Jack Mullen
The evidence is not hidden. It is not whispered in back rooms. It is written in sponsored training brochures, documented in federal court filings, and bragged about from podiums inside the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The State of Israel, through its military contractors, intelligence agencies, front groups and its private security contractors, has inserted itself into the training pipeline of American law enforcement at a scale that would make the Founders vomit on their tombstones. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a paper trail. U.S. sheriffs, state police, local police, and elements of the U.S. military are being taught to treat American citizens the way the Israeli Defense Forces treat Palestinians: as a hostile population to be surveilled, corralled, and crushed. The verdict is already in from Georgia, where an exchange program with Israel coincided with a 77% increase in fatal police shootings.
The verdict is in from Minneapolis, where the knee-on-neck technique was reportedly part of the playbook. And the verdict is in from every American city where police roll down residential streets in mine-resistant vehicles, pointing rifles at citizens who have committed the crime of being born in the wrong zip code. The Founders warned against standing armies in times of peace. They did not anticipate that the standing army would be wearing municipal badges and trained by a foreign power that has a documented, decades-long record of human rights violations. But here we are. And the hour is very late.
A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. – Geroge Orwell
Americans Begin to Feel the Sting of Palestinian Like Treatment.
Ask yourself a simple question: when you see a video of American police cracking a protester’s skull against the pavement, or firing pepper spray into a crowd of students, or putting a knee on the neck of a man until his soul departs his body, what does it look like? It looks like Gaza. It looks like Hebron. It looks like the occupied West Bank. And that is not an accident of visual similarity; it is the result of direct, organized, deliberate instruction. American police are not spontaneously generating these tactics from their own sadistic imaginations. They are importing them from a nation that has raised cruelty to a bureaucratic art form.
The data on this is no longer deniable. Since the 9/11 attacks, more than 300 high-ranking sheriffs and police officials from agencies large and small—from New York and Maine to Orange County and Oakland, California—have traveled to Israel for privately funded seminars described as counterterrorism training, according to an investigation by Reveal. These are not low-level cops on junkets. These are the people who write the policies. These are the people who buy the equipment and train the trainers. And they are going to a country whose military has been accused by human rights organizations of systematic abuses against civilians. Amnesty USA has explicitly asked the question: with whom are many U.S. police departments training? The answer is: with a chronic human rights violator. Israel. The training relationship is not a well-kept secret. It is a scandal that has been documented for years, yet it continues. Why? Because the people in charge of American policing want it to continue.
The most damning example comes from Georgia. In recent years, Georgia has experienced a devastating increase in fatal police shootings. These incidents nearly doubled, up 77% between 2017 and 2018. By May 2018, Georgia was already reportedly experiencing a more rapid rise in officer-involved shootings than the rest of the country. And what was Georgia doing at the exact same time? It was pursuing a “police exchange” program with the state of Israel, coordinated through Georgia State University. As researchers Ilise Benshushan Cohen and Azadeh Shahshahani documented in The Progressive, the link between the Israeli training and the bloodshed is visible in the pattern: communities of color paying the price for tactics honed in the occupation of Palestine. The training emphasizes military-style responses to civilian populations. The result is dead Americans.
But the Georgia case is only one strand in a web. In June 2018, a group of 25 first responders from Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia attended an eight-day training session in Israel, arranged by the Advanced Security Training Institute (ASTI). They stayed at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where they were addressed by Michael Oren, a former U.S. citizen and Israeli Knesset member. Oren, born Michael Bornstein, told the assembled American police and emergency managers: “We are defending the same civilization, the same values, the same beliefs. We are you, you are us.” This is the language of a colonizer. The Americans in that room were not learning how to de-escalate a domestic dispute. They were learning what Prism Reports has called “battle proven” Israeli methods and doctrines. “Battle proven” means designed for urban warfare. “Battle proven” means designed for occupation. “Battle proven” means the exact opposite of community policing.
