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Mamdani said NYPD boots were ‘laced by the IDF.’ What is the relationship between American police departments and Israel?
New York mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s recently resurfaced remark that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF” has renewed concerns from some Jewish voters about his potential administration’s attitude toward Israel — and renewed questions about the Israeli military’s relationship with police departments across the U.S.
Mamdani made the comment during an August 2023 conference for the Democratic Socialists of America. Mamdani, a DSA member representing Queens in the New York State Assembly, was a keynote speaker at the conference and appeared on a panel about “Socialist Internationalism.”
Mamdani said during the panel that for Americans to care about international issues, “We have to make them hyper-local. We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF. We have to make — not specifically that example all the time — just to say that for working class people who have very little time, who have so many stresses, who are under so many pressures, there isn’t much time for symbolism. We have to make it materially connected to their life.”
Mamdani told CNN last week that he had been referring to training exercises that have taken place between the New York Police Department and the Israel Defense Forces, not suggesting that the two were in close collaboration.
American Jewish leaders have widely objected to the comments. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the head of prominent New York Reform congregation Central Synagogue, said it “contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism.” Meanwhile, progressive groups outside the Jewish establishment say Mamdani hit on an uncomfortable truth about American law enforcement.
The image of an NYPD boot laced by an IDF soldier evokes a broader claim that the militarism and brutality of American law enforcement was imported from Israel in police training programs. The claim first gained traction in anti-Zionist spaces following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin.
The relationship between American police departments and Israel has since become the subject of ongoing criticism by groups who say Israel’s law enforcement practices promote aggressive surveillance, discrimination and violent intervention, and otherwise infringe on human rights.
But police aggression in the U.S. long predates Israel’s founding, much less American law enforcement training visits. The anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, though it opposes the trips, has cautioned against the notion that Israel is the origin of American police violence or racism, saying that such claims “obscure the fundamental responsibility and nature of the U.S.” and “further an antisemitic ideology.”
So what is the actual relationship between Israel and American police today, and what is its impact on law enforcement tactics in the U.S.?
Roots in counterterrorism
American law enforcement’s relationship with Israel dates back to the 1990s, but accelerated after 9/11, when police departments across the U.S. were responding to the threat of terrorism. In September 2002, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, an American nonprofit, brought high-ranking law enforcement officials from several major U.S. metro areas — among them New York, Los Angeles, South Florida and Dallas — to Israel to learn best practices for terrorism deterrence and response.
According to a press release JINSA issued at the time, the Americans observed “methods and techniques” that included bomb disposal, forensics, crowd control and coordination with the media and the public. The release also said the group visited police and IDF outposts to study Border Guard operations in the Galilee and the West Bank.
Since then, the trips have become routine. As of 2020, more than 1,000 American police officers from across the country have made similar training visits, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. JINSA isn’t the only group organizing the trips; the Anti-Defamation League and a program called the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange have also led American police trips to Israel.
JINSA maintains that its trips focus on management and policy issues, and that officials do not learn about physical tactics. But that may be little consolation to groups that oppose the visits in the first place, who say that observers of any Israeli police operation in Palestinian areas are witnessing live demonstrations of repressive violence.
The trips are only one aspect of the relationship. There is also a more direct collaboration between the NYPD and Israel: the former has had an office — though it reportedly consists of a single officer — at the Israeli police headquarters since 2012, as part of the NYPD’s counterterrorism efforts.
Backlash to the relationship
One group leading opposition to the trips is JVP, which in 2018 published a 57-page report about them called “Deadly Exchange.”
The report documented not only what officers encounter on the trips — for example, a network of hundreds of surveillance cameras around Jerusalem’s Old City — but also their parallel tactics in the U.S.; it points to a 5,300-camera surveillance system in Atlanta that the Atlanta Police Department said was modeled after the command center in Jerusalem. It also claimed that the St. Louis Metropolitan Police used Skunk, a foul-odor spray, on protesters in Ferguson in 2014 after seeing it deployed in Israel.
Not all of its claims are substantiated. One section that describes a Jewish lawmaker’s push for increased surveillance states that he was influenced by Israel’s example; that lawmaker never said such a thing and had not attended a police exchange program. Other cases cited in the report show similarities in American and Israeli law enforcement practices but do not show a causal link between them.
Still, the JVP report became a proof text following George Floyd’s death, when Black Lives Matter protesters were building coalitions with the pro-Palestinian resistance. Protesters pointed to the Minneapolis police officers’ attendance at a security exchange conference at the Israeli Consulate in Chicago in 2012, saying the knee-to-neck restraint Chauvin used to strangle Floyd was a hold IDF soldiers often employed on Palestinians.
Palestinians have described similar treatment by IDF soldiers. But records show neck restraints had been used in MPD training since at least 2002, and it’s unclear whether Israeli officials even taught the chokehold at the conference, or whether Chauvin — who was on the force at the time — was in attendance.
Moreover, reasons for increasing militarism in American police forces are manifold. To explain why American police departments look more like military bases now, observers would point to the military industrial complex and civilian access to military-grade weapons (which led law enforcement to keep up).
