 Hello, I'm Tim Paradis. I occasionally host interviews at the Portland Media Center. I'm pleased to welcome today Bob Scheibel, who is chair of a grassroots organization called Main Voices for Palestinian Rights that works on behalf of equality and justice for Palestinians. We're talking today at a time of reckoning in the United States on racial justice and police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. Our topic today is the training provided by the State of Israel. It's police forces and military to U.S. police departments. Bob, would you like to open up by saying a little more about Main Voices and then answering what the context is for Israeli police training, how long it's been going on, how many departments are involved and so forth? Well, let me say first about Main Voices. We see ourselves as an organization trying to educate our own members, the public, political figures here in the state, the media, and our mission is to bring about a just peace. We want justice and equality for everyone between the Mediterranean River and the Jordan River. Which geographically are the boundaries of Israel and the Palestinian-occupied territories? Right. And we know that every story is incomplete. Every story still has something else to be said about it. But we try to be at our best in doing fact-based research and making our arguments based upon that research because we want to inform people not simply to inflame people or to be rhetorical. We are in support of Palestinian rights and all efforts to achieve those rights that are nonviolent. The topic that I'm interested in talking about today has to do with the, as you explained, the training of our police by Israeli police, Israeli military, and other law enforcement groups there like border police. One of the reasons it's important to do this is that our media have almost nothing to say about this. I recently contacted Magna Chakravarti, I have a hard time with her last name, who does the on-point program on NPR and suggested that this is an issue they might want to look into. And I said to her that I've listened to all kinds of really good programs here on police training, police violence. But nobody ever says anything about the kind of training that our police get from the state of Israel, where even the Minneapolis police were trained. They weren't trained in Israel, but they attended a training in this country put on by Israel. And so far I've not heard a word back from them, so I will call them again sometime later. It's an important topic because it's happening a lot, far more than people know. Thousands of our police have gone there. Just one organization, it's called the Jewish Institute for National Security. They alone have trained some 11,000 U.S. police officials in our country. Every year, Jensa, that's the acronym, sends more police and police officials to Israel to be trained. They've done hundreds, if not a thousand or more, police training that way. Another organization is the Anti-Defamation League. They do a lot of training. In fact, I want to point out, and I have to look at my notes here, just this year, the ADL has sponsored a trip that included ICE, people from ICE, everybody knows that, right? Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshall Service, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigation Team, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and officers from police departments in the cities from the cities of Chicago, Las Vegas, Austin, Seattle, Oakland and Miami-Dade. Now that's just this year, just one organization. So is this training formally promoted by the U.S. federal government? Yes, yes. These trainings are facilitated by our government and also by the Israeli government. APAC, the American... Israel Public Affairs? Yeah, Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is widely known as the most aggressive pro-Israel lobby in this country. They have an affiliate, which is also engaged heavily in setting up these police trainings. People don't know, I'm quite sure, that the New York Police Department and the Department of Homeland Security both have branch offices in the State of Israel. So there's a lot of interactive connection going on. Do you know specifically how many states are involved in this exchange and does that include Maine? Yes, Maine has been involved. In 2012, Maine's chief of the state police went to Israel. He was quite impressed when he came back. He was interviewed in the Bangor Daily News and he was impressed by what they did. He commented on the surveillance that they do. Well, if I can just say... We'll get to the nature of the type of training, but just in terms of the prevalence of this, perhaps half U.S. states involved in this, or do you really not know a specific number? I would say about half the states. Okay. And almost every major city that you can think of. So it's very common. It's very common. Can you speak just to segue to what you started on? The nature of the training and more broadly why you conceive of it as a problem. Yeah. But what actually are they being trained in? Okay, they're being trained in crowd control, how to respond to protesters. They're being trained in how to do surveillance. They're being trained in how... And the surveillance part includes racial profiling. I'll come back to that in a minute. They're being trained in infiltration. They're being trained in various pieces of equipment and devices, tools they can use, such as something called skunk water, which is appropriately named, is put out by a company called... I want to say odiferous, but it's something like odor tech. I think it is odor tech. Skunk water is an extremely vile smelling liquid, which Israeli police will spray on protesters. They will spray into people's homes. They will spray this liquid, which you cannot get the smell off. In fact, I've been told that if it gets on your clothes, you just throw your clothes away. If you could throw your skin away, you would want to do that. But it takes days for the smell to go off of your skin. Now that is now being marketed here. And a couple of U.S. cities have purchased some, I think in St. Louis they've started stockpiling it. And there is a