The same training infrastructure reaches into state and local police through the Anti-Defamation League, which has historically facilitated exchange programs between U.S. and Israeli law enforcement. Jewish Voice for Peace revealed that a grassroots campaign led to a pause in these programs as of June 2020, but the damage had already been done. The ADL’s role—as documented in their report, REVEALED: ADL’s US-Israel Police Exchanges Militarize the Police—was to serve as a bridge between Israeli military tactics and American domestic policing. The ADL, an organization that claims to fight antisemitism, was instead fighting to make American police more like the IDF. The same groups that organize these trips—the ADL, JINSA, the American Jewish Committee—are not acting out of concern for public safety. They are acting out of a political agenda: to normalize Israeli occupation tactics by exporting them to the United States. And the American police are eagerly learning.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military itself is training with the IDF in ways that should terrify anyone who reads the Constitution. The U.S. Marines have trained with Israeli forces in urban warfare environments, as reported by Algemeiner. The U.S. Army looks to the IDF for lessons on rapid wartime adaptation and urban combat. The IDF’s Urban Warfare Training Center, with over 600 structures simulating a desert city, has become a model for how to fight in densely populated areas. But when the U.S. military deploys those same urban warfare techniques in American cities—as it did in the protests of 2020, as it does in the endless “homeland security” exercises—it is treating American streets as occupied territory. The Founder’s warning is not a metaphor. It is a prophecy.
Constitutional Rights Are Not Part Of Israeli Police Tactics
The contract between the government and the governed in the United States is written in the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment guarantees the right to assemble. The Fourth Amendment guarantees protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee due process. None of these protections have any place in Israeli policing doctrine. Israel, as a state founded on the violent dispossession of a native population, has never extended equal rights to the people it polices. Its security forces operate in a legal black hole: administrative detention without trial, military courts that convict at absurd rates, systematic torture of detainees, and the targeted destruction of civilian infrastructure. None of this is constitutional. None of this is compatible with the American legal tradition. And yet American police are being trained to ignore the Constitution in exactly the same way.
The Israeli Supreme Court once ruled against the use of torture in interrogations conducted by the General Security Service, but the very fact that this had to be litigated—and that torture continued regardless—demonstrates the fundamental lawlessness of Israeli security operations. The methods used by Israeli interrogators, as documented by human rights organizations, include “oppressive and brutal” coercion to extract false confessions. The case of Samer Al-Arbeed, hospitalized after interrogation by the Israel Security Agency, is a window into the standard operating procedures of a state that treats all detainees as enemies. Now ask yourself: what did American police learn when they visited Israel? Did they learn that the law is a barrier to be circumvented? Did they learn that suspects are enemies to be broken? The evidence from American police departments suggests that yes, that is exactly what they learned.
Consider the training that Minnesota police received. Over 100 Minnesota officers attended a 2012 conference organized by the Israeli consulate, where Israeli police trained them. The kneeling restraint technique—the same technique that killed George Floyd—was reportedly part of Israeli police practice. Israel Palestine News documented the connection between Israeli training and the knee-on-neck restraint. This is not to say that every officer who put a knee on a throat was directly trained by an Israeli instructor. But the technique was known in Minneapolis. It was seen as legitimate. It was used with lethal results. And when the officer in question was finally convicted, the defense relied on the classic Israeli security argument: the suspect was resisting, the officer feared for his life, extraordinary measures were necessary. That is the language of occupation, imported into the American Midwest.
The connection between Israeli doctrine and American police brutality is not merely anecdotal. Documents obtained by Truthout reveal how Israeli methods were presented to U.S. police as a model. The presentation did not include the Geneva Conventions. It did not include the Fourth Amendment. It did not include any check on state violence. It presented surveillance, stop-and-frisk, and militarized crowd control as best practices. The New York Police Department, in particular, has adopted Israeli-style tactics with enthusiasm: mass surveillance of Muslim communities, the institutionalization of “broken windows” policing, and a counterterrorism apparatus that treats ordinary citizens as suspects. The Postil Magazine has called this the IDF’s militarization of American policing — a “profound and deeply troubling convergence of state violence.” That is not hyperbole. That is a description of a system in which the techniques perfected in the occupation of Palestine are repurposed for the occupation of Queens, Brooklyn, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.
Now, the most insidious part: these trainings are largely funded by private donors. Revel documented that the trips are privately funded, meaning they escape public oversight and democratic control. The taxpayer does not pay for them, but the taxpayer pays the price. A police chief who travels to Israel on a free trip is not returning with an objective view of public safety. He is returning with a loyalty to his hosts. He is returning with an agenda. And when he is back in the United States, he will use his authority to buy the same military equipment, adopt the same military tactics, and treat his fellow citizens the same way the Israeli military treats Palestinians. There is no report to Congress. There is no public accounting. There is no democratic check. This is a hostile foreign influence operation conducted through police departments, and it is working.
