Chapter 2
The struggle for Palestinian rights has become increasingly connected to conversations about policing and racial justice in the United States. Since the early 2000s, thousands of U.S. law enforcement officials have participated in exchanges, conferences, and training programs involving Israeli police, military, and security officials. These programs have included discussions of counterterrorism, surveillance, border security, and policing.
Critics of these exchanges argue that they can transfer or normalize approaches to surveillance, racial profiling, protest suppression, and militarized policing. This connection became especially visible during the Ferguson uprising in 2014, when organizers and racial justice advocates drew comparisons between the policing of Black communities in the United States and the policing of Palestinians. The debate raises an important question for organizers: How are struggles against racism, militarization, occupation, and state violence connected across borders?
This history also provides an opportunity to examine solidarity between Black and Palestinian movements. Activists from both communities have identified shared concerns around racial profiling, police violence, surveillance, and political repression while also recognizing that their histories and circumstances are different. Understanding these connections can help us think about how communities learn from one another and build solidarity against systems of oppression.
Thousands of U.S. law enforcement officials have traveled to Israel on police exchange trips over the past two decades. While there, they’ve observed and brought home tactics such as racial profiling, aggressive crowd-control methods, and extensive surveillance techniques that Israel uses against the millions of Palestinians it governs under its long-standing, widely condemned military occupation. AJ+’s Dena Takruri explains how American protesters, as they exercise their constitutional rights, are increasingly being treated in ways that resemble the policing of an occupied population.
The Palestinian struggle for land, self-determination, and political rights has been compared by some scholars and activists to the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the United States. Both histories involve contested land, displacement, the disruption of communities, and struggles over sovereignty and control of natural resources. These comparisons can help us examine how colonial systems can reshape land ownership, political authority, and cultural identity, while also recognizing that Palestinian and Indigenous American histories are distinct and should not be treated as identical.
For Indigenous communities in the United States, colonization involved the seizure of ancestral lands, forced removal, broken treaties, and policies designed to undermine Indigenous sovereignty and culture. Palestinian communities have likewise experienced displacement and ongoing struggles over land and self-determination. Looking at these histories together allows us to explore how land, power, identity, and resistance intersect—and why movements for Indigenous and Palestinian rights often emphasize sovereignty, cultural survival, and the right of communities to determine their own futures.