JINSAHomeland Security Archives - JINSA

Defending the Homeland Requires a Global Presence

Nolan Judd — Fri, 09 May 2025 13:13:57 +0000

For much of the 19th century, Americans thought that the broad expanses of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans protected our homeland from enemy attack. They believed that the United States was blessed with what historian C. Vann Woodward dubbed “free security.” As he noted:

Throughout most of its history the United States has enjoyed a remarkable degree of military security, physical security from hostile attack and invasion. This security was not only remarkably effective, but it was relatively free. Free security was based on nature’s gift of three vast bodies of water interposed between this country and any other power that might constitute a serious menace to its safety. There was not only the Atlantic to the east and the Pacific to the west, but a third body of water, considered so impenetrable as to make us virtually unaware of its importance, the Arctic Ocean and its great ice cap to the north. The security thus provided was free in the sense that it was enjoyed as a bounty of nature in place of the elaborate and costly chains of fortifications and even more expensive armies and navies that took a heavy toll of the treasuries of less fortunate countries and placed severe tax burdens upon the backs of their people.

Many historians took issue with the notion that the relative security that the U.S. enjoyed was free, noting that for the bulk of the century after the War of 1812, the U.S. sheltered behind the implicit protection of the British Royal Navy. That fact notwithstanding, Woodward was certainly correct about prevailing American views. Most political leaders and much of the public believed that forward presence was not needed to be safe in our own hemisphere.

In the first half of the 20th century, we learned that allowing hostile aggressive powers to dominate Europe and the Pacific Ocean littoral created significant dangers to our security, even if they seemed far away. The experience of World War II convinced most members of America’s national security elite that the future defense of the United States would have to begin well beyond the nation’s continental frontiers. As historian Michael Sherry concluded in 1987 in his pioneering study of American air power, policymakers came to believe that “American weakness had encouraged Axis ambitions in the 1930s” and that as a result “powerful military forces could deter or subdue future troublemakers.” Pearl Harbor and the new weapons developed subsequent to it demonstrated the nation’s nakedness to sudden attack and its need for unprecedented forces-in-being to ward off the coming blitzkrieg.” The result was a consensus that America’s national security in the future would require forward defense, the ability to project power to Europe, East Asia and the Middle East which, in turn, would require allies and partners around the world to sustain a globe-girdling system of bases and facilities.

In the second half of the 20th century the development of long-range aircraft, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and nuclear weapons underscored that overseas developments can directly threaten the U.S. homeland. We finally recognized that to defend the United States we must engage overseas to prevent future wars—which might ultimately involve us—from starting. The alliances we have built over the last 70 years offer the best possible means to discourage potential aggressors from starting local wars that will inevitably become global. They allow us to maintain the global commons—including freedom of the seas—across which worldwide commerce flows, creating the unprecedented increase in wealth and prosperity that has developed since World War II. The ability to provide defense in depth and rapidly project power forward to regions of concern became the fundamental basis of America’s unique global role.

Today the United States is facing two highly dangerous, aggressive, autocratic, and expansionist foreign leaders. Yet despite the traditional emphasis on forward defense and the importance of U.S. bases as a form of reassurance for allies there have been persistent calls from the Trump administration for reductions of the U.S. overseas presence.

Vladimir Putin, who famously declared that the breakup of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century, has been pursuing the reconstitution of the Soviet empire since he took power. His forces occupy parts of Georgia and Moldova; he has taken Crimea; three years ago, he began a bloody and merciless full-scale war to conquer Ukraine. He has made clear that Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia are in his sights. And he covets the recreation of a buffer zone to Russia’s west along the lines of the defunct Warsaw Pact, a sphere of influence which would allow him to dominate Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania. In addition, his regime has declared the NATO alliance to be Russia’s enemy, routinely threatens the use of Russian nuclear weapons in response to policies he opposes, and has been carrying out a clandestine campaign of sabotage against Western communications cables, armaments factories and warehouses, and transportation grids.

Half a world away, Xi Jinping, under a similar belief that China has been denied a leading role in the world by “the West,” seeks to create a de facto empire that dominates the Asia-Pacific region. His regime has declared that the South China Sea, a key waterway through which one-third of global maritime trade flows, should be declared “an internal Chinese lake,” subject to control by Beijing. China also seeks to control the two key chokepoints, the Malacca and Lombok Straits, that offer access to the South China Sea from the west. Xi has made clear his intention of reunifying China with Taiwan, with force if he cannot achieve it by coercion. The Beijing regime has, further, claimed parts of the exclusive economic zones of several of its neighbors and has used armed force to protect Chinese commercial activity in those areas.

Ominously, both Russia and China are expanding their intercontinental and particularly their regional nuclear forces. And both have demonstrated a complete and total disregard for any treaties or obligations they might have undertaken.

Should either Putin or Xi believe they can take their neighbors’ territory without suffering significant cost, they might attempt to do so. The result, an imbalance in global power, a possible denial of U.S. access to areas of the world vital to us, and an invitation for further aggression could result in war, including possibly the use of nuclear weapons—all of which could have catastrophic effects on our own security.

It becomes imperative, therefore, to make clear to both Putin and Xi that the cost of such attacks would be prohibitive, that they would significantly exceed any gains they might hope to make. Only the United States can provide the military capability to make such a threat. And we can only do so credibly if we are present in those regions. While there are costs involved in forward presence, they pale in comparison to the costs of the likely global war that would result if deterrence failed. The recent bipartisan report of the NDS Commission estimates that a global war that began in the Indo-Pacific could cost the global economy as much as $10 trillion—and that is probably an underestimate.

