israel as a British colony is to deny Jews agency. It is curiously antisemitic, even as it (implicitly) absolves them of some of the blame for how things have gone. Some hill to die on.
        7mo ago
    - myth_drannon 7mo ago
      [flagged]
    - bhouston 7mo ago
      The strong/dominant beating up in the weak is as old as time unfortunately. One doesn’t always have to make that particular comparison as it is a sensitive one. You can point to any major instance of colonization (by whomever) to see similar polices and in the past it was even more brutal because there were no reporters (eg Belgium Free Congo had an estimated population decline of 75% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S... .)
- wk_end 7mo ago
  That checks out. Although the history of "Warrior Policing" in the US predates this (going back to the 60s) and extends far beyond IDF training programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_policing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_policing
- apical_dendrite 7mo ago
  David Simon and others have written extensively for decades about the problems with the Baltimore Police Department, and other departments around the country. They trace these problems back to the war on drugs and other purely American factors. The Amnesty article that you're citing is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Baltimore Police Department did not need to learn about constitutional violations from the Israelis.
  - pstuart 7mo ago
    Everybody thinks the War on Drugs is about "keeping people safe". It never was, it was always about manufacturing a tool to oppress "others".
    - convolvatron 7mo ago
      from that lens it was almost necessary to invent a pretense since people got all huffy about overt oppression at the end of Jim Crow.
    - nielsbot 7mo ago
      You can add The War On Terror to that list. Where do think US police get all their fun toys to play with? "How 9/11 helped to militarize American law enforcement": https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-9-11-helped-to-militarize-american-law-enforcement/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-9-11-helped-to-milita...
      - pstuart 7mo ago
        Yep. But the War on Drugs has been around much longer and is more relevant to people's day to day lives. And people buy into it. I hear this all the time "Sure, weed should be legal, and cocaine too because I like to party now and then, but the 'hard stuff' should definitely be illegal because its dangerous". To make matters worse -- people think that those who advocate against it are doing so because they want to do drugs (and some may) but it's a civil liberties issue and is the foundation for the militarization of the police.
ryandrake 7mo ago
That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and: > The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe. "I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
- xnyan 7mo ago
  Most people will never interact with a cop on duty outside of a speeding ticket or some other mundane encounter. A major chuck of what many people think about police comes from TV and movies. It's impossible to overstate the influence of Dragnet (the OG police procedural from the early 50s) alone on the widely held idea that police are mostly heroic and good. Police procedurals are still extremely popular, they overwhelmingly portray law enforcement in an extremely idealized way. There are exceptions (The Wire, The Shield), but they are noteworty in that police are not heroes.
- banannaise 7mo ago
  > When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? It only works if you deploy it against someone lower-status than you. The tactic is largely irrelevant and can be seamlessly replaced with any of a number of other tactics as needed. It's just enforcement of power hierarchies.
  - drugstorecowboy 7mo ago
    It really does only work when deployed against someone of a lower status. Just for example, if you imagine a sterotypical homeless man complaining that he felt unsafe against a sterotypical Karen, in the US there is no real chance he will be taken seriously regardless of the circumstances. It is more or less the "Get this peasant away from me" of our time. I found your comment to be very insightful and I appreciate it banannaise
dustractor 7mo ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are' American police officers ARE trained much like IDF forces. By the IDF! https://jinsa.org/jinsa_program/homeland-security-program/ https://jinsa.org/jinsa_program/homeland-security-program/
6510 7mo ago
Their media is non stop hammering the citizen with scary Muslim stories since the beginning of the country, every day since birth, with a density as if nothing else ever happened in the world. Deprogramming is possible. Just tell them it is impossible to argue it was their own idea. They know how hard it was rubbed in their face.
DiogenesKynikos 7mo ago
The IDF is a foreign occupation army, not the police. At least in the US, the police come from much the same communities as they patrol, and there's some sort of democratic accountability. Don't like the police? You can vote for local government candidates who will implement reforms. In the West Bank, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary violence at the hands of foreign soldiers. The IDF is not there to protect Palestinians. It's there to protect the Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land. If Palestinians don't like how the IDF behaves, tough luck. Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections, so they have zero say in the government that exercises ultimate authority over their lives. This is a fundamentally different situation from policing in the US.
dmitrygr 7mo ago
[flagged]
- wk_end 7mo ago
  Yes, American police use these kinds of justifications when innocent people are killed too. It's absurd (watch Surviving Edged Weapons [0] some time) either way. The reality is, if you have soldiers mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms, mowing down hundreds of people each year [1], you've over-indexed on vigilance and under-indexed on the value of human life. You're not trigger-ready, you're trigger-happy. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6jhru-EqDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6jhru-EqDA [1] https://www.un.org/unispal/document/ohchr-press-release-17oct25/ https://www.un.org/unispal/document/ohchr-press-release-17oc...
  - dzhiurgis 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - mindslight 7mo ago
      [dead]
    - mindslight 7mo ago
      I'm going to repost and elaborate on a reply of mine that appears to be shadow dead with no explanation. This doesn't seem to be the usual result of disagreement flagging. The only problem I can see is that perhaps this did not meet the level of substantiveness expected from an HN comment (OTOH I don't see how what it was replying to would meet this either, and mine is at least coming from the direction of intellectual curiosity!) "Perfect example of how no one thinks they're the villain in their own story" To be clear, the comment I'm replying to is justifying "mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms" based on some amorphous other "players" supposedly not valuing their own life (as a hypothetical soldier!). If this isn't a stark illustration of how individual people in a cycle of violence justify their own crimes to themselves, I don't know what is. The position would make sense in the context of say a street mugging where the victim ends up shooting the assailant. It might make sense in the context of domestic policing where the subject of an arrest attacks the police (modulo the usual moral hazard wherein cops create pretexts to claim they were being attacked). But in the context of this article and the proceeding comment, I don't see how it is anything but a rationalization for some pretty sick violence.
rakovsky89 7mo ago
[dead]
cineticdaffodil 7mo ago
[dead]
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