Nevertheless, the charge of Israeli influence has become all-encompassing; as in countless other examples, it is a simple explanation for complicated, maddening and seemingly unsolvable American institutional dysfunction. And as Mamdani said in 2023, it’s a convenient way to make international concerns feel “hyper-local.”
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EU seeks to advance trade ban on Israeli settlements
(JTA) — The European Union could be leaning toward banning trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Foreign ministers debated various tactics to respond to the settlements on Monday at their monthly council meeting in Brussels, against the backdrop of rising violence by settlers and efforts by the Israeli government to expand settlements in Palestinian territories.
In a press conference following the meeting, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said one possibility had stood out.
“The option that got the most support was banning the trade with illegal settlements,” she said. All 27 member states consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank to violate international law.
Kallas added, “We tasked the ambassadors to take this work forward, and probably will also have an extraordinary meeting on this.”
No decisions have yet been made, and the path forward is uncertain. Some EU member nations favor aggressive action against the settlements, while others are unlikely to back any measures that take aim at Israel. A number are in the middle and have not decided whether they support trade bans.
The level of agreement between European governments needed to enact a partial or full trade ban on Israeli settlements remains an open question. Kallas said it was the European Council’s legal opinion that voting on trade issues called for a qualified majority, meaning that 15 out of 27 states would have to vote in favor, representing at least 65% of the EU population.
But she also acknowledged that legal experts disagreed about how much backing was needed for a trade ban. “You can always find different lawyers who come up with different ideas,” she said.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar accused Kallas of an “obsessive campaign against Israel” in a post on X. “There was no consensus. There was no qualified majority. In fact, there was no majority at all,” he wrote, adding, “Tricks like this do nothing to advance our shared interests.”
The EU has hotly debated measures against Israel as settlements in the West Bank have expanded and settler violence has sharply intensified over recent years. The Israeli NGOs Peace Now and Kerem Navot said in a report last week that “the current Israeli government has advanced de facto annexation of the West Bank at an unprecedented pace.”
The ministers considered measures including a stricter export licensing system, higher tariffs and a partial or outright ban on goods produced over the pre-1967 lines. The options were first presented in a paper last week by the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, as pressure mounted from European governments.
Kallas said these potential moves were not “options against Israel,” but “options against the illegal settlements that undermined the two-state solution.” She told reporters before the meeting that member states had been pressing for a trade ban on Israeli settlements, saying, “Everyone agrees that the situation in the West Bank is really intolerable.”
In May, the EU sanctioned Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians after Hungary’s new government, led by Peter Magyar, gave its approval and allowed the states to reach a consensus.
To protest the Gaza war, the commission last year proposed suspending the EU’s free trade agreement with Israel as set out under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the cornerstone of economic and political cooperation between Europe and Israel. The proposal was not advanced because it lacked the majority support of 15 member states.
The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, accounting for 33.1% of its imports and 29.4% of its exports in 2025, according to a summary on the European Commission website, which did not provide data on settler goods. The free trade agreement does not apply to goods originating from Israeli businesses located over the pre-1967 lines.
Revoking the association agreement requires unanimous approval from the EU’s 27 member states, while a partial suspension, such as freezing the free trade agreement, calls for a qualified majority. Germany, Italy, Hungary and Czechia have consistently opposed such suspensions.
Israel’s most vocal critics in Europe, including Ireland and Spain, have pushed for suspending the association agreement along with proposing their own import bans at the national level. Ireland now holds the rotating presidency of the European Council, a six-month term that ends in December 2026.
The legal basis of trade restrictions on Israel lies at the heart of debates in the EU. Support from a qualified majority is sufficient to enact a commercial policy, while changes in the common foreign and security policy — such as sanctions — require unanimity.
Some legal scholars have argued that an EU ban on imports from Israeli settlements should be imposed as a trade measure rather than a sanction, making it easier to pass.
A group of 40 scholars said in an open letter last month to Kallas, trade chief Maroš Šefčovič and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen that a blanket ban on settlement imports had a legal basis under the EU’s common commercial policy. Claims that unanimity was needed for the prohibition were “grounded in political rather than legal considerations,” they said.
The scholars also referenced an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice in 2024, which said that Israel’s military control of Palestinian territories in the West Bank constituted an illegal occupation.
“In that regard, it should be noted that the EU Court of Justice has ruled that, in its acts, the EU is ‘bound to observe international law in its entirety,’” they said.
Daniel Mariaschin, Honorary CEO of the pro-Israel Jewish advocacy organization B’nai Brith International, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that reducing trade “would only weaken one of Europe’s most important partnerships in the region.”
“There are those within the EU who are looking for any way to undercut Israel’s international standing, and this is yet another example,” Mariaschin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors
(JTA) — The president of PEN America resigned over the weekend in protest of a report on boycotts targeting Jewish and Israeli authors, part of yet another round of internal division over Israel at the literary free-speech institution.
Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and Bard College professor, told The Atlantic he was stepping down because he believed the PEN report, “A Silent Moratorium,” failed to defend the free-speech rights of participants in the movement to boycott Israel.