All this said, it is worth raising the question of what benefits, precisely, the U.S. derives from what some have quantified as a $55 billion to $80 billion annual expense. Many so-called realists who seek to diminish the U.S. presence overseas, in order to reduce defense spending and avoid foreign entanglements that might lead to “endless wars,” never acknowledge that host nations provide support and some compensation for U.S. bases, but it is still worth reminding ourselves of the non-monetary compensation the U.S. gets from its overseas presence.

Base access enables us to deploy forces forward. Repeated studies by the RAND Corporation have demonstrated that the presence of significant U.S. military forces reduces the likelihood of major interstate conflict or escalation of local conflicts into major war. Our presence sends the signal that the U.S. is committed to and can prevent a fait accompli. It also can also provide opportunities for training and improving interoperability with allies, strengthening deterrence by conveying to potential adversaries that they will face a powerful counter coalition if they choose to pursue aggression. Reassurance of allies is a particularly important and underappreciated element of U.S. base presence overseas. U.S. bases are a visible sign of U.S. commitment and willingness to extend U.S. military deterrent power to friends and allies.

The U.S. presence can also block adversaries from seeking precisely the advantages described above for themselves by arranging for access or basing themselves. The small U.S. deployment in Syria, for example, has both helped keep a lid on a resurgence of ISIS terrorism and provided U.S. overwatch of Iranian efforts to rebuild its proxy network that Israel has done so much to weaken over the last few years. When the U.S. ignores a region or vacates its positions there, we can be sure that our adversaries will seek to move in. One can already see the PRC seeking precisely these kinds of access and advantages in places where the U.S. has been chronically inattentive like Latin America, Africa, and especially the South Pacific.

The bottom line is that while U.S. forward deployed forces, in concert with and assisted by the military forces of our allies, defend allied territory—the first targets of potential aggression—they also provide a jumping off point for U.S. forces in case deterrence fails in any major contingency. The record shows that their very existence helps to prevent war and the catastrophic consequences that would engulf us too were a global conflict to break out. In doing so they also protect the American homeland. And that makes our bases and forward presence a bargain when compared to the alternative.

Originally published in the Dispatch.

Amb. Eric Edelman is a JINSA Distinguished Scholar and counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, as well as former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Finland and undersecretary of defense for policy.

Franklin C. Miller served for three decades as a senior nuclear policy and arms control official in the Pentagon and on the National Security Council staff. He is a principal at the Scowcroft Group.

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For the Sake of Israelis and Palestinians, Israel Must Completely Defeat Hamas in Gaza

Nolan Judd — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 15:46:09 +0000

It is fitting that Israeli soldiers finally killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the period between the one-year anniversary of the October 7 attack, and the Hebrew calendar anniversary on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah.

The terrorist leader’s death marks a major milestone in the conflict. But it does not — and cannot — mark the end of Israel’s war in Gaza, or beyond. Those who would urge Israel simply to “move on” fail to understand the sheer brutality that Sinwar orchestrated, and the subsequent necessity of Israel’s operations to defeat Hamas and rescue the hostages.

Both of us witnessed Hamas’ brutality as part of programming organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), including an annual trip to Israel for retired senior US military officers.

Yet, even given our background, we were horrified by the raw footage of the attack, much of which Hamas terrorists filmed themselves, and a somber walk about and firsthand observation of one of the many devastated kibbutzim, Kfar Azza.

More alarming is that the full scope of the October 7 atrocities still has not reached the American public. The coordinated air, land, and sea invasion, and the barbaric violence against civilians, including rape, sexual violence, and mutilation, indicated this was not a spontaneous outbreak of violence — but a prepared assault fueled by the conditioned hatred of Jews.

Beyond the death and destruction, the October 7 attack also overturned Israelis’ sense of security and eroded deterrence against enemies even beyond Gaza.

But Sinwar also terrorized his own people. He served 22 years of four life sentences in Israeli prison for murdering Palestinians in his role as a brutal Hamas enforcer, until he was released in 2011 as part of a hostage release deal. Under his rule, life in Gaza even before 10/7 was subverted to Hamas’ military goals. Money and supplies were diverted, and civilian structures were appropriated to build “fortress Gaza” — turning the entire territory into a series of above- and below-ground fortified positions designed specifically for fighting the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Sinwar wanted to bring the fight to the streets of Gaza because he knew they housed a potent weapon against Israel — not any of the tunnels or hidden bombs, but the Palestinian civilians that Hamas would ensure were caught in the crossfire.

Recognizing that Hamas cannot defeat Israeli forces militarily, Sinwar’s strategy sought to maximize the number of civilian casualties in Gaza to rally international pressure against Israel.

With this strategy, Sinwar intentionally sacrificed the lives of thousands of Gazans, and turned that of hundreds of thousands into a living hell. As we detailed in a JINSA report following our trip, Hamas has serially violated international law by turning the civilian population of Gaza into human shields to hide its fighters and weapons inside hospitals, schools, humanitarian zones, and United Nations facilities. It tried to force civilians to remain in harm’s way, attacking those who sought to flee. For those lucky to escape, Hamas nevertheless ensured their suffering by repeatedly stealing humanitarian aid, preventing it from reaching the civilians who need it.

Hamas then weaponized this suffering against Israel, waging a disinformation campaign to blame Israel for civilian deaths and insufficient aid. Indeed, Hamas’s disinformation has generated public pressure that has led to widening public tensions between the United States and Israel, including pauses of key US weapons transfers and threats of an arms embargo.

One senior IDF officer told us that international pressure against Israel was more challenging to Israeli success than any battlefield complexities.

With Sinwar’s death, that pressure is already mounting again, urging Israel to declare victory and end in the war in Gaza. To be sure, the death of Sinwar, the man responsible for the deadliest attack against Jews since the Holocaust, sends a clear message that anyone who threatens Israeli lives will face justice. But it does not mark the end of the war in Gaza, nor the start of a new, more secure future for either Israelis or Palestinians.

This war is not about punishing the man responsible for 10/7. It is about ensuring that 10/7 can never happen again. It is about bringing home the remaining 100 hostages that were taken from their homes and kept, inhumanely, in tunnels for the last year. And it is about dismantling the remaining military capability of Hamas so that Gazans do not, once again, live under a terrorist regime. As long as Hamas persists in Gaza, these goals are not met and this war will continue.

The end of Sinwar is not the end of the war. Hamas will survive Sinwar unless Israel finishes its mission in Gaza. The United States should redouble its support for Israel to prevent the terrorist group’s next leader from rebuilding and not avoid pursuing victory for short term domestic political gain.

RADM Paul Becker, USN (ret.) served as Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and participated in JINSA’s 2024 Generals and Admirals Program. Ari Cicurel is Assistant Director of Foreign Policy at JINSA.

Originally published in Algemeiner.

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Fighting underground: The US military must learn from Israel’s experience

Nolan Judd — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 12:00:46 +0000

As Israel conducts limited ground operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, it already has encountered tunnels similar to the dangerous unseen combat it has fought for a year beneath Gaza.

Not for the first time, Israel is engaged in a new kind of fight that the United States will face in its future conflicts.

Just as the United States has learned from Israel’s wars in the past, the risks of tunnel warfare and how Israel is overcoming those challenges through coordinated troop maneuvers and technological adaptations should drive a shift in the US approach to subterranean combat.

The United States has a long history of learning from Israel’s wars. The 1973 Yom Kippur War had such a transformational effect that the US Army made the largest change to its doctrine since World War II. The Egyptian and Syrian armies’ use of new Soviet weapons and tactics that were more lethal and rapid, the ability of anti-tank weapons to neutralize more tanks in the first six days of the war than the United States had deployed throughout all of Europe, and tank battles occurring at much greater ranges than ever before shocked American defense planners preparing for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

After the war, the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) sent a team to Israel, whose findings led to the adoption of the AirLand Battle doctrine that would guide decades of thinking about winning a conventional war in Europe through close coordination between ground forces and aircraft.

Similarly, the wars under Gaza and southern Lebanon have shown how the subterranean environment poses challenges that US troops must be better prepared to fight. Tunnels will be a growing problem for Western-style militaries because they provide physical protection and create challenges for differentiating and isolating fighters from civilians.

Recognizing those advantages, Hamas spent nearly two decades fortifying Gaza with more than 350 miles of interconnected underground tunnels. They intentionally designed the urban landscape to enable attacks, protect Hamas fighters, and thwart IDF advances. Hezbollah built similar underground fortifications in southern Lebanon but over a much larger expanse of land.

Indeed, searching Hamas’s vast, subterranean labyrinth for terrorist fighters and hostages has been among the most difficult aspects of the war and has already proved a time-consuming process in southern Lebanon. Fighters have appeared suddenly from tunnels to quickly target Israeli soldiers before escaping through hidden passageways. Deep and fortified tunnels also held command-and-control centers, weapons production facilities, storage depots, and hostages.

Hamas and Hezbollah also constructed tunnels for strategic purposes as well. Building tunnels inside and below residential buildings, hospitals, schools, mosques, and United Nations facilities leveraged civilians as human shields to discourage Israeli operations. Despite Israel’s pledge to use precise military efforts to minimize collateral damage by distinguishing between terrorists and civilians, hiding fighters beneath civilian sites enabled the willful blindness about who Israeli strikes had targeted that fueled Hamas’s disinformation campaign, contributing to international pressure for Israel to stop the war prematurely.

Early in the war, Israel adapted after it became evident that its initial plan to collapse the tunnels with airstrikes or destroy the entry points would not be widely effective because of how expansive and deep the tunnels were and because such operations could be dangerous to the hostages. Instead, Israel utilized cameras mounted on drones or dogs and AI technology to detect threats so that Israeli forces could analyze the best means of responding.

In Gaza, the IDF quickly transformed its approach to subterranean operations while in contact with enemy fighters. A key adaptation was its implementation of new tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) for its troops to maneuver underground simultaneously with those moving above ground to use explosives that either completely destroy or render tunnels impassable.

After isolating the area around a tunnel entrance and establishing a secure perimeter to ensure there were no hidden entrances that terrorists could use to mount a surprise attack or escape, the IDF then sent in ground troops to defeat any threats, including with a liquid emulsion explosive that avoided the risk of inadvertent detonation on the surface.

Building on the decades of US experience in subterranean warfare in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam, examining Israel’s underground warfare could help the US and partner militaries prepare for operations against adversaries like Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea, who are growing increasingly close and learning from one another. As a senior Pentagon special operations official put it, it would be “foolish” to assume future fights won’t consist of a similar operational environment.

Borrowing from the IDF’s efforts to coordinate ground troops above and below ground as well as air assets, US doctrine and TTPs for subterranean warfare should emphasize the necessity to detect, analyze, differentiate, isolate, and defeat threats.

With the US military also seeking to transform while in contact with an enemy, just as the IDF continues to do, the US Defense Department should emphasize subterranean combat during collaborations with Israel about the future of warfare, expand the US-Israel anti-tunnel cooperation program to fund technologies that explore or collapse tunnels, and conduct regular subterranean warfare exercises with Israeli forces. Joint drills that focus on maneuvering troops simultaneously above and below ground and utilizing emergent technologies would have immense value to US missions from counterterrorism to hostage rescue.

Fighting underground is challenging in any scenario. Yet, Israel’s successful adaptations have once again provided a transformational model for the US military to study.

General David Perkins, USA (ret.) was the former Commanding General, US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) and a participant on the Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s (JINSA) 2019 Generals and Admirals Program.
Ari Cicurel is the Assistant Director of Foreign Policy at JINSA.