by wk_end 7mo ago

C6JEsQeQa5fCjE 7mo ago

> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are IDF trains them. https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-training-with-a-chronic-human-rights-violator-israel/ https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...

mupuff1234 7mo ago
Pretty sure police brutality was invented way before Israel existed.
- juliusceasar 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - 6510 7mo ago
    In the 1200's British colonizers invaded Ireland, in 1920's the same colonial oppressors were moved to Palestine. Arthur Balfour was Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1887 till 1891 and it was his idea to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Ship out the jews, radicalize the natives, have the two of them fight for hundreds of years. It couldn't be a more British idea.
    - wk_end 7mo ago
      It was absolutely not Balfour's idea to create a Jewish state in Palestine. The Balfour declaration was from 1917. But the Zionists first started to move to the region in the hopes of establishing a homeland in the early 1880s, based on their belief that a Jewish state (anywhere; Argentina was another candidate) was necessary for their long-term survival due to the long history of antisemitism in Europe - getting worse by the day - and their (correct, it turned out!) fear that it could reach cataclysmic levels. It was very much their idea. Balfour's declaration, which wasn't official law, didn't single-handedly dictate British policy for the next 30 years and 14 governments; people vastly overstate the importance of it. Britain did not "ship out" the Jews - most Jewish migrants to Mandatory Palestine were from Eastern Europe and came to Mandatory Palestine very much of their own volition, without British help. And in 1939 - just in time for the Holocaust - Britain cracked down hard on Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine to try to quell Arab unrest; Jews continued to migrate illegally anyway, despite what the British wanted. Of course Britain had its role in contributing to the violence in the region, but to characterize Israel as a British colony is to deny Jews agency. It is curiously antisemitic, even as it (implicitly) absolves them of some of the blame for how things have gone.
      - 6510 7mo ago
        > people vastly overstate the importance of it. Fascinating, thanks for pointing this out. > to characterize Israel as a British colony is to deny Jews agency. It is curiously antisemitic, even as it (implicitly) absolves them of some of the blame for how things have gone. Some hill to die on.
        7mo ago
  - myth_drannon 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  - bhouston 7mo ago
    The strong/dominant beating up in the weak is as old as time unfortunately. One doesn’t always have to make that particular comparison as it is a sensitive one. You can point to any major instance of colonization (by whomever) to see similar polices and in the past it was even more brutal because there were no reporters (eg Belgium Free Congo had an estimated population decline of 75% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S... .)
wk_end 7mo ago
That checks out. Although the history of "Warrior Policing" in the US predates this (going back to the 60s) and extends far beyond IDF training programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_policing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_policing
apical_dendrite 7mo ago
David Simon and others have written extensively for decades about the problems with the Baltimore Police Department, and other departments around the country. They trace these problems back to the war on drugs and other purely American factors. The Amnesty article that you're citing is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Baltimore Police Department did not need to learn about constitutional violations from the Israelis.
- pstuart 7mo ago
  Everybody thinks the War on Drugs is about "keeping people safe". It never was, it was always about manufacturing a tool to oppress "others".
  - convolvatron 7mo ago
    from that lens it was almost necessary to invent a pretense since people got all huffy about overt oppression at the end of Jim Crow.
  - nielsbot 7mo ago
    You can add The War On Terror to that list. Where do think US police get all their fun toys to play with? "How 9/11 helped to militarize American law enforcement": https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-9-11-helped-to-militarize-american-law-enforcement/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-9-11-helped-to-milita...
    - pstuart 7mo ago
      Yep. But the War on Drugs has been around much longer and is more relevant to people's day to day lives. And people buy into it. I hear this all the time "Sure, weed should be legal, and cocaine too because I like to party now and then, but the 'hard stuff' should definitely be illegal because its dangerous". To make matters worse -- people think that those who advocate against it are doing so because they want to do drugs (and some may) but it's a civil liberties issue and is the foundation for the militarization of the police.

