Content warning: this article contains mentions of violence and suicide
Since early October, Palestinian flags have cut through Ann Arbor’s cold rain, wind and apathy. Protesters, denouncing the University of Michigan’s support of Israel’s oppression of Palestine, have gathered at campus landmarks, like the Diag, the steps of Angell Hall, the President’s front lawn and the President’s office, located in the Alexander G. Ruthven Building.
The protests, organized by Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, the University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, highlight the interconnected nature of oppression and liberation. In many of their chants, SAFE emphasizes how repressive tools used against Palestinians are not isolated to the region but rather are utilized by oppressive systems worldwide.
In a multi-part series, I will dive deeper into these chants and explore how oppression manifests itself across the globe in horrifically similar ways. The first chant that caught my attention:
“From Detroit to Palestine, Police violence is a crime.”
State-sponsored policing forces, like the United States’ police forces and Israeli Defense Forces, utilize unwarranted and arbitrary violence against marginalized groups. When working with a narrow definition of violence — actions causing bodily harm or lethal injury — police brutality is often the focus. Police brutality violates basic human rights to life and safety. When policing forces disproportionately infringe on marginalized groups’ rights, they reinforce and exacerbate systems of oppression.
In the United States, Black Americans are more than two times as likely to be killed by police compared to white Americans. Over the last decade, the country witnessed egregious police killings that sparked the Black Lives Matter protests — Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Ahmaud Arbrey, George Floyd and Breanna Taylor, to name a few. This violence is part of a longer history of racialized brutality that extends to U.S. policing’s very foundations. Policing forces utilized violence to uphold the White Supremacist institutions of slavery and Jim Crow. After the Civil Rights movement, police continued to weaponize violence to maintain white supremacy. In the late ’60s and ’70s, the FBI dismantled Black Power organizations that threatened white supremacy and resorted to killing many of its leaders, including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. In 1992, the beating of Rodney King at the hands of the Los Angeles police sparked race riots. Even these examples are a limited view of the intertwined nature of police brutality and racial oppression in the United States.
The Israeli National Police, the Israel Border Police and the IDF similarly inflict wanton violence. Israeli forces killed approximately 10,559 Palestinians from 2000 to the onset of violence after Oct. 7. Their pattern of brutality has extended throughout the 75 years of Israeli occupation. The routine denial of Palestinians’ right to life and safety entrenches the Israeli government’s apartheid policies and the dehumanization of Palestinians.
Violence’s conceptualization, at the same time, can also extend beyond physical attacks and includes human rights violations, as well as social, economic and psychological harm. These acts are often just as significant and impactful as physical violence.
Therefore, under this broader understanding of violence, police violence includes a wider array of police actions such as arbitrary or discriminatory imprisonment — a state tool used to break the spirit of communities and rob them of their sense of safety and autonomy, thereby denying oppressed peoples their basic humanity. More than one in five Palestinians have been arrested under the 1,600 Israeli military orders placed on Palestine. When looking at just Palestinian men, the rate doubles. Policing forces target male-presenting individuals with more intensity since men are often regarded as greater security threats. The United States enacts a similar system of violence against Black Americans: one in three Black men will be sent to prison in their lifetime, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. U.S. police forces arrest Black Americans at five times the rate of white Americans. Many of these arrests take place under U.S. laws stemming from the “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs” — structurally racist policy that superseded Jim Crow.
Unwarranted imprisonment is also practiced by both countries. As of August 2023, Israel was holding more than 1,200 detainees — 99% of whom were Palestinians — without charge or trial. This “administrative detention” can last from months to years. These detainments are reminiscent of Kalief Browder, who was held at Rikers Island in New York for three years without trial, with almost two years in isolation, just for the charges to be dropped. Kalief’s alleged crime: stealing a backpack. Kalief attempted suicide many times in prison and ultimately died due to suicide after his release. Black Americans are more likely to be held in jail pretrial in large part due to the cash bond system where Black citizens, on average, receive twice as high bail amounts.
Another common form of police oppression is protest suppression. Repressing nonviolent resistance protects systems of dominance by silencing dissenting voices and obscuring existing oppression. During the Black Lives Matter protests, state and local governments deployed heavily militarized forces that committed unwarranted violence against protesters, medics, journalists and legal observers. These actions prompted United Nations human rights experts to denounce the police’s actions.
