this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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In a lot of ways Israel is the testing grounds for new weapons and tactics. Once tried, tested, and perfected, they are brought back to the core.
During the Ferguson uprising after Michael Brown was murdered, Palestinians on Twitter recognized the weapons police were using on protestors, like matching teargas canisters.
I also remember seeing an Intercept article talking about new generation of Homeland Security Mexico border surveillance tech being tested on Gaza and the West Bank first.
And I am guessing that Palestinians are the test subjects?
Indeed they are. Test the means of oppression abroad, bring it back home once the bugs have been worked out.
Not really, the American government doesn't really care much about Palestine.
The west allies with Israel and Saudi Arabia as a way to keep Iran from overtaking the entire area.
I didn't mean it in that the US capitalists care about Palestinians or even Israelis specifically, just that the region functions as a sort of laboratory to test out new means of oppression.
Not really sure if that's completely necessary, oppression for oppression sake isn't really important to capitalists either. It's more that the west has to protect the petrodollar, and Iran is the only local power in the region that could potentially threaten it.
If you look at anyone who America's ever allied with in the region, the common denominator is that they are all willing to shoot at Iranians.
They don’t do it for simple sadism, they have Israel test ways to be cruel so their own military can when “necessary” and so they can teach USian pigs how to crush dissent when we inevitably rise up like BLM.
We don't need Israel to test ways to crush dissent in the United States. We have been on the cutting edge of that particularly cruel science since before we were a nation.
The Israeli are not teaching, they are learning..... They are utilizing techniques we mastered when we stole the damn country. Broken treaties, Reservations, starvation, and finally utilizing a raid against civilians as an excuse to commit a genocide.
This is basically King Phillips War (1675-1678) being played out in modern times. Its a story of colonizers who forced natives off their land with treaties, and then broke those already asymmetrical treaties. Provoking retaliation raids, which they used to justify a genocide.
This is a foundational piece of American history and is often cited as the birth of our national identity.
Yes, the US are OG oppressors, but Israel is on the cutting edge. It is a material fact that Israelis train cops in the US in oppression. New high tech techniques are tested in both places and shared. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/12/how-the-us-and-israel-exchange-tactics-in-violence-and-control
I think that's comparing apples to oranges. Training police in small arm tactics isn't the same as teaching a government how to suppress an entire group of people.
Israel has yet to stabilize their monopoly on violence, something that the US has maintained for the last 200 years.
I'm not even saying that the US doesn't benefit from supporting an apartheid state, and they very well may utilize them to explore new ways to suppress populations. However, this is not intrinsic to their material motivations.
If we perceive the scenario through the lens of historic materialism, it's pretty apparent when and why the west began colonizing the region. It's always been oil, and it will continue to be oil until we either exhaust the supply or the demand.