supplier in this country that is promoting it and saying, this is good for use at border crossings. It's good for sit-ins. It's good for all kinds of demonstrations you want to break up. So that's part of it, too. But I assume that's only one of the chemical agents that is used in crowd control. Oh, yeah. They also use tear gas. They use rubber bullets. Rubber bullets were used if you were following the news. You know that when President Trump wanted to clear these peaceful demonstrators away so that he could walk across to the church and get a photo op. Tear gas was used. Rubber bullets were used. What are called percussion grenades were used. All of these are used routinely, regularly in Israel. Rubber bullets, by the way, they sound kind of harmless. They sound like, well, maybe they're made out of rubber. They are hard metal bullets covered with a thin veneer of rubber. People can be blinded. They can even be killed with a rubber bullet. So, yes, these are also materials that our police see the Israeli police using, they're instructed in the use of them, and also the riot gear. So is it your understanding that every technique that Israeli police or military forces might use within Israel or occupied territories are trained for U.S. police forces or are there certain things which are not permitted within U.S. police guidelines? Yeah. Well, that's an interesting question. I, of course, don't know exactly everything that they are taught. In Israel, a spokesperson for the Israeli law enforcement says that we do not train our police to use the knee on the neck. It is not in our guidebook or training manual. Well, one thing, as an expert at Harvard on international police training has pointed out, it's hard to know whether that's even true or not because Israel's training manuals are kept highly confidential. What we do know, though, is that they definitely used the knee on neck training. And if our camera could get a close-up on this, this is a close-up of Israeli police, the knee on neck, right on a Palestinian, this was near the al-Aqsa mosque, an Israeli activist and documentary filmmaker. I read recently where she reported that she herself has been a part of demonstrations on behalf of Palestinians and she has personally seen the knee on neck being used against Palestinians, even against Israelis who are participating in those protests. In fact, she said she has two friends, Israeli friends, Israeli Jewish friends, who have had their necks broken. Now she said fortunately they're both okay today, but have had necks broken from this technique. We don't know for sure when the Minneapolis police department was asked whether or not Officer Chauvin had been part of the training when Israel came over to train their department. The department never responded to answer that question. But we do know that Chauvin was using that technique. We know that Chauvin has been training their police for some years now, the police in Minneapolis. So that much we do know. Now you've, I understand in our conversation prior to sitting down that you've been to Israel in the occupied territories a number of times. Yes. And have you seen the nature of military and police action involving Palestinians and protesters? Because obviously the situation over there is that territories are occupied space. Right. And the rules of how policing is conducted are probably rather different than they are meant to be in the U.S. The answer is no, because when I go over there, the last thing that I want to do personally is to even get close to a real demonstration. Because I want to stay over there, I have friends there, I want to continue to get educated. And if they get involved in a demonstration, I would be shipped out of there immediately and if they arrested me. And I would never be allowed back in. So I try to stay clear of those. Now my wife and I, we've been five times and on our second visit there, we did go to the village of Baleen. And Baleen, every Friday, they have protests against the wall which is coming up near their town and against settlements which are increasingly taking over land belonging to Baleen that are right on the other side of the wall when the wall is built there. And Baleen is in the West Bank which is Palestinian territory. It's in the West Bank and Palestinian territory. And we got there just a day or so after that Friday. So we saw live tear gas canisters all over the ground. We saw scorched bushes and earth where these tear gas canisters sometime had just landed and burnt some of them. We saw spent rubber bullets and we talked to people who had been hit by those rubber bullets and we were actually shown some of those rubber bullets. That's how we know what they consist of. Now, how does Israel benefit from this? And you mentioned some of the organizations that promote these exchanges, but how does Israel benefit? Israel is in the top 10 countries in the world in the selling of weaponry. And it has a thriving weapons industry, a thriving surveillance industry. And so Israel benefits, there are a number of ways they benefit. But one of the ways they benefit is that it's a moneymaker for them. The CEO of a prominent manufacturer of munitions in Israel commented once that this was during Operation Protective Edge, I think it was called in 2014. When some, what was it, 1400 I think Palestinians were killed, about several hundred children were killed, thousands more wounded. It was a horrible assault. He said, every time there is a campaign like this one going on in Gaza, we see a real increase from abroad seeking our materials. The same companies, they have munitions shows around the world. You can find them in this country. And they promote at those shows and in their written literature that they send out and online literature. They protest, I mean they showcase and they promote their weapons as being quote, battle proven, ground tested. Now what they mean is these things have been tested and proven much of it in Gaza, on the people of Gaza. They have been tested in crowd control on people in the West Bank. Even people inside Israel proper. Now for people who don't know what Gaza is, can you just briefly explain? Gaza is sometimes described as the world's