On Friday, our campus saw this exact tactic in action. Police attempted to break up a nonviolent sit-in protest organized by a coalition of 54 student organizations, including SAFE, Jewish Voices for Peace and Graduate Employees’ Organization. Officers from the Division of Public Safety and Security and local police forces resorted to aggressive and violent tactics to prevent students from entering, including physically forcing their way into the building entryway, pushing protestors away from the public building during business hours and ripping a student’s hijab off.
In Palestine, while Israeli forces utilize violence with similar intentions to U.S. forces, the levels of violence they employ are much more significant. In 2018, Palestinians organized widespread demonstrations in Gaza. The “Great March of Return” protested the border wall during the 11th anniversary of the land, air and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip and the 70th anniversary of the Nakba. Despite the marches remaining overwhelmingly peaceful, Israeli officials gave orders to shoot any demonstrators within several hundred meters of the fence. During the demonstrations, Israeli forces fired at protestors, bystanders, children, paramedics and journalists, resulting in 183 deaths and 6,106 injuries from live ammunition. Israeli security forces injured an additional 3,098 Palestinians by bullet fragmentation, rubber-coated metal bullets or tear gas canisters. Only four Israeli soldiers were injured during this time. No Israeli soldiers were killed at any protest sites. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry found that during the protest, Israeli forces “committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.”
The two systems of policing are not isolated from each other. Programs sponsored by the United States and Israeli government entities and outside groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, have facilitated connections between each nation’s law enforcement. As part of these programs, members of U.S. police forces, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI, among others, have traveled to Israel and received training from Israeli forces. These programs have also sponsored workshops, conferences and meetings between Israeli and American police. The program has specifically been found to have allowed techniques related to racialized profiling and breaking up protests to transfer between the groups.
Oppressive policing is also not isolated to just these two locations. SAFE’s chant recognizes this reality, using the words “from” and “to” rather than “and.” Police violence is carried out by oppressive systems around the world.
In France, riots and protests broke out in June in response to the police killing of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French boy of Algerian and Moroccan descent. The act of brutality sparked anger over the French police’s practice of racial profiling. Young men of African and Arab descent are 20 times more likely to be stopped by French police than the rest of the French population. The French authorities tried to ban peaceful demonstrations against police brutality following the riots.
In Venezuela, Fuerzas de Acciones Especiales — a branch of the Bolivariana National Police — was established by President Nicholas Maduro in 2017 to stop an ongoing crime wave. FAES routinely conducts extrajudicial killings and arbitrary arrests in poor communities that no longer support Maduro. FAES operatives, known as “death squads,” were responsible for more than 9,000 killings in an 18-month period in 2018 and 2019. Like other oppressive police forces, FAES responded to nationwide protests — over proposed tax changes, economic inequality, police violence, unemployment and poor public services — with live ammunition, beatings, detentions and media shutdowns.
The list continues. Australia, Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa and plenty more countries are perpetrators of police violence.
Many of these states justify police violence with the claim of preventing the spread of drugs, crime or terrorism. The same countries, however, consistently ignore and do not address the underlying causes of these transgressions. The Israeli government doesn’t remove the system of apartheid that leads to violent Palestinian resistance. The United States does not take sufficient steps to remedy the racial wealth and health care gaps that lead to crime and drug usage. The Venezuelan government refuses to address economic inequality that forces citizens to join gangs and resort to crime. Instead, states utilize policing forces to further impose the very oppressive systems that create these underlying issues. States and their law enforcement use the resulting drugs, crime and terrorism as pretext to dehumanize targeted groups and make violence against these groups more palatable to the general public.
Police violence does not exist in isolated spheres, it is a global issue. As SAFE intended to highlight with its chant, oppressive policing is a joint plight, shared by Palestinians, Black Americans and so many other groups. By focusing on eliminating all forms of police violence, justice movements can find empathy and coalition with groups around the world.
It is not enough to focus just on the violence that affects you or that is closely situated to you. To tackle one form of oppression, one must be committed to eliminating all forms of oppression — from Detroit to Palestine.
This contributor has asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons.