STOP COP CITY from Atlanta to Palestine: A Syllabus

9 min readFeb 22, 2024

Left: Freedom fighters of Gaza. Right: Defenders of the Weelaunee Forest.

The fight against Cop City connects anti-colonial struggles across the world, from Atlanta to Palestine and beyond. In solidarity with the Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City that is taking place in Tucson this week, WAWOG is co-hosting a teach-in with Demilitarize Atlanta to Palestine and the Weelaunee Defense Society at Woodbine in Ridgewood, Queens on February 25 from 5–7pm.

Our panel will feature movement leaders and lawyers who will speak to the implications of RICO terrorism laws and other legal technologies being used to criminalize the movement, counter-repression strategies developed by groups like SHAC7, and the targeting and incarceration of the Holy Land 5 during the early years of the War on Terror. Demilitarize Atlanta to Palestine will break down the history of deadly exchange between US and Israeli policing — in particular, the GILEE program in Georgia, which has helped shape law enforcement strategy around Cop City.

We created the following syllabus as a supplement to the teach-in, which we hope can serve as a useful resource for anyone interested in learning more about the global fight against cop cities.

How does Cop City connect to Palestine?

GILEE, or the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange program, is a Georgia State University-based police exchange program between the Atlanta Police Department (APD), the Atlanta Police Foundation’s Atlanta Police Leadership Institute, and the Israeli Occupation Forces. This program was created to ensure the exchange of tactics and capital under the guise of “homeland security.” The same corporations that are funding Cop City invest private capital into GILEE; their funding sends hundreds of APD trainees from Georgia to Israel to refine practices of urban warfare. The blueprint for Cop City was inspired by Israel’s very own Cop City called Little Gaza in an-Naqab or the so-called Negev Desert. Israel’s Cop City is built on stolen Palestinian land, and Georgia’s Cop City proposed site is the Weelaunee Forest, 381 acres of stolen Muscogee land. This relationship symbolizes the connections between the prison industrial complex, militarism, settler colonial oppression, white supremacy, and expanded state-sanctioned violence against working-class Black and Indigenous communities.

What do we mean by “Palestine is the laboratory?”

Israel has one of the most advanced military and surveillance technologies in the world. It is one of the global leaders in the defense sector, raking in billions of dollars a year for the benefit of the settler colonial state. Their weapons have been tested on Palestinians through movement restrictions and besieging and bombing Gaza; their violence on Palestinians is used as part of their “battle-tested” sales pitch. From Myanmar’s ethnocide against the Rohingya and the surveillance of refugees and Indigenous people at the U.S.-Mexico border to India’s campaign against Kashmir and slave markets in Libya, Israel has aided, abetted, and continues to profit off violence across the globe. For more examples, check out Antony Lowenstein’s book The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.

What does the phrase ‘deadly exchange’ mean?

Since the early 2000s, thousands of police departments, border patrol and ICE, and FBI agents have trained with the IOF as part of paramilitary exchange programs. These exchange programs grew out of a post-9/11 development of so-called counter-terrorism technology and tactics in policing and immigration policy. The U.S. learns tactics and strategies from Israel, who is deemed as a beacon of “successful policing,” and in turn, brings those strategies back home to increase criminalization against Black and brown people, surveil Muslims, and repress Indigenous-led movements, to name a few examples. The U.S.’s adaption of Israeli counter-insurgency policing, immigration, and surveillance models reinforces and legitimizes occupation and apartheid in Palestine by the Zionist entity.

Why should New Yorkers care?

Since 2002, the NYPD has trained Israel’s Shin Bet and other agencies in broken windows-style policing (or stop-and-frisk) which they use against Palestinians. In exchange, the NYPD’s blurred lines between policing, counterterrorism, and surveillance developed the Demographics Unit, which surveilled all aspects of Muslim life. This spying program was modeled on how Israeli authorities operate in occupied Palestine. In 2012, the NYPD opened a branch in the Israeli police headquarters in Kfar Saba. Our tax dollars fund yearly NYPD delegations to Israel. The systemic repression of Palestinians and the systemic oppression of Black and brown New Yorkers are only exacerbated by this relationship. Until the deadly exchange between the NYPD and Israel ends, we will have more Amadou Diallos, Eric Garners, and Akai Gurleys, more martyrs in Palestine, and more instances of policing and surveillance with impunity.

Finally, there are currently 69 cop cities being built or already built since 2020 across the U.S., including in Yonkers, New York and Newark, New Jersey. Research shows that the major push for these projects began after the uprisings of 2020 to further militarize the police and train them to quell future mass uprising.

How do innovations in state repression at the local and state level in Georgia impact all of us?

The Georgia Senate’s latest move (S.B. 63) to criminalize charitable bail funds is part of a new wave of state suppression to undermine solidarity, eliminate political opponents, and destroy grassroots movements like Stop Cop City, targeting them both physically and financially. Paired with the state’s existing “domestic terrorism” law, the Georgia legislature has been working to make sure anyone can be jailed indefinitely without trial. S.B. 63 could become the country’s test case for domestic terrorism statutes; if it works to surveil, prosecute, and imprison activists and organizers, other states will likely follow up with their own versions under the cover of omnibus bills. These bills, and the disinformation about supposed crime waves and retail theft sprees, work to restrict individual civil liberties by manufacturing consent for the erosion of any semblance of democracy.