Globalizing repression, from Hebron to Brooklyn

Globalizing repression, from Hebron to Brooklyn
Joshua Stephens – 24 March, 2013 – NOW

BROOKLYN, NY – On March 12th, 25-year-old Mahmoud al-Titi was shot and killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank town of Hebron, where he was a journalism student and an organizer on behalf of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. His death marks just the most recent casualty of Israel’s use of live sporting ammunition against Palestinians, banned by the IDF since the Second Intifada. Some speculate it reflects an Israeli strategy to undermine unarmed resistance by forcing protestors to resort to violence, a terrain in which they would easily be dominated by the IDF. Similar to the fallout from the recent murder of Arafat Jaradat in an Israeli prison, al-Titi’s death was followed by an escalation in confrontations with soldiers. “Hebron is very hot, people are very angry; about this situation and about everything around them,” says Issa Amro, an organizer with the Hebron group Youth Against Settlements. “There are almost daily clashes.”

Three days prior to al-Titi’s murder, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East Flatbush, undercover NYPD officers shot and killed sixteen year-old Kimani Gray, after seeing him allegedly adjust his waistband in a suspicious fashion, and claiming he’d pulled a gun when they approached him. At least one witness has publicly disputed the police story, and claims the officers continued to fire into Gray’s body once it had hit the sidewalk – behavior incommensurate with the police officer’s claim of self-defense. The borough has responded with fury, organizing nightly anti-police protests, and spreading news of the event on social media using the hash tag #BrooklynUprising. Aside from the protests, often in defiance of pleading local politicians, the neighborhood has seemingly turned on the police. “The anger has been impossible to contain,” says Chepe, an Occupy Wall Street organizer and Brooklyn resident. Seeing bottles rain down on violent cops from balconies and windows is nothing new, he says. “But this isn’t a matter of a few drops. It’s a downpour.”

In Brooklyn and the West Bank, the backlash against brutality has instigated a state response. Over the last week, according to Amro, Hebron has rather predictably been subject to increased Israeli military activity. “More restriction, more checkpoints, more house raids at night,” he says. Similarly, in East Flatbush, the NYPD recently declared a “Frozen Zone”: an official designation that bars all media access and authorizes the arrest of anyone who ignores or defies a police order – a rare measure implemented in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks.

While these vignettes suggest a certain correspondence, and even appear to share a timeline, a rather glaring error is committed in drawing equivalencies. As one Palestinian organizer pointed out, “Talking about police brutality under a state is different than talking about the acts of an occupying army.”

In addition to flattening the differences between the two scenarios, equating the two obscures rather stark larger trends. Legal acts dating back to the US Civil War bar the military from performing in a domestic law enforcement capacity, but the militarization of police the world over has been underway for some time, amidst discourses within which even public health matters are constructed as ‘wars’. In the paranoid post-9/11 era, war is no longer confined by space or time; war since 2001 has morphed into a permanent state of exception in which civil liberties and necessities of the democratic process are often radically curtailed. From unmanned drones, to spying operations, to the low-scale warfare unleashed on nonviolent demonstrators during the Occupy movement in the US, the exploded notion of warfare against diffuse enemies such as ‘terror’ have fundamentally altered the contours of not only war, but policing. As Chepe points out, “it’s important to understand that police precincts like the 67th [in East Flatbush] consider their beats to be war zones.”

These trends are not ones lost on those looking to turn a profit. Israel and its private sector increasingly position themselves as exporters of surveillance and security technology, as well as technologies for crowd control and the management of civil disturbance – even to their sworn enemy, Iran. China, India, and Finland have all recently pursued acquiring Israeli surveillance and security tools as well.

Aside from providing a captive market for Israeli goods, the occupation is a major engine for the Israeli defense industry. The West Bank effectively serves as a proving ground for both tactics exported to official agencies, and the technologies best suited to those tactics. The correspondences between Hebron and East Flatbush are not a matter of mirroring or reducibility, but their strikingly similar timelines bring into focus key features at the intersection of militarization and neoliberal globalization. From Spain, to Greece, to Tunisia, to Egypt – and increasingly the United States and Canada – a pronounced shift in the management of nonviolent civil society movements has taken shape in recent years; one that casts democratic aspirations as a threat to security, and responds with overwhelming force. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a shift that puts Palestine and the methods of repression and justification refined on its population front and center – especially as they become key Israeli exports. …source