June 2020
To the Seattle Mayor and city council,
We are one thousand Israeli citizens, active against our government's violations of international law and human rights against the indigenous Palestinian people [1]. We write with concern for civil and political rights in municipalities which have their police, immigration, or border police trained by Israel's armed forces, specifically in light of and in solidarity with the most recent Black Lives Matter protests.
Israel's armed forces - from police to military to secret service - routinely and openly utilize racial profiling as a standard form of policing [2]. These policies are strikingly evident and run the gamut between discrimination and humiliation [3] to violence and extrajudicial street executions [4].
While Israel claims it treats all its citizens equally, it has enacted more than 65 laws denying indigenous Palestinian citizens basic equality and civil and human rights [5], culminating in the 'Nation-State Law', which enshrines apartheid into Israel's constitutional law [6]. These laws, which impose structural violence on the indigenous Palestinian population as a whole, are enforced by, and in turn perpetuate, police brutality.
However, it is not only Palestinians whose blood runs cheap in Israel's streets. Jewish Israeli citizens of Ethiopian descent also bear the brunt of Israel's racial policies. They are subjected to policing tactics that are often applied to Palestinians, such as the use of stun and gas grenades [7], and -worst of all - street executions [8].
It cannot be understated that Israel's police forces not only play military roles in the West Bank, but are stationed in it, on privately owned Palestinian land [9]. This latter fact makes Israel's law enforcement complicit in its gravest of war crimes. The violence employed by Israel's army and police forces in Gaza and the West Bank is so extreme, that it is no wonder that when re-stationed to work with an Israeli population which isn't necessarily Palestinian, officers must be reminded that they are "not in the (occupied) territories in the West Bank and not on the border...It takes a long time for a police officer to fire a bullet. A police officer shoots only as a last resort, after he’s been shot at." [10] However, as our footnotes demonstrate, when faced with a Palestinian, or Ethiopian, Israeli police officers simply do not apply what should be an obvious and inherent part of their training to begin with.
Finally, we must also speak against the abuse of Palestinian children in Israel's prisons. While it is cruel in and of its own that Israel so readily locks up Palestinian minors in the hundreds each year, those who are entrusted with their care, in prisons or other detention facilities, employ what UNICEF refers to as - "widespread, systematic and institutionalized" ill-treatment, beatings, and torture [11].
Mayor Durkan and members of city council, we ask you to reconsider this dangerous organisation whichtrains your police officers. You have nothing to learn from Israel's police forces other than racism and brutality. The people of Seattle do not deserve Israel's violent tactics, nor should the officers of Seattle be compelled to apply them to human beings.
Sincerely,
Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS Call from Within