The U.S. Department of Justice has been silent. The COPS Office, which defines training as helping members of an organization acquire knowledge and skills, offers no mention of the Israeli training scandal. The DOJ Office of the Inspector General has not produced a single report on the thousands of police officers who have been trained by the IDF or its proxies. The silence is not an accident. It is complicity. When the federal government refuses to investigate the foreign training of domestic police, it is not saying “we don’t know.” It is saying “we don’t want to know because we know what is happening is indefensible.” The Founders understood that a standing army controlled by the executive is the first step toward tyranny. They did not imagine that the army would be a foreign-trained police force. But that is the reality. A standing army of sheriffs, state troopers, and municipal police, armed with Israeli doctrine, deployed against the American people.
Serving Israeli Interests Around The World Has Brought The Problems Of The Middle East to America
The policy of exporting Israeli security training to the United States has a name: influence. But it is not influence for the benefit of Americans. It is influence for the benefit of Israel. The more American police behave like the IDF, the more legitimized Israel’s occupation of Palestine becomes. Every time an American police officer uses a technique learned in Israel, every time a police chief justifies brutality by citing a foreign counterterrorism seminar, the Israeli government can say: “You see, everyone does it. Even the Americans.” The Israeli defense establishment has made a strategic decision to globalize its tactics and its ideology. The goal is not to help American communities. The goal is to wrap Israeli practices in the American flag and thus shield Israel from international criticism. It is a form of laundering—not of money, but of violence.
The consequences are already visible. More than 300 senior law enforcement officials have made the pilgrimage to Israel. In New York, police chiefs and officers continue to travel to Israel even as Israel wages a genocidal war on Gaza. In September 2025, more than a dozen police officers from the state of New York were reported on a training trip to Israel, despite human rights experts confirming that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. This was the second such training visit hosted by an Israeli government agency during the war. The message to Palestinians is clear: your suffering is a training opportunity. The message to Americans is even worse: your police will soon do the same to you. And indeed, the military equipment is already here. The armored vehicles are already here. The drones are already here. The surveillance state is already here. The only thing missing is the public acknowledgment that the American police have been transformed into an auxiliary of a foreign occupation force.
The U.S. military is also complicit. The U.S. Marines have trained with the Israeli military in urban warfare environments, learning how to clear buildings, how to dominate streets, and how to fight in densely populated civilian terrain. The U.S. Army is studying the IDF’s wartime adaptation in Gaza as a model for future conflicts. The JINSA report on underground warfare encourages the U.S. to adopt Israeli methods for fighting in tunnels, citing the IDF’s experience against Hezbollah and Hamas. All of this is framed as necessary for national defense. But ask yourself: where are American soldiers going to use tunnel warfare? Where are U.S. Marines going to apply Israeli urban combat tactics? They are already using them in American cities. Since the 1990s, the Posse Comitatus Act has been shredded by successive administrations, allowing the military to be used for domestic law enforcement. The National Defense Authorization Act authorizes the stockpiling of weapons and ammunition for domestic use. The “standing army” the Founders warned about is not a hypothetical redcoat invasion. It is a military-industrial-police complex trained by Israel, equipped by defense contractors, and unaccountable to the people.
The Founding Fathers’ fear of standing armies was rooted in lived experience. Elbridge Gerry worried that unchecked military power would lead to despotism and proposed capping the peacetime army at 3,000 men. John Adams viewed powerful generals as threats to liberty. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that the King “has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.” These men did not want a domestic force that could be used against the population. They had just fought a war against such a force. And yet today, the United States has more than 800,000 police officers, equipped with grenade launchers, sniper rifles, armored personnel carriers, and surveillance apparatus, trained by a foreign power, and deployed in communities like an occupying army. The Founders would not recognize this country. They would denounce it as a tyranny. And they would be right.