Originally published in Breaking Defense.

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Watch Webinar – The Melting Point with Gen Frank McKenzie

Nolan Judd — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 19:32:41 +0000

“As the leader of U.S. Central Command, I had direct operational responsibility for the strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, the ruthless general responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. service members. Iran had begun to doubt America’s will, which the strike on Soleimani then proved…. The situation in Iran has changed, but the Soleimani strike offers a lesson that is going unheeded.”

JINSA hosted Gen Frank McKenzie, former commander of U.S. Central Command and JINSA Hertog Distinguished Fellow, to discuss his new book The Melting Point, to learn the lessons he took away about deterring Iran, the Middle East, and the challenges of high command and war in the 21st century. The discussion was moderated by JINSA’s President and CEO Michael Makovsky, PhD.

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FOX News interview with JINSA Senior Fellow John Hannah reacts to withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan

Ethan Pupkin — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 14:27:31 +0000

John Hannah is a Senior Fellow at JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Defense and Strategy.

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Open Letter: Campaign at Tufts University on Banning Police Exchanges With Israel

Ethan Pupkin — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 14:32:02 +0000

The Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) sent an open letter yesterday to Tufts University President Anthony Monaco in response to a recent referendum passed by the student body calling on Tufts to end its participation in U.S.-Israel law enforcement exchange programs.

The effort at Tufts to denigrate and cancel such exchanges is part of a larger, deeply dishonest, and anti-Semitic campaign known as “Deadly Exchanges” that is part of the Boycott, Divest & Sanction (BDS) movement. BDS activists target JINSA because our Homeland Security Program is the preeminent program bringing together senior U.S. and Israeli law enforcement officials for a best practices exchange of counterterrorism and homeland security policies. While JINSA has not taken any participants from Tufts University on its program before, we are committed to fighting back against this nefarious campaign to harm U.S. national security.

We are proud of our program, grateful to the Israeli and American officers who participate, undeterred by the vote at Tufts, and committed to exposing the “Deadly Exchange” campaign for what it really is – propaganda from the BDS movement.

By Tufts University – Tufts Visual Identity, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45770008

Dear President Monaco,

We are a coalition of Tufts University alumni, donors, and senior law enforcement professionals who are writing to express concern about a recent campaign at Tufts to ban police exchanges with Israel.

The so-called “Deadly Exchange” campaign against police cooperation between the United States and Israel has been promoted by anti-Israel groups nationwide since 2017, as part of a broader push to erode public support for the Jewish state. It depicts police exchanges, and their sponsors in the American Jewish community, as driving violence against minorities in America, rather than sharing lessons that save and improve lives.

Efforts to link Israel and American Jewish organizations to incidents of police violence in the United States are rooted in readily refutable falsehoods. Now that they have appeared for the first time in the US as a campus referendum — which Jewish leaders at Tufts said “is more about vilifying Israel than addressing police reform” — we would like to set the record straight.

Law enforcement cooperation programs seek to leverage the decades of experience that Israel has tragically accumulated in dealing with mass casualty attacks, in order to best protect Americans of all backgrounds. They focus on subjects including the modus operandi of terrorist organizations, community policing, and minimizing casualties in the event of a hostage-taking situation, a mass shooting, or a terrorist incident.

These topics remain unfortunately relevant for schools and universities. As Kevin Maguire, the former Tufts police chief who participated in an exchange program in Israel in 2017, said last month, “Terror attacks in cities throughout the US, including Boston, and on college campuses, such as Ohio State University and some others have demonstrated the need for local and university police departments to prepare for potential terror attacks and to know how to prevent and respond to them.”

Our lead signatory, who designed the preeminent US-Israel police exchange program run by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), can likewise directly attest that it does not teach racial profiling, protest suppression, or arrest mechanics, or promote the targeting of vulnerable groups. Our law enforcement signatories can speak to the importance of the lessons that they learned during the program, and how their participation has made their communities safer.

The academy is a place to explore new and provocative ideas, and we strongly respect the right of students and faculty to freely debate, including about policing in America and police reform. Yet we also believe that when open falsehoods are being widely disseminated on campus, administrators can play an important and positive role by rejecting misinformation and acknowledging the benefits of programs that aim to improve public safety.

We applaud the university for committing not to act against the exchanges, and we urge administrators to do even more, and stand firm as the truth is challenged.

Sincerely,

Tufts Alumni:
Diana Ely Epstein ’67
Joan Bernheimer Sahl ’67
Bernard Shavitz ’61
Dr. Andrew Sklover ’62

Criminal Justice:
Steven L. Pomerantz Former Assistant Director of the FBI and Director of the Homeland Security Program at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)
Roland Sellon Chief of Police Mansfield, MA
James DiGianvittorio Chief of Police Middleton, MA
Helen Rafferty Deputy Chief of Police Canton, MA
Michael Morrissey District Attorney Norfolk County, MA
Kenneth Berkowitz Chief of Police Canton, MA
Lt. Col. Joseph Philbin Rhode Island State Police

Originally published in The Algemeiner

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Washington Free Beacon Quotes JINSA Homeland Security Program Director Steven Pomerantz on “Deadly Exchange” Campaign

Ethan Pupkin — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:09:46 +0000

BDS’s Latest Tool: Anti-Cop Sentiment
By Chrissy Clark

Dr. Zachi Evenor, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The anti-Israel movement is capitalizing on anti-police sentiment to expand its boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against the state of Israel.

Activists—including university professors—are arguing that the “anti-Black” sentiments in the American policing system stem from lessons learned in police officer exchange programs with Israel. Such activists claim that the only way to stop the alleged “militarization” of American law enforcement is for the country to divest entirely from the state of Israel.

