STOP COP CITY from Atlanta to Palestine: A Syllabus

Writers Against the War on Gaza
9 min readFeb 22, 2024

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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.

I. About Cop City

Defend the Atlanta Forest Library

‘The birds stopped singing’: Inside the battle for Atlanta’s South River Forest by Timothy Pratt | Atlanta Magazine

Atlanta’s Cop City is Putting Policing Before the Climate by Hannah Riley and Micah Herskind | Teen Vogue

Key Dates and Moments in Atlanta’s ‘Cop City’ controversy by Chauncey Alcorn | Capital B News

The New Fight Over An Old Forest in Atlanta by Charles Bethea | The New Yorker

Atlanta community members warn of environmental damage from Cop City by Ray Levy Uyeda | Prism Reports

Meet the Major Corporations and Cultural Institutions Helping Build Cop City in Atlanta by Tia Brown | LittleSis

A timeline of events surrounding ‘Cop City’ and the DeKalb/Blackhall land swap by Rebecca Etter | WAB

Unicorn Riot Coverage of the Movement to ‘Stop Cop City’ | Unicorn Riot

Not One Tree — Stopping Cop City by Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko | N+1

Land Swap or Cop City? A Visual Guide | Atlanta Community Press Collective

Cop City is Only the Beginning, Unless We Fight with Benji Hart and Jasmine | Movement Memos

Behind the News: Cop City Primer with Micah Herskind | Jacobin Radio

Week of Action to Stop Cop City | It Could Happen Here

II. The “Atlanta Way”

This is the Atlanta Way: A Primer on Cop City by Micah Herskind | Scalawag Magazine

The Taking of Peachtree-Pine and the Dawning of Cop City by Ariana Blazer | Scalawag Magazine

The fight to Stop Cop City has decades-old roots by Micah Herskind | Prism Reports

Cop City, Gentrification, and Young Thug: Atlanta’s Uneven War Over Greenspace in ‘The City of the Forest’ | Scalawag Magazine

III. Militarization / The Deadly Exchange

Gaza is a Strategy, Not Just a Place | Samidoun NY/NJ

How the US and Israel Exchange Tactics in Violence and Control by Mersiha Gadzo | Al Jazeera

Free Palestine, Stop Cop City | Palestinian Youth Movement

Israel and the Militarization of Atlanta’s Police by Audrey Bennett and Trevor Kosloski | The Signal

IV. The Prison Industrial Complex

Injustice Hidden Deep in Atlanta’s Forest: The Old Atlanta Prison Farm and the South River | A Project by Students of Georgia State University

Slave Labor, Overcrowding, and Unmarked Graves: The Buried History of Atlanta City Prison Farm from the 1950s to 1990s Shows It’s No Place of Honor | Atlanta Community Press Collective

Cop City and the Prison Industrial Complex in Atlanta, by Micah Herskind |Mainline

V. State Repression

The Real Outside Agitators | Mapping Atlanta

Remembering Tortuguita: A vigil for the slain abolitionist | Atlanta Community Press Collective

States of Siege | Ill Will

Fascism, Free Speech, and Cop City: What’s Happening in Atlanta and Why It Matters by Sophia Tesfaye | Salon

Living in an Earthquake: The Fight Against Cop City Confronts Unprecedented Repression | CrimeThInc

Atlanta Keeps Putting Up Roadblocks as Organizers Push to Vote on Cop City by Piper French | Mother Jones

Cop City: Police, Protest, and Social Control | Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Cop City, RICO, and corporate fascism with Taya Graham and Stephen Janis | Rattling the Bars

‘Now you’re a terrorist’: Atlanta’s Cop City crackdown | Fault Lines

“A Political Prosecution”: 61 Cop City Opponents hit with RICO charges by Georgia’s Republican AG | Democracy Now!

VI. Strategy and Tactics

Building the Movement to Stop Cop City: Three Theories of Victory in Atlanta by Unity and Struggle | It’s Going Down

Strategizing for Palestinian Solidarity: Expanding the Toolkit, From Demands to Direct Action | CrimeThInc

Shutting Down the Port of Tacoma: Reflections from the Salish Sea | CrimeThInc

The Forest and Its Partisans by A. C. Corey | N+1

The City in the Forest: Reinventing Resistance for an Age of Climate Crisis and Police Militarization | CrimeThInc

Beneath the Concrete, the Forest: Accounts from the Defense of the Atlanta Forest | CrimeThInc

The Forest in the City: Two Years of Forest Defense in Atlanta Georgia |CrimeThInc

Balance Sheet: Two Years Against Cop City | CrimeThInc

Don’t Stop: Continuing the Fight Against Cop City, Six More Months in the Movement to Defend the Forest | CrimeThInc

VII. Solidarity

How They Stopped Work at the Raytheon Facility: Report on a Day of Blockading | CrimeThInc

Week of Writing #StopCopCity | Scalawag Magazine

We Got Us: A Case Study and Reflections on Supporting an Arrestee from the 2020 Uprisings by Richard Hunsinger Defense Committee | Atlanta Community Press Collective

No Cop City Anywhere by Benji Hart | In These Times

How We’ll Know If Stop Cop City Won by Mariah Parker | Hammer and Hope

Stop Cop City Play @ EZLN 30th Anniversary | WFHB Radio

Studies in Dignity | WFHB Radio

Israel’s Urban Warfare Training Center, otherwise known as “Little Gaza” (Oded Balilty/AP)

VIII. Palestine / Global ‘War on Terror’

Cop City to Palestine: Webinar on the interconnectedness of the Black and Palestinian struggles | Alliance for Global Justice

Strategizing for Palestinian Solidarity: Expanding the Toolkit from Demands to Direct Action | CrimeThInc

From Black Atlanta to Palestine: A statement of connection, solidarity, and survival by Da’Shaun Harrison, Eva Dickerson, Osama and Bisan | Scalawag Magazine

How the US Jailed Five Innocent Palestinians by Miko Peled | Electronic Intifada

After Wadie’ Haddad: The “War on Terror” and the Resistance | Samidoun

Criminalizing Resistance by Charlotte Kates | Jacobin

Free the Holy Land 5 | Within Our Lifetime

IX. The Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City

Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City

SRY Campaign | Stop the Construction of Cop City

The Companies and Foundations Behind Cop City | American Friends Service Committee

The SHAC Model: A Critical Assessment | CrimeThInc

(Use Tor/VPN to access) Undercover Cop City

Follow

@defendATLforest (Twitter/X)
@atlanta_press (Twitter/X)
@ACPC_Live (Twitter/X)
@mainlinezine (Twitter/X)
@UncoverCopCity (Twitter/x)
@scalawagmag (Twitter/X)
@micahinATL (Twitter/X)
@hannahcrileyy (Twitter/X)
@defendatlantaforest (Instagram)
@stopcopcity (Instagram)
@stopcopcitysummit (Instagram)
@weelauneedefense_nyc (Instagram)
@stopcopcitynyc (Instagram)
@eavdefendsthetrees (Instagram)
@saveweelaunee (Instagram)
@atlpresscollective (Instagram)
@studentsagainstcopcity (Instagram)
@mariahforathens (Instagram)
@mainline_atl (Instagram)
@swifties_against_cop_city_ (Instagram)

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Writers Against the War on Gaza
Writers Against the War on Gaza

Written by Writers Against the War on Gaza

Building a cultural front for a free Palestine.

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