biggest ghetto. It's a small segment of land. It's one of the most densely populated places on the planet. And Gaza suffers from lots of malnutrition. It suffers because its water treatment system was destroyed by Israel in 2010. Israel has not allowed them to get materials in there to repair it. So 90% of its water is polluted. They cannot get its electricity system going for the same reason. And so when they're saying battle tested, battle ground proven or ground proven battle tested, they are talking about what they're doing to these people in Gaza and then also what they're doing to people in the West Bank. So it's not a very appealing picture, which is why I think Israel is at some pains to keep it out of our consciousness, out of our media. The police who go there are our police who go there. We've also had, by the way, FBI officials have been there. The CIA has been there. This just gives you a feeling of how widespread is this training. And one might say, well, what's the problem really? They know how to handle bad people. You know, they're surrounded by bad people. Why shouldn't our police get trained there? And the reasons are that our police are being trained by the police who do the work of a state, which for 53 years now has been an hostile occupier of another people. Israel treats the Palestinians as terrorists, as enemies. Now, a number of people think, well, aren't they? Aren't they terrorists? Aren't they an evil, Jew-hating people? That is the message that Israel has successfully for a long time been able to get across, but it's an incorrect message. So when our police go there and their police make this connection between Palestinians defined in that way and those people who are threatening you in the United States, your internal terrorists, your domestic terrorists, they're doing two things. They're telling our police a story about the Palestinians, which is wrong and which is very harmful. But they're also inculcating in the minds of our police that the people you're dealing with back home are just like these evil people. Now, who are these evil people? They are of a different racial group. Many people would say, although they're both Semitic, but they're still different ethnic, different racial group from Jews. And some of them are more dark-skinned than others, but they are not what we would just call white people. And so that puts into the minds of our police, oh, these brown-skinned, dark-skinned people that we're dealing with here, these Muslims, these Native Americans, these African Americans, they are also these Hispanics. They are also, they're like those people. So you can see how that mindset can lead to mistreatment of protesters here. What we need to understand is that the Palestinians are a people seeking redressment for their oppression. They are a people who are abused, oppressed, they're denied their human rights. People who are protesting here are also protesting their lack of human rights. So you've made clear that U.S. media gives little, if any, coverage to this police training. Has there been any pushback at city, state, or national political level? And what would you like to see happen, to have the training completely ended? The spokesperson for Amnesty International said that the relationship between our police and Israel's police is extremely problematic. Our own police don't exactly have a sterling record with regard to race relations and treating people of color. In fact, police ever since the beginnings of the end of the reconstruction period, coming right forward, have been abusive of black people. There's an excellent documentary called Thirteenth right now on Netflix about exact of this and efforts that have been made to make black people seem like the enemy, like criminals. All right, having our police who already don't have a very shining record, Attorney General Barr notwithstanding in his views, to have them then trained by Israeli police is a really bad combination. So yes, I would like to see it stop just like Jewish Voice for Peace. Jewish Voice for Peace has put out an interesting study and is called the deadly exchange and they want us to end the deadly exchange. Now, our own State Department, not under Mr. Pompeo. And if someone was interested in that study, they could just Google Jewish Voice for Peace. They could go to Jewish Voice for Peace or they could just Google the deadly exchange and they could find that study. Our State Department and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have all listed Israel as a state. They have cited Israel for a number of violations and these violations include things like aggressive crowd control, ill treatment of protesters, even torture, unlawful killings. These are all things that Israel has been cited for. And so to have them training our police is a bad connection. It's a very bad connection. Bob, we're actually, we've only got about a minute or a minute and a half to go. I'll let you end on a word about how folks could find out more about Maine Voice for Peace. Well, let me, even before I do that, let me say something else. Just recently in the news here, we learned that our state police have something called the Maine... This is a surveillance system. It's a surveillance system and it's been highly secretive. And they have been infiltrating and surveilling organizations like or against the corridor, some peace camps, and then they have been giving this information to executives at CMP, ExxonMobil and others. So let me just hold you there because that's another opportunity folks can do a little independent research on. I want to thank you for giving us this in-depth explanation of the police training. Any last word on how folks could be in touch with your organization? Yes. You can go, you can email us at mv as in voice, p as in peace, rights, mvprights at gmail.com or you can go to our website. But if you email us, we will answer your questions. We will put you on our e-list. There's so much more to say about this and I'm just glad for this opportunity to do just a little bit of talk about it. Okay, we have a red light flashing and thanks very much, Bob. Thank you. Portland Media Center, thank you for hosting us. Thank you.