Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, an extremist settler and Jewish supremacist, has called on the police commissioner to create “local response teams” globally to protect Jewish communities overseas. This comes amid a wave of antiwar protests on college campuses across the United States denouncing Washington’s support for the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, and calling on their universities to divest from companies connected with the Israeli war machine. The rallies are largely led and organized by anti-Zionist Jews.
“Diaspora Jews are currently suffering from a harsh wave of antisemitism in communities and on campuses in the US, Europe, and around the world,” Ben Gvir said on Wednesday, according to a report by the Israeli media network Arutz Sheva.
He continued, “I asked the police commissioner to draft a plan to aid in the creation of local response teams that will protect Jewish communities and institutions overseas, through professional tutelage, including a training program and technological solutions for security.” It’s not clear what such security teams would look like, but Ben Gvir clarified that these activities would be carried out “in cooperation with the local police and relevant authorities.”
Training programs and tactic exchanges between Israel’s notorious occupation forces and American police, spies, and federal agents has already been ongoing for decades, focusing on deploying authoritarian “violence and control including mass surveillance, racial profiling and the suppression of protests and dissent.”
As Amnesty International has previously reported, “These trainings put… US law enforcement employees in the hands of military, security and police systems that have racked up documented human rights violations for years. Amnesty International, other human rights organizations and even the US Department of State have cited Israeli police for carrying out extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings, using ill treatment and torture (even against children), suppression of freedom of expression/association including through government surveillance, and excessive use of force against peaceful protesters.”
More than 100 Columbia University students were arrested after the school’s administrator, Nemat Minouche, called on the New York Police Department to break up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” Across the country – including at Berkeley, Harvard, Texas University in Austin, and USC – similar protest camps have been established and subsequently attacked by police.
A plethora of videos on social media show law enforcement officers violently suppressing the protests, along with assaulting or arresting journalists as well as university employees supporting the divestment campaigns.
Texas police are assaulting journalists pic.twitter.com/bPLj4I2yNQ
— Mnar Adley (@MnarMuh) April 24, 2024
Both President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who together have killed at least 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 20,000 women and children, have declared these American college student demonstrations “antisemitic” and insisted they would not let them stand.
Netanyahu has called for a stronger crackdown against student protesters in the US. “Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done,” he said in a video statement on Wednesday. Opposition leaders in Israel, such as former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, have issued similar demands and even called for the White House’s direct intervention. Biden has vocally condemned the “antisemitic protests,“ saying he had “set up a program to deal with that.”
The president has defamed young Americans leading the demonstrations as “reprehensible and dangerous,“ claiming “we’ve seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews” at the protests. However, activists from Jewish groups organizing the campus actions deny such threats are taking place and say there is no danger.
“I am perfectly safe here. And this has all been a distraction because they don’t want us talking about the nonstop massacre of Gaza, of Palestinian civilians, being taken out by the IDF [Israeli army],” Jared Kannel, a Jewish student at Columbia, told the TRT news outlet. Conversely, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which helped lead the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” said the actual attacks against Jewish students are being launched by university administrators.
“Columbia University has actively created a hostile environment for students who are Palestinian or who support Palestinian freedom. Additionally, the administration’s actions have made the campus much less safe for Jewish students,” the JVP stated.