The U.S.-Israel police exchange program was launched to address the counterterrorism needs of local law enforcement in both countries following the September 11 attacks. More than 200 U.S. federal, state, and local officers have traveled to Israel to discuss effective counterterrorism techniques. Contrary to activists’ claims, the program does not have a “field training” component nor does it teach officers how to use physical restraints.

In 2018, the Jewish Voice for Peace group founded the “End the Deadly Exchange” campaign, which aims to end international police conferences between the United States and Israel. The group claims that the exchange programs promote “worst practices” that “are shared to promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing practices that already exist in both countries.” Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of the police, the “Deadly Exchange” campaign has gained traction, particularly on college campuses.

Steven Pomerantz, director of the Homeland Security Program at the Jewish policy think tank JINSA and former assistant director of the FBI, told the Washington Free Beacon the “Deadly Exchange” campaign is gaining momentum because of a burgeoning alliance between anti-Israel and anti-racist organizers. “[Jewish Voice for Peace] sees this opportunity to marry these two hot issues—Israel and alleged police brutality—and they have done that,” Pomerantz said. “They’re growing with allies in the Black Lives Matter movement and certainly on college campuses … where law enforcement is unpopular.”

At Tufts University in November, student activists crafted a first-of-its-kind ballot measure demanding that “the Tufts administration prohibit [campus police] officers from attending military-led and/or similar international trips in the future, refine the vetting process to prevent prior attendees from being hired, and apologize for sending [Kevin Maguire], the former Tufts police chief, to a militarized training trip.” A similar resolution was passed by the city council of Durham, N.C., to “prevent the militarization” of the police.

Professors and faculty members at Tufts are also in favor of the ballot initiative and penned a letter to the university president applauding the Students for Justice in Palestine group—which kickstarted the on-campus campaign—for “breaking down barriers.” Three professors have played an outsized role in crafting the anti-Israel narrative on Tufts’s campus.

Amahl Bishara, the chair of the anthropology department, has been outspoken about ending the alleged “militarization” of the Tufts University Police Department. In 2018, Bishara condemned the university for sending officers to the Anti-Defamation League’s National Counter-Terrorism Seminar in Israel, saying that the “adoption of Israeli approaches to security would endanger … students, staff, and faculty.” And in a recent workshop organized by the Boston Socialist Unity Project, she argued that only through divestment from Israel can American police departments become places of “intersectional, anti-racist activism.”

Greg Thomas, a Black studies professor, has likewise drawn a link between supposed Israeli “militarization” and the anti-police narrative. Thomas has written that “there is a radical kinship between Palestinians and Black Americans” because both have lived in “political captivity.” The professor has also propped up the founder of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton, who claimed that “Israel was created by Western imperialism and is maintained by Western firepower.”

A third professor, Thomas Abowd, teaches a class called “Colonizing Palestine” that includes lectures that show bloodied “Palestinian kids under the occupation.” Abowd was previously relieved of his teaching duties at Wayne State University in Michigan and proceeded to blame “money from Zionist community members and alumni” for his departure. Tufts has said it does not endorse the beliefs Abowd advocates in his courses.

Despite the pushback from faculty and students, a university spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon the school does not agree that its police department is “militarized” nor does it plan to apologize for sending officers on a sponsored trip to Israel.

“We strongly disagree with any characterization that the Tufts University Police Department is ‘militarized,'” the spokesman said. “[The department’s] trip to Israel … was not a military training program, nor was it intended to serve as an endorsement of any particular policy or policing strategy.”

Originally published in The Washington Free Beacon

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The Algemeiner Quotes Steve Pomerantz on Police Exchange Programs

Ethan Pupkin — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 20:45:32 +0000

Top Jewish Group Slams Quaker Publication for Spreading Blood Libel Blaming Israel for US Police Violence
by Benjamin Kerstein

By Elvert Barnes from Baltimore, Maryland, USA – IMG_0263, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92728934

A top Jewish group slammed a Canadian Quaker publication on Sunday for spreading what it called a “big lie” by claiming that Israel was responsible for US police violence against minorities.

The article by Sara avMaat appeared in the publication Quaker Concern, and asserted that the “racism that pervades our society” was revealed by the “increasing militarization of the police,” which she alleged was a result of “exchange visits and joint training that takes place between Israeli personnel and North American law enforcement professionals.”

She quoted from a book by far-left Israeli-American activist and BDS supporter Jeff Halper, who falsely charged that the training included tactics such as “interrogation bordering on torture, use of aggressive and disproportionate force, administrative detention and mass arrests, and aggressive crowd control.”

AvMaat then cited an already-discredited claim by Amnesty International and the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace on the matter. She also made a guilt‐by‐association argument by highlighting a public radio report that police in Minnesota, where George Floyd was killed, participated in the training, though there was no indication that this was in any way connected to Floyd’s death.

In response, the Simon Wiesenthal Center tweeted, “Latest #Quaker intersectionality outrage doing the Lord’s work by spreading another big lie — defaming #Israel for US police officers who violate their oath to protect all citizens. Carrying water for Palestinian demonizing Jewish state.”

The claim that US police learn violent tactics from Israel that disproportionately harm minorities, nicknamed “Deadly Exchange,” is false and has been thoroughly discredited, though it is still spread by antisemitic and racist organizations and individuals, mainly on the political left but also including Jew‐hating reactionaries such as Louis Farrakhan.

It is widely seen as a blood libel in the Jewish community.

In June, Israel Police foreign media spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld tweeted, in reference to the Floyd case, “There is no procedure that allows an officer of the #israel police dept to carry out an arrest by placing a knee on the neck of a suspect.”

“None of police Counter terrorism training that #Israel national police provide to foreign law enforcement officers involves such a measure,” he added.

