Fight the real enemy

People are in the streets.

There were HUGE protests against ICE in NYC, LA, and other cities this past weekend after ICE officer Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good in cold blood in Minneapolis. Vigils and demonstrations have arisen all over the United States. I’ve watched video of unarmed Minneapolis residents confronting ICE after the murder, even as ICE agents try to use “what happened” to threaten others.

A motherly woman¹ with gray hair: “You don’t have to do this. You can step away right now.”

A Black Vietnam vet: “You’re a bunch of bitches. You can go home safe, but you’re terrorizing this city instead.”

As Robert Reich says: “It’s no longer left versus right or even Democrat versus Republican. It’s now democracy versus oligarchy. Freedom versus dictatorship. Right versus wrong.”

In Iran, millions of people have taken to the streets across the country, calling for an end to the theocratic government that has had a chokehold on the people for nearly 50 years. The government has cut off internet and murdered, as of January 13, 10,000 protesters (according to Time magazine).

People are in the streets, here and in Iran, demanding justice, freedom, and a return to the rule of law.

In the streets, too, were 200 people who demonstrated in support of Hamas outside a Queens, NY, synagogue last week. This did not even pretend to be a pro-Palestinian protest. It was explicitly pro-Hamas. And like ICE officers, those terrorist-supporting traitors are too cowardly to show their faces.

In Jackson, Mississippi, the city’s only synagogue was firebombed early Saturday morning. The synagogue also houses the Institute of Southern Jewish Life. Several Torahs were damaged or destroyed.² The library was destroyed. There is smoke damage throughout the building. The fool suspect (a 19-year-old kid with a hatred of Jews as his explicit motive) had his phone on him and didn’t disable location-tracking. Like Jack Foley says in “Out of Sight”: “Most criminals are idiots and that’s why they get caught.” The kid, laughing, told his dad what he’d done. His dad turned him in.

The synagogue, Beth Israel, was bombed before, by the KKK, in 1967, because its rabbi was involved in the Civil Rights Movement.

You can send a note of support and donate to Beth Israel Congregation so they can rebuild and replace the Torahs here.

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The common enemy in Iran and the United States? Supremacy and authoritarianism under the guise of religion. Both governments disappearing people and killing them in the streets. ICE is detaining US citizens, Vance is promising that ICE will go door to door (in blue cities and states where they stand to lose elections), and Trump has said that it’s time to go after “bad people who have been here for a very long time, who were born here. I think we ought to get them the hell out of our country too.”

It can be a powerful rhetorical move to say that Trump’s government is behaving like the Iranian Islamist government. So, too, we say that ICE is the Gestapo. The similarities are worth pointing out. We Americans must, however, be wary of using these comparisons to distance ourselves from our own history of violent political repression. As a Black commentator on Instagram points out,³ ICE resembles nothing so much as American homegrown slave patrols, which hunted and captured Black people—free and enslaved both—and created a culture of terror under the guise of law and order.

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Maybe you’ve come across the claim that Israel is responsible for the violent behavior of ICE agents. New York City’s Mayor Mandami made a similar claim at a Democratic Socialists of America conference in 2023, where he said, “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” This is antisemitism. In an explanation to Anderson Cooper, Mandami said that he was specifically talking about training exercises conducted by the IDF for the NYPD.

What were these training exercises? After 9/11, a Jewish American nonprofit arranged for high-ranking law enforcement officers from major US cities, including but not limited to New York, to travel to Israel to learn best practices for deterring and responding to terrorism.⁴ It is obvious why the IDF would have expertise in this area.

For better or worse, US federal law enforcement agencies work together with law enforcement from many other countries: the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and Mexico among them. Rarely are those collaborations about specific tactics; usually they are short-term conferences and exchanges. No law enforcement group from another country is responsible for training, indoctrinating, or controlling the operations of US police. If police in the US are militarized (as they have become, more and more, since 9/11), abusive, and violent, we have no one to blame but ourselves: our laws, our funding structures, our courts, our votes, our culture.

As for ICE, which started in 2003 as a division of the Department of Homeland Security, they do operate abroad: they maintain offices at US embassies and consulates worldwide. They serve as law-enforcement liaisons to the US embassies; they work with host-nation police, customs agencies, and intelligence services in areas such as human trafficking, drug trafficking, financial crimes, visa fraud, cybercrime, and terrorism. They do not detain or deport people as part of this work.