ryandrake 7mo ago

That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and: > The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe. "I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.

xnyan 7mo ago
Most people will never interact with a cop on duty outside of a speeding ticket or some other mundane encounter. A major chuck of what many people think about police comes from TV and movies. It's impossible to overstate the influence of Dragnet (the OG police procedural from the early 50s) alone on the widely held idea that police are mostly heroic and good. Police procedurals are still extremely popular, they overwhelmingly portray law enforcement in an extremely idealized way. There are exceptions (The Wire, The Shield), but they are noteworty in that police are not heroes.
banannaise 7mo ago
> When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? It only works if you deploy it against someone lower-status than you. The tactic is largely irrelevant and can be seamlessly replaced with any of a number of other tactics as needed. It's just enforcement of power hierarchies.
- drugstorecowboy 7mo ago
  It really does only work when deployed against someone of a lower status. Just for example, if you imagine a sterotypical homeless man complaining that he felt unsafe against a sterotypical Karen, in the US there is no real chance he will be taken seriously regardless of the circumstances. It is more or less the "Get this peasant away from me" of our time. I found your comment to be very insightful and I appreciate it banannaise

dustractor 7mo ago

> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are' American police officers ARE trained much like IDF forces. By the IDF! https://jinsa.org/jinsa_program/homeland-security-program/ https://jinsa.org/jinsa_program/homeland-security-program/

6510 7mo ago

Their media is non stop hammering the citizen with scary Muslim stories since the beginning of the country, every day since birth, with a density as if nothing else ever happened in the world. Deprogramming is possible. Just tell them it is impossible to argue it was their own idea. They know how hard it was rubbed in their face.

DiogenesKynikos 7mo ago

The IDF is a foreign occupation army, not the police. At least in the US, the police come from much the same communities as they patrol, and there's some sort of democratic accountability. Don't like the police? You can vote for local government candidates who will implement reforms. In the West Bank, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary violence at the hands of foreign soldiers. The IDF is not there to protect Palestinians. It's there to protect the Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land. If Palestinians don't like how the IDF behaves, tough luck. Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections, so they have zero say in the government that exercises ultimate authority over their lives. This is a fundamentally different situation from policing in the US.

dmitrygr 7mo ago

[flagged]

wk_end 7mo ago
Yes, American police use these kinds of justifications when innocent people are killed too. It's absurd (watch Surviving Edged Weapons [0] some time) either way. The reality is, if you have soldiers mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms, mowing down hundreds of people each year [1], you've over-indexed on vigilance and under-indexed on the value of human life. You're not trigger-ready, you're trigger-happy. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6jhru-EqDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6jhru-EqDA [1] https://www.un.org/unispal/document/ohchr-press-release-17oct25/ https://www.un.org/unispal/document/ohchr-press-release-17oc...
- dzhiurgis 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mindslight 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - mindslight 7mo ago
    I'm going to repost and elaborate on a reply of mine that appears to be shadow dead with no explanation. This doesn't seem to be the usual result of disagreement flagging. The only problem I can see is that perhaps this did not meet the level of substantiveness expected from an HN comment (OTOH I don't see how what it was replying to would meet this either, and mine is at least coming from the direction of intellectual curiosity!) "Perfect example of how no one thinks they're the villain in their own story" To be clear, the comment I'm replying to is justifying "mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms" based on some amorphous other "players" supposedly not valuing their own life (as a hypothetical soldier!). If this isn't a stark illustration of how individual people in a cycle of violence justify their own crimes to themselves, I don't know what is. The position would make sense in the context of say a street mugging where the victim ends up shooting the assailant. It might make sense in the context of domestic policing where the subject of an arrest attacks the police (modulo the usual moral hazard wherein cops create pretexts to claim they were being attacked). But in the context of this article and the proceeding comment, I don't see how it is anything but a rationalization for some pretty sick violence.

rakovsky89 7mo ago

[dead]

cineticdaffodil 7mo ago

[dead]

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]