Steven L. Pomerantz, a former assistant FBI director and the head of the Law Enforcement Exchange Program at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), which helps organize such training programs, told The Algemeiner, “Exchange programs began as a direct result of 9/11 at the specific request of senior law enforcement officers. It focused on counter-terrorism responsibilities of law enforcement, both prevention and response, and was aimed at only senior law enforcement officials.”

The programs, he said, included “no hands-on training and no tactical training.”

Ironically, he pointed out, far from promoting violence against minorities, “more recent programs have included subjects such as improving relations between law enforcement agencies and minority communities, and recruiting in minority communities.”

A fundamentalist Christian sect now widely identified with the political left, the Quakers have a long history of virulent anti-Israel activism, and during World War II opposed the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany.

Originally published in The Algemeiner

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Russia’s Attempt to Steal COVID-19 Research Signals a Cybersecurity Crisis in U.S.

Ethan Pupkin — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 18:53:31 +0000

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The unprecedented hack of high-profile Twitter accounts and Russia’s recent attempt to steal coronavirus research could signal a growing cybersecurity crisis.

With an election in November the ability to manipulate politically powerful and market-moving social media accounts — including those of former President Obama, current Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian West, Elon Musk and Apple — should be a wakeup call about U.S. exposure to vulnerable technologies.

While the Twitter cyber scammers identity is unclear, the increasing tendency of adversaries to launch cyberattacks against the United States and its allies requires renewed attention from America’s policymakers. For better deterrence and resilience, Congress should provide additional funding and authority to nonmilitary agencies that can better establish norms in cyberspace.

Ideally, nations want to communicate deterrent messages to avoid a military conflict. By signaling what America will punish in the cyber domain, it can prevent accidental escalation and communicate potential costs for future cyberattacks. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union slowly established acceptable boundaries for attribution, confirmation and retribution, and how to signal one another over time.

The same sort of quasi-ground rules need to be developed in the cyber domain. In cyber, minor actions can have significant outcomes and trigger significant responses because the major cyber nations have not defined or established cyber norms and redline offenses well enough with sufficient condemnation or economic costs. Cyber actors must understand U.S. redlines and the severe consequences for crossing them.

Recognizing that America faces growing challenges in the cyber domain, Congress enacted the bipartisan Cyberspace Solarium Commission to evaluate current strategy and propose recommendations. However, its report, like the 2018 Department of Defense Cyber Strategy, largely avoids discussing signaling.

To address this gap, Congress should further delineate legal authorities and responsibilities for the Departments of Defense, State and Homeland Security, as well as the FBI. While the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 helped clarify the distinctions between the military’s authority under Title 10 of the U.S. code compared to the intelligence agencies ability under Title 50, the State Department and Homeland Security’s crucial role in cyber defense requires greater attention.

Homeland Security has outlined the 16 areas of critical infrastructure. However, the United States lacks a policy statement outlining redlines for each area and how cyberattacks would translate into responses inside or outside of the cyber domain.

With its creation in 2018, Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has a mandate to defend against cyberattacks that target the government — alongside the FBI — and critical infrastructure. Congress could better enable CISA by requiring that critical private-sector companies coordinate with it and mandate that they timely report cyber intrusions.

At the end of last year, Congress took a good step by providing a $334 million increase to CISA’s budget over the previous year’s funding for a total of $2 billion. Clearly-defined cyber responsibilities and authorities, however, need further refining. A recently proposed House Appropriations Homeland Security subcommittee bill would provide CISA with $2.25 billion, with $11.6 million to create a Joint Cyber Center for National Cyber Defense. These increases are noteworthy, but the budget for this new agency needs a further 50% increase for it to execute its mission effectively.

Next, legislation should institutionalize support for diplomacy about the cyber domain. One of the Solarium Commission’s recommendation for an assistant secretary of State for cybersecurity could help coordinate links between international trade, information sharing and cybersecurity. The new position has great potential to improve signaling and could better define costs for unacceptable behavior.

A new bill in the House has also called for the creation of a Senate-confirmed “Cyber Director,” a major recommendation of the Solarium report. The United States needs a point person for cyber to create accountability, but the idea of a cyber director has faced pushback from the White House, who has yet to publicize their own alternative.

Instead, Congress could conduct oversight through the proposed assistant secretary of State for cybersecurity or Joint Cyber Center for National Cyber Defense.

As Congress evaluates proposed reforms, Israel’s reorganization of its cyber defense agencies offers a useful model to study. In 2018, Israel merged the National Cyber Security Authority and the Israeli National Cyber Bureau to form the National Cyber Directorate. This new organization now defends Israeli cyberspace and reports directly to the prime minister. American policymakers should consult with their Israeli counterparts to examine how this change has effected Israel’s recent cyber battles with Iran.

Likewise, Israel can be a crucial cyber partner. Both countries previously collaborated a decade ago on the Stuxnet computer virus that infected Iran’s nuclear program. Similar cooperation should continue in the future.

There is also room for broader cyber defense and intelligence cooperation between America and Israel. The Jewish Institute for National Security of America recommended raising Israel’s information-sharing status to be on par with the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. This would be a bold policy move that would help both U.S.-Israeli cyber cooperation.

America needs to upgrade its approach in the cyber domain and better utilize all levers of national power. Focusing on its nonmilitary capabilities would be an enormous benefit going forward.

RADM David T. Glenn, USGC (ret.) was the director, Command, Control, Communication and Computer (C4) Systems and Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the U.S. Cyber Command. He was a participant on the Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s (JINSA) 2012 Generals and Admirals Program to Israel. Ari Cicurel is a Senior Policy Analyst at JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Defense & Strategy.

Originally published in Washington Times

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JTA Quotes JINSA Homeland Security Program Director Steven Pomerantz on US-Israel Police Exchanges

Ethan Pupkin — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 14:37:58 +0000

More than 1,000 senior US police officers have visited Israel. Here’s what they learn from Israel’s police force – and why it’s controversial.
By Ben Sales

By Israel Police, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88592204

In June, as protests against aggressive and abusive policing in the United States took hold, so did a false accusation about a group of programs that sends American police chiefs to learn from their counterparts in Israel.

