With every escalation of United States wars — whether the post-9/11 war of terror or Genocide Joe Biden’s current war on Palestine — we witness an escalation in policing and the militarization of the U.S. border. It is no coincidence that the Senate is currently discussing changes to the U.S. migration system as part of a military aid package related to Israel and Ukraine, in the name of “national security.” Israel purchases more than 80 percent of its weapons and military technology from the U.S., using the billions of dollars of military assistance it receives from the U.S. annually. The U.S. in turn supports Israel to operate as the police of the Middle East, North Africa, and the world over. Leftists, abolitionists and antiwar activists need to understand that our struggles against policing, prisons and U.S. empire are inseparable. As my INCITE! Comrade Clarissa Rojas and I have written, just as U.S. empire has always relied upon policing and containment as interconnected strategies for securing global power, it has always been militarist, existing in a permanent state of war and expansion, obsessively concerned with the extractive accumulation of land, resources, cultures and the people it commodifies into power and capital.
During this profoundly terrorizing moment of Palestinian genocide, we need to acknowledge how the structures of incarceration, anti-migrant violence and U.S. conquest have always gone hand in hand.
The INCITE! Movement is a network of radical feminists of color that began organizing at the turn of the 21st century, during the year preceding the launch of the U.S. global war of terror. It was driven by the idea that the existence of the U.S. nation-state is based on colonialism, empire-building, war-making and enslavement. We understood that the first European settlers to arrive on Turtle Island captured Indigenous people to use them as chattel; that carceral systems have emerged in the context of periods of colonial land settlement; and that European colonization of Turtle Island included securing borders to strengthen the power of the U.S. nation-state.
Rojas taught me that the institutional inheritance of vigilante settlers and the U.S.’s genealogy of colonial violence formalized into la migra (Border Patrol), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the detention and deportation regime. Queer abolitionists Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie and Kay Whitlock teach us that systematic policing and punishment of gender and sexual variance were integral to colonization in the Americas. Indigenous feminist Luana Ross also teaches us that since European contact, Indigenous peoples in the Americas have always been imprisoned, “confined to forts, boarding schools, orphanages, jails and prisons and on reservations.”
If we are going to strive for prison abolition, we must also strive for the abolition of the military. Here are five reasons why we cannot abolish one without the other.
1. Militarization of the Police
The militarization of the police is an outgrowth of the “war on drugs,” first declared by President Richard Nixon and expanded by Ronald Reagan, that has been propelled forward through the post-9/11 “war on terror.” Especially in this post-2001 context, military contractors such as Blackhawk Industries have gained broader markets by selling their equipment — including stun grenades, armored tanks and counterattack vehicles — to police agencies with massive Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants. Military contractors are also paid to train cops and SWAT teams, binding the military, policing and profit closer together.
Many of us remember the summer of 2014, when activists in Ferguson, Missouri, faced the military-grade weapons of four city and state police departments — tear gas, smoke bombs, stun grenades and tanks — while at the same time Palestinians were confronting Israel’s heavy artillery shelling, massive use of cannons, mortars and half-ton to one-ton missiles. The same U.S. company, Combined Systems Inc., made the tear gas canisters fired in both Ferguson and Gaza. This is why it would be a mistake to forge solidarity from Ferguson to Gaza based only upon the idea that our struggles are “similar” (i.e., both communities faced tanks, tear gas, etc.) — because our struggles are also interconnected. The same institutions that attacked Black protesters in Ferguson had been sharing military technology and strategies with the Israeli army.
Indeed, thousands of U.S. police officers, sheriffs, border patrol agents, ICE officers and FBI agents have trained with Israeli military and police forces. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a so-called civil rights group, in fact contributes to the militarization of U.S. policing by bringing U.S. law enforcement agents to visit Israeli checkpoints and military prisons, all while helping both Democrats and Republicans to expand systems of surveillance, racial profiling and the repression of public protests through the use of force. Every presidential administration has supported the Israeli settler-colonization of Palestine not only to strengthen the U.S.’s global interests, but also to strengthen the power of white capital and elites. They do this, in part, through the expansion of policing.
The links between militarism and policing are especially clear in Arab and Muslim communities. Consider the DHS campaign, “If You See Something, Say Something.” As the Arab American Action Network (AAAN) has revealed, this program works through Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). As the AAAN explains, SARs recruit community members to surveil those around them during everyday moments, and report anything that “doesn’t seem quite right.” We end up with random community members reporting, say, a man who looks “Muslim” sitting on a bench at a train station or taking a picture of a bridge. Deemed “suspicious,” Arab and Muslim people end up on government watch lists. Through the Countering Violent Extremism program, DHS also provides funding to local groups such as teachers, cops or mental health professionals to train community members to report other community members who show signs of “extremism.” Yet these “signs” — like growing a beard or praying five times a day — provide a blueprint for the racial profiling Muslims.
The U.S. and Israel both outsource surveillance technologies to private companies, a practice often called cyber or surveillance capitalism. The U.S. helps Israel test these technologies and strategies of policing and repression on Palestinians. The U.S. then imports these technologies back for domestic use. Every time the U.S. launches a new war “abroad,” it imports its violent technologies of surveillance, the torture of prisoners, or its repression of activists back home to the U.S. Scholar Ila Ravichandran refers to this as an “import/export” approach to surveillance. Notably, the U.S.’s repression of pro-Palestinian activism helps rationalize the repression of all of our BIPOC movements. This conflation enables the U.S. to target members of the movement for Black lives with terrorism charges. For example, after the police-perpetrated killing of George Floyd — may he rest in peace and power — DHS collected intelligence on protesters who were arrested for trivial criminal infractions having little to no connection to domestic terrorism. More of us should be outraged and deeply concerned that the Department of Homeland Security is surveilling protesters and collecting lists not only of activists but also their friends, family members and social media associates — whether or not these associates engage in any political activity themselves.
This surveillance continues the legacy of programs like the FBI’s COINTELPRO between 1956–1971. Since the ‘60s, the ADL worked closely with the FBI to place under secret investigation not only neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups like the KKK, but also tens of thousands of left-leaning groups, including anti-apartheid, Black Power, Chicanx and Indigenous movement activists. They especially sought to paint the Black Power movement as antisemitic, which helped disrupt support for the Black Panthers. Zionist pressure groups like the ADL have always understood that controlling and containing BIPOC movements is integral to repressing Palestinian resistance. In this sense, we need to be clear that U.S. empire understands that it will fall when our movements learn to refuse a “Progressive except for Palestine” politics. We cannot strive for racial justice aims such as abolition while remaining silent on U.S. imperial wars.
3. Border Violence
The military-industrial complex (MIC) depends on the policing of borders, including both U.S. state and vigilante violence against migrants.The U.S.’s murderous practices on the Mexican border borrow from Israel’s border policing and the U.S. and Israel use their borders as laboratories for new forms of militarized police enforcement and control. For example, on the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation, near the Arizona-Mexico border, the company Elbit Systems of America, based in Israel, has built surveillance towers that increase police and border control’s capacity to surveil and track people’s everyday lives, contribute to the militarization of Native lands and reinforce false militarist ideas about “protecting” borders from “enemy” migrants who “threaten” the U.S.’s economy and security. The U.S. leans on Elbit especially since it has already “tested” its practices on Palestinians through its work on Israel’s separation wall and the border of the Gaza Strip.
Let us also not forget how the U.S. relied on 500 pages of documents from the Israeli military in the federal U.S. deportation case of beloved community activist Rasmea Odeh. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice, in collaboration with Israel, put Odeh, leader of the Arab Women’s Committee, on trial for allegedly lying on her naturalization application 10 years earlier. Here, the U.S. went on a fishing expedition to target a 69-year-old Palestinian American activist, and then used her immigration papers, filed a decade earlier, to build a deportation case against her. The U.S. claimed that she failed to indicate that she had previously been incarcerated. While Odeh was indeed incarcerated for 10 years in an Israeli prison before immigrating to the U.S., she was a political prisoner. An Israeli military sweep had picked her and 500 other Palestinians up in 1969. They sexually tortured her for 45 days, coerced her to confess to two bombings and incarcerated her for the next 10 years before exiling her from her Palestinian homeland. Before her immigration trial, the judge, Gershwin Drain, ruled that Odeh was forbidden from mentioning her imprisonment in Israel in court. Reifying U.S. rape culture, while he silenced her from telling her story of sexual assault at the hands of the Israeli military, he allowed the U.S. prosecutor to rely on Israeli military documents to portray her as a “bomber” — which he repeated at least 50 times throughout the trial, leading the jury to deem her guilty of immigration fraud, sending her into a second exile from the U.S. back to Jordan.
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