The likely outcomes if this is not stopped are catastrophic. First, the brutality will escalate. The Israeli training model treats the public as hostile, embraces collective punishment, and encourages officers to use lethal force quickly and without accountability. Every American city that adopts this model will see more dead citizens. We have already seen the pattern in Georgia, where the 77% increase in fatal police shootings coincided with the exchange program. We have seen it in Minneapolis, where the knee-on-neck technique was used with lethal regularity. We have seen it in New York, where the NYPD’s counterterrorism apparatus has criminalized entire communities. If the training continues, American police will no longer pretend to be public servants. They will reveal themselves as what they have become: the enforcement arm of a security state, dedicated to suppressing dissent, crushing protests, and maintaining a racialized order that benefits the powerful.
Second, civil liberties will be further eroded. Israeli tactics are unconstitutional by design. Administrative detention, indefinite surveillance, profiling, and military-style raids are incompatible with due process. If police continue to import these methods, the Fourth Amendment will become a dead letter. We will see more warrantless searches, more mass surveillance, more no-knock raids, more “pre-crime” policing based on racial and political profiling. The courts, packed with corporate and executive branch appointees, will continue to bless these practices, citing the need for national security. American citizens will find themselves living under a regime that is functionally equivalent to the Israeli occupation: checkpoints, identity checks, martial law in practice if not in name. The American police will have become the standing army the Founders feared, but worse, because unlike the British redcoats, they will be trained by a foreign state with a documented history of torture and apartheid.
Third, the importation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into American streets will accelerate. This is not a metaphor. It is a prophecy of the concentric circles of hatred — while Zionist work feverishly to undermine the First Amendment using ‘hate crime’ and antisemitism charges. When American police deploy in response to protests against Israeli genocide—as they did against pro-Palestinian student demonstrations across the country—they are not just enforcing the law; they are becoming party to the crime. Police violence against protesters is legitimized by the Israeli training, and the protesters are then labeled “terrorists” in a direct echo of Israeli propaganda. The violence will not stop with protest suppression. The surveillance state will target activists, journalists, and anyone who criticizes Israel or the police. The U.S. government, already captured by Israeli state interests, will use its police apparatus to silence dissent. The Fifth Estate—the people—will be treated as the enemy. The problem of the Middle East will no longer be abroad; it will be in your neighborhood, at your door, on your street. The blast radius of the occupation will encompass all of us.
Fourth, the military misadventures abroad will find their domestic twin. The U.S. military, trained by Israel, will continue to be used at home. The Insurrection Act allows the president to deploy troops to suppress domestic disturbances. The annual defense spending bills increasingly blur the line between foreign and domestic warfare. The 1033 program provides military grade equipment to local police. If current trends continue, we will see full-scale military patrols in American cities, martial law declared under the guise of “public safety,” and a suppression of any organized opposition to the regime. This is not the plot of a dystopian novel. It is the logical endpoint of the merger of IDF doctrine, civilian police, and the U.S. military. It is the standing army made manifest. The Founders warned, but the warning was not enough. The people must act.
What is to be done? The answer is simple: stop the training. Cut every program that sends American police officers to Israel. Ban foreign military assistance for domestic law enforcement. Defund the ADL and every organization that facilitates these exchanges. Prosecute police departments that adopt Israeli-style tactics as violations of federal civil rights laws. Investigate every police department that has participated in these training programs. Demand transparency: publish the names of the 300+ officials who have traveled to Israel, publish the curricula, publish the policy changes that resulted. And above all, treat this as what it is: a hostile foreign intervention in American domestic affairs. Israel is not an ally; it is a client state that has captured the U.S. government, and it is using American police as training infrastructure for its occupation regime. The people of the United States must rise up in defiance. They must demand an end to Israeli-trained police. They must reclaim their cities from the standing army. If they do not, the future is clear: the brutality will intensify, the Constitution will become a memory, and the streets of America will run with blood—not as a metaphor of Palestinian suffering, but as a literal outcome of a policy designed in Israel and implemented in the United States.
The hour is late. The occupation of America has already begun. The only question is whether the people will stop it or become its accomplices. The Founders were not naive; they knew that freedom requires eternal vigilance. And the most urgent object of vigilance today is the local police department—now trained by a foreign power to treat American citizens as enemies. End the Israeli training. End the militarization. End the madness. The survival of the American republic depends on it.
NOTE: Just Before Publishing:
Former Israeli Defense Force (IDF) volunteer Brian Mast is on the SHORTLIST to take over as Secretary of the Army, two US officials confirm to me
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/2094979152063369321?s=20