“The tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services,” a British actress told a newspaper in one illustrative incident. A member of the British Parliament was demoted for sharing the story laudingly on social media.

Over the past couple of months, the accusation has popped up elsewhere. It’s the latest version of a claim that has circulated in anti-Zionist circles for years — that U.S. police delegations to Israel serve to import brutal and militarized policing to the U.S.

The organizations running the trips say that beyond being false — the trips do not teach physical, on-the-ground tactics such as chokeholds — the claim that Israel encourages American police brutality is an anti-Semitic canard.

“These types of instances existed long before any of these professional leadership exchanges happened, and are part and parcel of the history of the U.S.,” said George Selim, senior vice president of programs at the Anti-Defamation League, which runs police delegations to Israel, regarding American police brutality. “Seeking to link Israel as a state to U.S. police misconduct is a bizarre excuse for the centuries-long history of racism and injustice that has been part of American history, really since our founding.”

The main organization opposing the delegations has been Jewish Voice for Peace, or JVP, an anti-Zionist group that published a 2018 report calling the trips a “Deadly Exchange.” The report says they normalize “the violent repression of communities and movements the government defines as threatening.”

Based on the report, JVP has campaigned for an end to police delegations to Israel, and has succeeded in banning them and other international police exchanges in Durham, North Carolina. It also has successfully pressured two New England police officials to withdraw from delegations.

Now JVP is seeking to temper the anti-Israel criticism tied to recent protests of police brutality. In a June update to its “Deadly Exchange” campaign, JVP said that “Suggesting that Israel is the start or source of American police violence or racism shifts the blame from the United States to Israel” and “furthers an antisemitic ideology.”

But JVP is still campaigning against the trips — not, they say, as the driver of police abuse in the United States — but because the group says such exchanges allow police forces from two countries with histories of racial discrimination and allegations of oppressive policing to swap strategies.

“On these trips it’s about sharing and swapping ideas and tactics, but that’s not to say that the mission from the United States officials wasn’t there to begin with,” said Stefanie Fox, JVP’s executive director. “It’s like, oh great, then let’s adapt this and adopt this to the practice we’re already trying to do of surveillance and of suppression of protest and of racial profiling.”

Trip organizers and participants, however, say that’s a fundamental mischaracterization of the trips. They say the trips, which are far from unique among international police exchanges, expose participants to a variety of policing practices in Israel, from surveillance systems to models for community policing in minority communities. The itineraries, they add, mostly consist of lectures, meetings and tours.

“What we do is focus on management and policy issues, not training, not specific tactical training,” said Steven Pomerantz, director of the Homeland Security Program at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, or JINSA, a conservative think tank that runs some of the delegations. “There’s no shooting, there’s no wrestling, there’s no chokeholds. That’s just not what this is about. It’s about the constituent parts of successful law enforcement [and] counterterrorism responsibilities in local policing.”

A focus on counterterrorism in a post-9/11 world

The delegations to Israel began in the 1990s and ramped up after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The sponsoring organizations and their Israeli partners frame the trips as an opportunity for American police to learn from a country and police force with many decades of experience protecting civilian populations from attack.

“There was a lot of interest, and still is, in understanding the Israeli approach to terrorism and counterterrorism,” said Robbie Friedmann, who runs the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, a program at Georgia State University that takes senior police officers on delegations to Israel and elsewhere. “Delegations learn about the need to provide balance between fighting terror and providing services, so that if someone gets their apartment burglarized, they know that’s something the Israel Police will take care of.”

More than 1,000 participants, mostly senior law enforcement officials, have gone on the trips, which are primarily provided by Friedmann’s program, the ADL and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Each organization has taken several hundred police officials to Israel, a small fraction of the leaders of the approximately 18,000 police departments in the United States. The trips are generally privately funded and are free for participants, though none of the organizations would share the exact sources of the funding or the costs of the trip.

Israel is far from the only country to host a delegation of police officials from abroad. Foreign police officers come to the United States to see how police forces here operate, and countries across the world also host delegations. Friedmann’s group has run tours in countries throughout Europe and South America, as well as in China, Australia and elsewhere.

And the trips are just one example of a whole industry of delegations to Israel. Jewish organizations regularly offer Israel trips to politicians, community activists, celebrities, students, business executives and an array of others. As with those trips, part of the goal of the police delegations is to acquaint the participants with Israel and give them a favorable view of the country.

The main goal of the trips, across the groups that organize them, is to share Israeli expertise in counterterrorism. Organizers say the trips are about observation, policy and systems, not about doing active-duty training or teaching American officers physical maneuvers.

“In Israel in general, confronted with the kind of threats they are, they’re still very resilient,” said Lou Dekmar, the chief of police of LaGrange, Georgia, and the past president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, who has been on several delegations to Israel. “How important it is, when there is a crime or an attack, to quickly address it, process it and reintroduce a state of normalcy.”

But American officials do get to see their Israeli counterparts in action. The field of counterterrorism in Israel covers a range of topics, from responding to a terror attack in real time to gathering intelligence to policing mass protests. In addition to the Israel Police, some of the trips meet with the Border Police, which patrols the border with the West Bank, as well as the Israel Security Service, or Shin Bet, and the army.

Some trips take officers on a tour of Israel’s surveillance system in eastern Jerusalem, as well as study how to clear the scene of a terror attack so that normal life can resume. The excursions emphasize efficient sharing of intelligence between the Israeli military and police, as well as the importance of having defined procedures in place at West Bank border crossings for Palestinians who enter Israel. Delegations also visit Israel’s National Police Academy, where they view training in action.

