Seattle City Council won't bar police from training with Israeli forces

• Published date: 28 September 2021
• Author: BEN SALES/JTA
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The bill, which was defeated by a vote of 5-4 at the council's meeting on Sept. 20, was conceived following the May conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Its lead sponsor was a socialist council member, Kshama Sawant, who also led a protest in June seeking to block an Israeli cargo ship from docking at Seattle's port.

The defeat of the bill marks at least the third vote this month in which a major local anti-Israel motion brought in the wake of the May conflict did not pass. Two weeks ago, the Burlington, Vermont, city council voted to withdraw a resolution to boycott Israel. Last week, the teachers union in Los Angeles voted to "indefinitely" delay a boycott vote.

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In Seattle, Sawant initially sought to ban the city's police from training with Israel's military or police forces. The bill was later modified to ban training with the military or police of any country that is not party to certain international human rights treaties, or that has been found by an international court or the United Nations to have violated human rights conventions.

Human rights groups as well as the United Nations General Assembly have accused Israel of violating the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that "the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."

The bill followed a years-long campaign by pro-Palestinian groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace, opposing US police delegations to Israel. More than 1,000 senior American police officers have participated in such delegations, which seek to learn from Israeli counterterrorism and security practices.

Some of the groups that oppose such delegations have called them a "deadly exchange" in which American police forces adopt Israeli forces' abusive practices. Trip organizers say that allegation is false, with some saying that suggestions that Israel is to blame for racist policing practices in the United States amounts to antisemitism.

In the debate ahead of the vote on Sept. 20, council members said they had spoken with Jewish groups opposed to the bill as well as local groups that supported it. An amendment that would have expanded the bill to prohibit police exchanges with all countries failed, in part because the Seattle Police Department frequently works with police forces in Canada, less than a two-hour drive...