AMEU’s The Link: “Israelizing the American Police, Palestinianizing the American People”
The Link, published on a bi-monthly basis, is Americans for Middle East Understanding’s primary education and information tool. More than 175 issues of The Link have followed since the first issue in 1968.
The Link archive constitutes a body of informed commentary, fact and anecdotal evidence that is all the more valuable for writers, researchers and historians because each issue (for the most part) covers only one subject.
In the current issue, Jeff Halper, an American-born anthropologist who has lived in Israel since 1973, former Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and a co-founder of The People Yes! Network, writes, “What is a Security State? Why, in the 21st century, is the prosperous US, supremely proud of its democratic traditions, turning into a Security State?
“Why can’t the US just enact the policies, create the structures and produce the weapons conducive to a Security State, especially now that it has the “homeland security” justification of 9/11? The ‘Israelization’ of the American police begins in the wake of 9/11, but it has its roots in the previous quarter century. By 9/11 the debilitating effects of neoliberalism, starting in the Reagan Administration, had already created huge social and income disparities. This is Global Palestine. Your police and security forces, together with your military, are purchasing Israeli weaponry, technologies of repression, tactics of population control and its Security State structures all perfected on the Palestinians, in the laboratory that is the Occupied Territory.”