A 2019 itinerary from the ADL, for example, had the delegation observe security procedures at Ben Gurion Airport, a West Bank checkpoint and eastern Jerusalem, in addition to visiting the Gaza border and the Palestinian police. The delegation also visited Israel’s Police Academy and other Israeli police institutions, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, and Christian and Jewish religious sites.

Chief Janet Moon of the Peachtree City, Georgia, Police Department, who visited Israel with Friedmann’s institute in 2015, remembers watching training on how police officers shoot at a moving vehicle.

“No matter where you go in the world, law enforcement is law enforcement,” she said. “They have the same challenges with budgeting, resource allocation, community policing. And they’ve been dealing with terrorism a lot longer than we have.”

The “Deadly Exchange” campaign: Exposé or anti-Semitism?

An interest in counterterrorism is not the only thing that Israeli and American police have in common. As in the United States, minorities in Israel have long complained of mistreatment from law enforcement, though in the case of Israel’s Arab minority, one recent protest movement called for more policing in Arab cities.

Israel Police officers also have been accused of profiling both Arab and Ethiopian Israelis, and recent years have seen large protests by the Ethiopian community against police brutality.

For participants in these programs, the extensive itineraries and opportunities for observation are seen as a benefit because Israeli and U.S. police face similar challenges regarding crowd control, detection of terror threats, airport security and patrolling diverse populations. But to critics of the trips, who already oppose much of how Israel and America practice policing, the combination of the two is damning.

“Militarized, racist, violent policing in this country, rooted in centuries of colonization and slavery and warmaking here in the U.S., alongside Israeli occupation and the brutality enacted against Palestinians there — there’s no good sense in which those governments should be trading and cross training and developing relationships with one another,” the JVP’s Fox said.

Her group’s “Deadly Exchange” report claims that the trip’s goals include “justifying racial profiling” and “suppressing public protests through use of force.”

The report cites some examples of American policing practices that came from Israel. It notes that the Atlanta Police Department’s camera surveillance system is modeled after Jerusalem’s, following a 2008 police delegation to Israel, for example, and cites testimony by the administrator of the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration in 2016 that said Israeli training and Israel’s airport security practices have informed those of his agency.

But more often, the report notes general links between American and Israeli policing practices without showing that controversial practices in the United States were learned in Israel or created with Israeli participation. In one section, discussions of Israeli crowd control are portrayed as “technical know-how based in disregard for the right of Palestinians to oppose the Israeli occupation.” The report also suggests that a Jewish lawmaker in New York who lobbied for racial profiling was influenced by Israel’s example, when in fact he did not link his support for Israel to that proposal and had not participated in police exchanges.

Trip organizers say that the “Deadly Exchange” report’s claims amount to bigotry.

“To me this is a libel, following a long string of libels in Jewish history,” JINSA’s Pomerantz said. “This is kind of the same thing, that the Jews are responsible for what’s happening in minority communities in America at the hands of the police. It’s just another one of those libels.”

Palestinian activists and their allies point back to accusations of Israeli police misconduct as the core reason that they say the trips shouldn’t be happening. Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian-American scholar, says he is routinely profiled when he returns to Israel, where his extended family still lives and where he was born.

“Yes, our police need to get better here in the United States,” said Munayyer, a nonresident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C. “But do they really need to be training in a place and with forces where racial profiling is a value, where racial profiling is actually central to the ethos of the security system?”

What the trip participants bring home

The delegations do broach uncomfortable topics, organizers say. When it comes to racial profiling, for example, the Georgia State program’s Friedmann said, “We receive briefings based on the policies,” and that participants learn about the process for filing complaints.

“What’s important is not to suggest that Israel is a perfect society,” he said. “But it is a society based on the rule of law, and if an officer is behaving egregiously, it will be handled.”

Similarly, Selim said, the ADL trips naturally discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including on its visits to Palestinian police in the West Bank and to an Israeli border crossing. He said those portions of the trip are especially valuable for participants from border cities in the United States.

“It’s impossible to talk about policing and security in Israel without talking about the conflict,” he said. “When there are police executives from Southern California or from Texas or from Arizona, New Mexico, that have joined the delegation in the past two decades, these are in many instances border cities and border towns on the Mexican border.”

He added, “Issues of cross-border dialogue, engagement, holistic community policing in those cities is very real for them. So to see that in an international context is very helpful for a comparative sense of what works, what doesn’t.”

In addition to discussing counterterrorism, the trips also show Israel’s efforts at community policing in Arab-Israeli cities. Micky Rosenfeld, the spokesperson for the Israel Police, said the police have opened new police stations in Arab-Israeli areas and increased their efforts to recruit Arab police officers.

“The situation in America is complicated in the same way that the situation [in Israel] is also complicated,” he said. “Building an ongoing relationship with the community is something that takes time, and it has to come both from the community and law enforcement.”

Both Moon and Dekmar say they have been influenced by Israel’s approach to community policing. Dekmar noticed that the Israel Police has started recruiting Arab-Israeli cadets as early as high school to increase the chances that they’ll become officers. He says he began identifying and engaging minority high-schoolers as candidates to serve in his Georgia department as well.

“That was a direct result of the experience I saw in Israel,” Dekmar said. “A recognition that if you’re going to recruit from minority populations, you need to start developing relationships younger.”

The police chiefs have also implemented procedures or technologies they saw in Israel in their home departments. Moon installed a geo-location system in her 911 call center similar to one she saw in Israel. Dekmar said he adopted an Israeli mentality of conducting training more improvisationally, with less complex equipment.

“[I] recognize that this is a very complicated situation that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to good guys and bad guys,” Dekmar said. “It lends itself to an understanding of different cultures placed in a position that potentially could clash at any time.”

Originally published in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency

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