Following the police shooting of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown on 9 August 2014, images of Ferguson, Missouri conjure the atrocities suffered by those living under military occupation in war zones across the world. They depict Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams in battle helmets with guns trained on the foreheads and chests of black women and men; military tanks circling residents demanding to know why police had killed yet another young black man; and protestors doused with tear gas crying with the pain of a substance long banned as a chemical weapon by the Geneva Convention.
Globally, people have responded to the use of military-like force on citizens with outrage and disgust, drawing connections between the treatment of US residents of color and the current siege on Gaza. When St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar claimed that the police had done everything possible to practice “restraint,” he seemed to echo the words of Israeli officials justifying, yet again, civilian deaths in Gaza. Indeed, Palestinians have reacted to police brutality in Ferguson by providing advice on how to avoid the side effects of tear gas and expressing support for demonstrators there. Residents of Ferguson, in turn, have held signs reading “Free Gaza” alongside placards that state, “I AM A MAN,” evoking the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike. This exchange between people on opposite sides of the world, and the hopeful networks of solidarity emerging therein, illuminate troubling aspects of the US state and offer potential frames for global activism.
These two spaces are linked by the US government-financed militarization that has supported sieges on communities with unequal access to power worldwide. In the Middle East, according to a collective of US professors writing in 2011, the US government has offered some 8.6 million dollars per day to Israeli forces for the occupation of the West Bank. While paying lip service to the idea of peace talks, the US government has unhesitatingly shared damaging intelligence with, and supplied weapons and ammunition to, the Israeli state. Less than two weeks ago, US lawmakers demonstrated their unfaltering support for Israel by approving 225 million dollars to maintain the Iron Dome, despite the perverse death toll of Palestinian residents as a result of offensive Israeli military operations in Gaza.
The long history of the US government’s military support of Palestinian repression has been paralleled by the gearing up of militarization in state and local police forces inside the United States. Following the 1965 Watts Rebellion, where black and brown residents of Los Angeles took to the streets frustrated by the socioeconomic limitations of civil rights legislation as well as police brutality, the arming of local police forces with paramilitary capabilities has had a disproportionate effect on low-income communities of color, according to a recent study by the American Civil Liberties Union. The end of the Cold War initially exacerbated this trend, as Ronald Reagan launched a “war on drugs” that concocted low-income communities as a threat to domestic security. Since its 1997 inception, the Department of Defense’s 1033 program has also transferred military surplus weaponry—including tanks, helicopters, and M-16s—to local and state police forces. Through the program, police forces nationwide have received some 4.3 billion dollars in military-grade equipment.
However, the practice grew exponentially after 11 September 2001. With the premise of protecting citizens from acts of terrorism, the Department of Homeland Security has provided over thirty-four billion dollars in grants to local and state police forces. Ironically, just last year, the police chief of nearby St. Louis asked for an undetectable drone with which to police the city in case a terrorist attack took place. The pretext of fighting the “global war on terror” has had the result of turning communities of color, long treated as enemies of the state, into potential war zones.
The troubling trend of increasing militarization is made more so by how political leadership has displaced responsibility for such violence. In Ferguson, as in Gaza, official US demands for peace ignore the fact that the supply of military weaponry negates such a call to action. This irony has not been lost on residents in Missouri and abroad. One Palestinian tweeter, displaying an empty tear gas canister reading “Made in USA,” offered satirical assurance to the citizens of Ferguson, saying that there should be no worry because the tear gas they faced had been tested on Palestinian civilians. If, as Missouri Congressional Representative Emanuel Cleaver rightly states in TheGuardian, that it is “unconscionable that we would convert a city in the middle of America into a war zone,” it is equally unconscionable that we would provide Israel with the means to do so in Gaza.