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With the Anti-Defamation League making recent headlines over a (seemingly de-escalated) ongoing public spat with X owner Elon Musk…

…many have highlighted the ADL's nearly two-decade sponsorship of a program which sends US law enforcement officials to Israel for various training seminars which several organizations have blamed for the 'militarization' of US police.

This is also set against the backdrop of the post-9/11 'war on terror' era trend of local police departments gaining access military gear and equipment. Heavy armored vehicles like MRAPs have now become a fixture of even small town police departments.

"A lot of the policing that folks are observing and being talked to about in these trips is policing that happens in a nondemocratic context," Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and author of a forthcoming book on global policing, told The Intercept in 2017.

"The kinds of training police are given in Israel is actually part of the problem because it encourages a warrior mindset in police and exposes them to practices that would be unconstitutional in the U.S.," he told the outlet earlier this year.

The FBI has also participated in the program, which was launched by former FBI official Steven Pomerantz.

In the summer of 2020 as the George Floyd BLM protests raged across the United States and 'defund the police' became a national refrain which liberal cities across the country actually instituted (with much regret), ADL senior VP of programs, George Selim, and another top ADL official, internally questioned the group's support of the Israeli training program.

"In light of the very real police brutality at the hands of militarized police forces in the US, we must ask ourselves difficult questions, like whether we are contributing to the problem," wrote the officials in a June 9, 2020 memo to CEO Jonathan Greenblatt which suggests ending the program. "That is, we must ask ourselves why it is necessary for American police, enforcing American laws, would need to meet with members of the Israeli military. We must ask ourselves if, upon returning home, those we train are more likely to use force."

According to Amnesty International in 2016,

Critics have dubbed the practice the "Deadly Exchange."

Durham bans it

In 2018, five years after former Durham, North Carolina Chief of Police Cerelyn Davis attended a 2013 training session with the Israel National Police, the North Carolina city banned the exchange program. Davis, now the chief of Memphis PD, seemed "to have changed her tune" according to The Intercept.

Davis's predecessor, Larry Godwin, also trained in Israel as part of a  Homeland Security International Conference.

ADL And 'The Architect' Hit Back

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt

While the ADL has oddly scrubbed the exchange program's main page from their website (now archived here), the organization has defended the program in response to previous questions, writing:

The self-proclaimed 'architect' of the US-Israel police exchange noted above, Steven Pomerantz – who heads the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), a Washington DC Think Tank, wrote in a lengthy June 19, 2020 statement (10 days after ADL officials raised the notion of the organization's complicity in police violence) that the training courses don't involve 'field training,' work on "building trust with minority communities," and therefore couldn't possibly translate to reports of increased police brutality in the US.

The letter then pivots to how "Israel’s unfortunately extensive experience in the counterterrorism field" can benefit US police.

"Importantly, both American and Israeli police agencies operate under similar conditions, with judicial and public oversight and an aggressive free press," writes Pomerantz. "There is value in learning how Israel fights terrorism while preserving its democratic institutions and the individual rights of citizens — challenges facing all democratic societies."

Meanwhile, the American Jewish Committee has criticized the 'deadly exchange' as a 'trope' which 'directly compares U.S. police actions against Black Americans with the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) treatment of Palestinians."

The AJC says that "Accusing Israel or Zionists of complicity in the murder of Black people is malicious, perpetuates antisemitism, and blames Jews for societal ills."