On Police Brutality - 5/5/2024

Hello everyone, and thank you for coming. Today marks the 211th day of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We gather to mourn the over 34,000 people who have been killed by the Israeli military, backed by the US. We know this number is an undercount and that each of these people has a story that is so much deeper than being a number and a name in a list of martyrs. Despite the accounts of Gazans, and the growing solidarity movements around the world, the Israeli government continues to march on, and the US government continues to enable this violence.

Alongside the horrors coming out of Gaza and the West Bank, we must also turn our attention to the horror of police violence and facism around the world. We’ve seen college protesters - who are in many ways still kids - get brutalized by police and fascist demonstrators. We see the news call the encampments dangerous, and full of Jewish hatred, when, in reality, they have been beautiful examples of solidarity and demonstrate what it means to build a world of love, diversity, mutual support and care. I spent an afternoon at Brown’s encampment and loved to see that it was a combination of activism and also just college kids being kids. They sang, they danced, they protested, they did their homework, kicked soccer balls, and just hung out. 

And yet - despite the fact that these encampments have been largely peaceful, they have been met with such brutal police violence that looks familiar to many of us, either because we saw it being employed during the summer of 2020 or because we have seen videos from how the IOF uses force against Palestinians on a day to day basis. There is a reason why so much of this looks the same - the choreography, the weaponry, the riot gear, the use of force.

Since 9/11, American police have done thousands of exchanges with the IOF where they share tactics and training with one another. In 2020, Amnesty International did an investigation and found direct links between the Baltimore PD’s use of excessive force against protesters, and their training with the Israeli military. As someone who has been part of protest movements, and who got tear gassed by American-manufactured canisters while at a peaceful protest in the West Bank about a year ago - getting just a taste of what Palestinians deal with every day- watching the violence on college campuses feels familiar in a sickening kind of way.

What feels less familiar, is seeing the ways that people are applauding this violence. I was part of a synagogue in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the year I lived there. The Rabbi was someone who seemed to have really good politics and made statements about police brutality in the years since I moved out of the congregation. He is also someone who has been applauding the law enforcement response to the encampments and spreading the propaganda that Palestine solidarity organizing is inherently anti semitic. How is it possible that people can  get it so wrong? That they can be so propagandized and so internally incoherent that they can condemn police violence in one moment, and embrace it and celebrate it in another. 

This kind of discordance is really dangerous especially as it is used to prop up the police - an institution that was created to enslave Black people in the US and protect the property of the wealthy. An institution that throughout time and throughout the world, has been used to upheld white supremacy. The American police legacy and their purpose has not deviated that far over the past 200ish years. To this day, police officers conduct extra-judicial killings of Black and Brown people without consequence. They will stand idly when White Supremacists violently attack marginalized people, but will beat up non-violent protesters without a second thought. 

I spent a few hours digging into what Judaism has to say about relationships with the police and their tools of oppression and it was a really mixed bag. On the one hand, synagogues work closely with the police. As a kid, I remember having a security guard at all times. Now, there might be several police cars on duty during services because of concerns about anti-Jewish hatred.Walking into high holiday services this year, I counted no fewer than 3 cars, and 10 officers. I felt uncomfortable and cannot even imagine what Jews of color would beel walking into this space.  Jews took part of white flight in the US and benefited from policies of housing and other kinds of segregation. 

Going as far back as the Talmud, one scholar, Rabbi Hanina urged Jewish people to overlook small abuses of police power in order to have social stability. In Pirkei Avot, the talmudic book of Jewish ethics written in the first century, Rabbi Hanina says: pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear it inspires, every man would swallow his neighbor alive. What this quote is saying is that people should fear their governments, that they should use fear as a weapon for control. 

This feels at odds with the fact that Jews have also been subject to state violence and have lived in fear of their government for some time. Since the early 1000’s when Catholics committed violence against Jews because of myths of blood libel. During the Middle Ages, and through the Holocaust, Jews have experienced state sanctioned violence in a series of pogroms. In any of these cases, the police certainly did not protect Jewish people. Police will only ever protect the oppressor. Police or the military, or whomever is tasked with securing government interest, work through sewing fear. 

Maybe the real question is this: does the fact that Jews had to live in fear for so long mean that they now have permission to inflict fear and violence on other people? In my mind, the answer is unequivocally no. Being a victim of very real anti-Jewish hatred and violence does not allow for Jewish people to weaponize antisemitism to suppress protests across the world, nor does it allow the Israeli government the right to use violence across Palestine to commit genocide. 

In fact, Jews have the obligation to break these cycles of oppression. In Deuteronomy we read ”take utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live. And make them known to your children and to your children’s children.” 

We as people, regardless of our religion or lack thereof, have histories that brought us here. So many of us come from lineages where state violence has been used to maintain cis, straight, white, christian, male, hegemony and as such, it is our duty to remember this, to speak out against it because we all suffer under militarized facism. All of our struggles for liberation are deeply connected. Our fight for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide is one of abolition, of prisons, of borders, of white supremacy.