“It’s the First Amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu told the publication. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
The author did not respond to multiple Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment, but in an Instagram post Monday alluded to an interest in creating a new organization to rival the prominent nonprofit, which defends the free expression rights other writers.
In response to an interview request, PEN sent a statement to JTA saying it was “grateful” for Mengestu’s leadership and would “respect” his decision. The statement also alluded to PEN’s own past turmoil: “We tell hard stories, in politically challenging moments, about writers from a range of perspectives, even when it’s uncomfortable for us given our own recent history.”
In its report, published on its blog, PEN described “Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.” Interview subjects include several Israel critics, as well as literary agents who assert that they face more difficulties signing Jewish authors after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and amid the subsequent war in Gaza. The report also repeatedly cited a JTA report about a 2024 viral list of “Zionist” authors to boycott.
Among other details, PEN’s report revealed that Israeli novelist Etgar Keret and public radio host Ira Glass had cancelled a planned live event in Australia over fears of threats and protest.
“This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all,” according to the report.
In addition to the report, PEN also altered its institutional policy toward cultural boycotts, which the organization has long opposed. Although its report on Jewish authors asserted that boycotts “threaten the free expression rights” of their targets, the revised guidelines say that the group will also defend the right of writers to participate in boycotts.
Mengestu’s resignation comes at a perilous moment for Jews facing cultural boycotts, both within the standard-bearers of PEN and elsewhere. PEN’s Jewish former longtime CEO stepped down in 2024 following months of blowback from rank-and-file authors who felt the organization was insufficiently critical of Israel and caused PEN to cancel a festival for global authors.
Since the leadership change, PEN leadership has published and retracted a condemnation of a boycott effort trained at an Israeli comedian and also published a report cataloguing Israel’s “cultural destruction in Gaza.”
Mengestu had assumed the role of board president in 2025. But PEN’s report about Jewish and Israeli writers on Thursday, he wrote, “makes clear that [change] will not happen.”
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “deeply troubled” by Mengestu’s resignation Monday. “Freedom of expression means opposing efforts to boycott, silence, or exclude writers because of their identity or nationality,” the organization tweeted, saying that the author’s decision to leave PEN over his objections to the report on Jewish authors “sends a chilling message.” Jewish authors also objected.
“Imagine running a free expression org and resigning because it refuses to blacklist authors based on their nationality,” the author David Zweig wrote on X, musing whether Mengestu would object to boycotting authors from his birth country: “Ethiopia doesn’t exactly have a good human rights record.”
In response to The Atlantic’s story that quoted sources from inside PEN who were critical of his resignation, Mengestu wrote a lengthy Instagram post Monday in which he stated, “This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” criticized past PEN reports critical of the BDS movement, and added, “What PEN America fails to understand is that boycott is a form of dialogue.”
He announced his intention to “help make something better,” receiving affirmative comments from notable authors including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Angela Flournoy, Jewish pro-Palestinian novelist Jess Row and Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Moser, author of a forthcoming history of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Other Jewish authors on the left were among those defending Mengestu’s decision to step down.
“Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows,” author Sarah Schulman wrote on Facebook. Calling PEN’s blog about Jews “one of those fake anti-semitism pieces,” Schulman added, “If PEN wants to survive, they have to get out of the Israel/Zionism business.”
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Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide
(JTA) — The Church of England’s legislative body voted Monday to encourage churches across England to engage with a document produced by Palestinian Christians that accuses Israel of genocide despite requests from Jewish organizations and Britain’s chief rabbi to reject it.
The document is titled “Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide” and is also known as Kairos II, after the Palestinian Christian movement Kairos Palestine that produced it. It describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide, states that Israel is a “colonial enterprise built on racism,” and says decades of “occupation,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The vote on Monday does not adopt the accusations as church doctrine but says the church should hear the documents as “heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians,” and to engage with them in order to better understand the conflict.
Ahead of the debate in York, several Jewish organizations expressed concerns, and Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis asked Synod members to reject the amendment. Mirvis called Kairos II “deeply concerning” and that it “risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building” between Christians and Jews.
“It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood,” he said.
Afterwards, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Phil Rosenberg, issued a statement calling the passage of the motion “highly problematic.”
“Kairos Palestine may come from a place of genuine pain, but the falsehoods and distortions of Kairos II, including its erasure of Jewish identity and experience, is a prescription for more division and not the answer to conflict in the Middle East,” he said.
“This document reflects the pain and trauma of the Palestinian people. As a pastor, I hear the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers — a cry that rises from the ruins of Gaza, and from the violence and oppression of the West Bank,” she said.
She added, ”I also hear the concerns of the chief rabbi, the co-leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, and the Board of Deputies, and I thank them for their honesty.” She said the church remained opposed to antisemitism and committed to safety for Israelis as well as Palestinians.
The Synod debate followed Mullally’s visit to the West Bank in June, where she met Palestinian Christian communities in Birzeit. During the visit she said, “I will use my role as Archbishop to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve.”
The debate marks the ascendance of Israel-related issues in another major church, after the Catholic Church’s Pope Leo XIV angered Jewish groups soon after being elected last year by endorsing an investigation into whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
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