The police violence in Ferguson and the attendant images have inspired comparisons with Israel’s assault on Gaza. The parallels between Israeli and U.S. militarized policies are not far-fetched. A cursory investigation shows that Israel maintains an extensive network of relations with U.S. law enforcement agencies at the local, state and federal levels.

It is no coincidence that the Ferguson and St. Louis County police forces were trained in Israel in recent years. These connections are so important that the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee touts their success and the Jewish Virtual Library lists police training as a separate category of U.S.-Israel relations. The CRI, a private counterterrorism-training outfit run by a former Israeli special forces member, promises training in “combat experience in dealing with terrorism, crime and guerrilla warfare.” Over the years, thousands of U.S. personnel at all levels of law enforcement and hundreds of senior managers, from local police chiefs to FBI detectives, have taken counterterrorism training in Israel or attended conferences sponsored by the Israeli government, security-minded conservative think tanks and even the Anti-Defamation League with little to no scrutiny for their role in the militarization of our police forces.

In 2001, shortly after 9/11, I wrote a column asking, “We’re all Israelis now?”