I was today-years-old when I learned that Israeli forces train American police.
I learned more about the program; which U.S. city police departments participated, the fact that ICE executives were there, etc. Afterward, all of the issues we’ve had with policing in America suddenly had an origin.
A donor to the program said that when trainees return to the U.S., “They are Zionists.”
Israeli forces are training American police. Trainers from a country that has zero respect for human life, human rights, or civil rights — evidenced by their refusal to follow International law and their human rights violations (report).
Not to mention the Palestinians who are attacked, forced out of their homes, or killed in the West Bank in Israeli settler violence.
To be clear, the comment about civil and human rights is my opinion.
It was formed from the evidence I’ve seen with my own eyes.
Evidence of snipers intentionally targeted children (UN Commission report), Israel’s intentional starvation of an entire population (leading to the deaths of children), statements from Israeli Government officials, how Israel is now forcing up to 2 million Palestinians into a small area with the characteristics of a concentration camp — Israel Katz called it a “humanitarian compound,” and the torture and violent sexual assault happening inside Israeli Prisons (New York Times/BT’selem).
For more than 30 years, Georgia has been running a quiet pipeline between American police departments and the Israeli security state.
It has a name: the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, or GILEE — a program housed at Georgia State University that has sent Georgia police chiefs, sheriffs, and command staff to train in Israel since 1992. They have also brought Israeli police officials to train in Atlanta in return.
Roughly 1,250 law enforcement executives have gone through GILEE‘s exchange programs, and tens of thousands more have attended its workshops and conferences.
The U.S. Department of Justice subsidizes the program through grants to Georgia police departments.
Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus — one of the biggest right-wing donors in the country — poured at least $1.25 million into GILEE between 2005 and 2022.
And now Atlanta has an 85-acre, $118 million training complex to anchor that ecosystem: the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as Cop City, which opened in April 2025 over the objections of more than 100,000 Atlantans who signed a referendum petition the city simply ignored.
The Cop City connection
To be precise about what’s documented: Israeli forces don’t run classes inside Cop City.
A structural connection runs through money and people.
The Atlanta Police Foundation — a private entity that raised the corporate half of Cop City’s funding — shares an overlapping network of wealthy backers with GILEE, including Marcus and several of AIPAC‘s top donors.
Every Atlanta police chief has participated in GILEE, according to its founder.
The officers who train at Cop City are led by command staff steeped in Israeli policing doctrine, and internal documents show nearly half of Cop City’s trainees will come from outside Georgia — meaning the tactics learned there spread nationally.
Organizers have also drawn a darker parallel: Cop City‘s mock village echoes Israel’s Urban Warfare Training Center in the Negev desert — the sprawling replica city nicknamed “Mini Gaza” — where the Israeli military rehearsed the urban combat tactics it later unleashed on actual Gaza.
The Black Alliance for Peace called for abolishing both, describing Cop City as “designed to refine the tactics of urban warfare and repression.”
ADL Regional Director
[Participants] “come back and they are Zionists.”
What are American cops learning?
This is the question at the heart of the “Deadly Exchange” campaign launched by the anti-zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace.
Israeli police and military operate an occupation. Their daily work includes checkpoints, mass surveillance of Palestinians, administrative detention without charges, and crowd suppression that human rights organizations — including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — have documented as part of a system of apartheid.
Those are the “best practices” on display and the consequences show up at home.
Organizer Musa Springer told The Real News that racial profiling is “sewn into the tactics” American officers are taught — and that Black residents and organizers increasingly get treated like terrorists.
GILEE‘s own founding director, Robert Friedmann, has a long record of anti-Muslim statements, once declaring: “There is no Islamophobia. There is knife-o-phobia.”
Georgia is not alone
The exchange pipeline is national, run largely through two pro-Israel organizations:
The Anti-Defamation League has flown American police executives to Israel through its National Counter-Terrorism Seminar since 2003, with more than 200 top-ranking officials participating.
A 2015 ADL delegation included executives from ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service, and police departments in Chicago, Las Vegas, Austin, Seattle, Oakland, and Miami-Dade.
An ADL regional director bragged that participants “come back and they are Zionists.”
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JINSA — the Jewish Institute for National Security of America — has run its Law Enforcement Exchange Program since 2002, sending at least 200 officers to Israel and hosting U.S. conferences reaching more than 10,500 law enforcement personnel.
The NYPD went furthest of all: it has maintained its own office inside Israeli police headquarters since 2012.
After a decade of these exchanges, the NYPD was exposed running a “Demographics Unit” that spied on entire Muslim communities — mapping where people ate and prayed, treating ordinary life as suspicious.
The LAPD sent officers starting in 2002, where Israeli companies pitched them facial recognition and drone technology.
Departments in Baltimore, D.C., Baton Rouge, and dozens of other cities have participated.
The organizations behind these trips insist they’re benign.
JINSA maintains that its delegations focus on management and policy, not physical tactics.
But documented itineraries tell the whole story: tours of maximum-security Gilboa Prison, paramilitary riot units, and occupied Hebron, whose downtown was emptied of Palestinians for a fortified settlement.
You don’t tour an occupation to learn community policing.
American communities — especially Black, brown, Muslim, and immigrant communities — deserve police accountable to civil rights law, not departments modeling themselves on forces that international human rights bodies accuse of apartheid and war crimes.
Every city with an exchange program should face the question Atlanta’s organizers keep asking: who, exactly, are our police learning to see as the enemy?
