Overdose prevention researchers like me are familiar with the harms caused by the expansion of policing and surveillance. A steady stream of new technologies, new techniques and personnel sustains the United States’ drug war.
As Israel’s assault on Gaza continues, there has been much political and media focus on how the US supplies the Israeli military with weapons. Less prominent is how our nation’s relationship with Israel influences US policing practices, which in turn harm communities of color and people who use drugs.
US and Israeli police have had deep ties for some time. In its War on Terror following 9/11, the US expanded and increased militarization of its police. During this period, the US sent over 1,000 law enforcement officials and first responders to Israel to participate in joint training and exercises. Such collaborations, which existed on a smaller scale previously, have continued in the years since, with thousands of US police also receiving training from Israeli officials in this country.
US police have been trained in Israeli suppression tactics that might have been deemed excessive at prior points in US history, but now seem to be the norm. Militarized policing—together with common Israeli tactics, like employing flash grenades and wrestling people to the ground in dangerous ways (consider how Derek Chauvin used his knee to kill George Floyd)—has become commonplace in the US, in part because of these deadly training exchanges.
Human rights organizations have linked these exchanges, and the implementation of tactics used on Palestians, with human rights abuses in the US.
I was present in 2023 when Israeli soldiers, acting as border police between Palestinian-controlled areas and illegal Israeli settlements, responded to a peaceful sit-in in Hebron with smoke bombs and tear gas. I’ve also participated in US protest movements, and have recently watched how US police have responded to the encampments for Gaza. To me, the similarities in aggressive and violent tactics are clear.
Human rights organizations have linked these exchanges, and the implementation of tactics used on Palestians, with human rights abuses in the US. Policing in precincts across the country has at times eerily resembled Israeli forces’ operations in the West Bank.
Police in Baltimore, Maryland, for example, were found in 2016 to have conducted illegal stops, racial targeting, unreasonable uses of force, and interference in constitutional rights to free expression. Further investigation revealed that the Baltimore Police Department learned many of these tactics from exchanges with Israeli security forces.
A few weeks ago, in response to peaceful protests in Los Angeles, police used rubber bullets and bean-bag guns despite their general prohibition.
Excessive tactics against Palestine solidarity protesters today, or against Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, are tied to the racial profiling that police employ far beyond protest movements. Racism is largely why people of color have much higher rates of drug-related arrests than their white peers despite using drugs at the same rates. Racism is deeply embedded in both US law enforcement and the Israeli security forces with which US police conduct cross-training.
Exchanges between US law enforcement and Israeli forces are not limited to the training of personnel. The Israeli military is also involved in the development and testing of surveillance technologies that are then later used in the US.
In 2022, it came to light that the US Drug Enforcement Administration was deploying Israeli spyware that can invade personal phones and hack information at scale.
Following the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, Israel saw thousands of tech workers laid off. The Israeli military budget meanwhile steadily increased; tech firms were then encouraged to branch out from general informational technology to security and surveillance. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) grew to become a business incubator and dedicated more resources to technical projects, used to automate the decades-long occupation of the West Bank. This led to the development of AI and surveillance technologies that have been deployed in both the US drug war and the current slaughter of Gazans.
In 2022, it came to light that the US Drug Enforcement Administration was deploying Israeli spyware that can invade personal phones and hack information at scale—despite the Biden administration having blacklisted similar technology developed by another Israeli firm.
Though the DEA claimed it was using this software only to track drug trafficking organizations in other countries, we can have little confidence that it wasn’t also used to surveille US people who use drugs. The DEA has a long history of secret surveillance operations to disseminate dubiously (and potentially illegally) acquired information to local police, often about low-level drug-law violations.
Mass surveillance of people who use drugs is especially troubling, when research has shown that people’s attempts to avoid law enforcement contact and incarceration can lead to drug-use behaviors that increase risk of overdose.
It is essential that we recognize how the liberatory struggles of people who use drugs, Palestinians and many others are interconnected.
The weapons pipeline, too, doesn’t flow only from the US to Israel. Israeli weapons that are tested on Palestinans are later exported. For example, in 2014, the Israeli government debuted a Spike drone rocket. Having been used to kill six occupants of a taxi in Rafah, Gaza, that year, it was then sold to numerous countries, including the US.
Although such weapons have mostly been used in a military context, the federal 1033 Program and 11022 Program allow state and local governments to purchase discounted military equipment “in support of the war on drugs, homeland security, and emergency response activities.”
In advocating to end the drug war, it can be tempting to confine our critiques to the US police and prison-industrial complex, and our demands to decriminalization and legalization. But the US drug war does not occur in a vacuum. It is essential that we recognize how the liberatory struggles of people who use drugs, Palestinians and many others are interconnected. We must demand freedom from oppression for all.
Photograph of police sharpshooter at the Ferguson protests in 2014 by Jamelle Bouie via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 2.0