Yes, sometime there are ICE officers posted at the US embassy in Israel. This does not mean that Israel is training them, anymore than the UK, France, and Mexico are training them—which is to say, not at all.

I am not defending ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, US policing, or US foreign policy. There are excellent criticisms of all of these. But these are US problems. We cannot blame another nation for them.⁵

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Now why would some people single out Israel as a particularly noxious partner to US law enforcement? Hmm, I almost have it . . . it’s right on the tip of my tongue.

Social media posts (via @unpackedmedia on Instagram):

• “ICE stands for Israel’s Coming for Everybody.”

• “You can tell ICE officers are trained by the IDF by how eager they are to put bullets into innocent people.”

• Quoting reports about the murder of Renee Good: “This sounds better in the original Hebrew”; “this is straight-up how the IOF operates in the West Bank”; “the United States of Israel.”

Let me repeat myself. We can’t blame Israel for the violence of American police or ICE; the violence of American law enforcement and paramilitary groups predates the founding of Israel by hundreds of years. This violence is homegrown and has been practiced on Black Americans and others since before the US was a nation.

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The blaming of Israel for the problems of the US, by cherry-picking and misrepresenting facts or offering no evidence at all, is antizionism. Antizionism is nothing more than an ideology of hatred of the Jewish people. There is of course legitimate criticism of the state of Israel; antizionism is not that.

Antizionism posits an ideology, zionism, which it defines as violent, Jewish-supremacist, white-supremacist, settler-colonial imperialism. Then, in a brave move for the leftist, antizionism says it’s vehemently opposed to all of that.

Joshua Burgin (in private correspondence) describes how antizionism operates in the case of blaming Israel and the IDF for US ICE and police brutality:

1. Israel is treated as categorically different from every other US ally or partner. The US has police and military exchanges with dozens of countries, many with far worse human-rights records [than Israel]. Only Israel is framed as uniquely corrupting of American institutions. That asymmetry is not explained by evidence. It is explained by ideology.

2. Domestic American problems are attributed to an external Israeli influence rather than to US political decisions, laws, funding structures, or voters. This mirrors a classic antisemitic move: Jews are accused not just of wrongdoing, but of secretly shaping, directing, or poisoning societies from behind the scenes.

3. Critiques of US policing that could be argued on their own terms are instead reframed as imported evils. That reframing allows critics to avoid responsibility for American systems while preserving moral certainty. [And, I would add, by preserving the critics’ sense of moral superiority.] Israel becomes the explanatory device that makes everything cohere.

4. No comparable theory is built around US exchanges with the UK, France, Germany, etc. Those counties are not accused of “training” American police brutality into existence. Israel is singled out because it already occupies a symbolic role as a global villain in certain political subcultures.

Antizionism and antisemitism are ugly. They are conspiracy theories. They are harmful to Jewish people all over the world. They harm the rest of us, too, as all conspiracy theories do. They disfigure our souls with hatred, erode our moral compass, and confuse our ability to discern what is true.

These are difficult times. We need all of our courage, our sense of solidarity, and our goodwill. Protect each other. Show up for each other. Fight the real enemy.

1. In the late ’80s, a book was published that argued, based on data, that the most effective strategy for a woman to avoid rape is to act like an angry and disappointed mother scolding a child. I’ve been wondering if that would work with ICE, too—because, let’s face it, a whole bunch of those bland, bloated white men are also rapists.

2. “A non-Jewish reader might gloss over the destruction of the Torah scrolls. For Jews, those words pierce the heart. To say that the Torah is our sacred text does not quite capture the relationship between the Jewish people and the Torah. It may be closer to say that losing a Torah scroll can feel like losing a loved one. Our tradition requires communal mourning when a Torah is destroyed.” (Rachel Posner, If You Are Not Jewish, This Is for You)

3. I need a system for keeping track of social media sources. I was sure I’d save this commentator’s post and video, but now I can’t find it to give her credit. I apologize to her and to you.

4. https://forward.com/fast-forward/781165/idf-police-trainings-explained/

5. Thanks to Joshua Burgin for help with research and articulating the information in this section.