Call it recency bias, personal interest, or perhaps just a general concern for society's trajectory right now, but as I followed Wednesday's news of an ICE agent killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, then watched the federal government flatly lie about the sequence of events, the indignant language and informational smokescreens felt nauseatingly familiar. It was as if someone had taken Israel's playbook for Gaza and tested it out stateside.
You don't have to leave the city, much less the state or country, to find precedent of law enforcement slaughtering the people they're supposed to protect. It's an American tradition already illustrated by many devastated families and callous police union presidents. But for years now, both in Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli government has modeled how to act with both viciousness and total impunity. That in turn has affected the efficacy of public pressure in other parts of the world. Entities within the sphere of U.S. power have realized that it is even easier to slaughter a person in the street and get away with it.
Typically, when an American police officer kills a person for no reason, the department identifies the killer, places them on some kind of administrative leave, and waits for a trial to acquit them of charges, before a civil suit delivers a diminished form of justice which doesn't include accountability for the perpetrator due to qualified immunity. The official police statements are so convoluted and passively worded that it's difficult to tell what happened, and generally it's left to the media to dig into the victim's background and smear them. Describing this gruesome cycle is not an endorsement of it, but an attempt to emphasize that it's getting worse. In this instance, the aggressive obfuscation is being handled by the Trump administration itself. It's been over 24 hours since a masked ICE agent shot Good in the face as she tried to drive away, a killing caught on video from multiple angles, and the public still doesn't know who the shooter is. We don't even know what his entire face looks like. Update (2:59 p.m. ET): The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that the agent's name is Jonathan Ross.
Instead of transparency, the Department of Homeland Security has retroactively crafted a baseless narrative to make a mother in a car containing stuffed animals appear as a threat. Secretary Kristi Noem described a series of events that clearly did not happen on video, claiming Good committed "an act of domestic terrorism." Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin claimed that Good "weaponized her vehicle" by trying to drive away. Vice President JD Vance called her "a deranged leftist." None of this can justify what that ICE agent did, and they know it, but as my colleague Albert Burneko wrote, it is done to reassure ICE that the only limits are what they are willing to do. Lie immediately and forcefully, and by the time the public can scrutinize the details, move on to the next act of brutality.
Does any of that feel reminiscent? There's endless footage and news of Israeli soldiers shooting random Palestinians, demolishing any building they choose, committing war crimes of all kinds. These thugs have express permission to keep themselves anonymous, hurt who they want, and suffer no consequences. The justification arrives after the violence: A 16-year-old in the West Bank was “suspected of hurling a block” at soldiers, so that was supposed to validate him being shot at point-blank range. Choose your own example: the hospital that wasn't a base for Hamas, the renowned journalist who was fatally shot for reporting the news, the starving children who deserved it.
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu take lessons from each other. They have praised each others' walls, gone through their own corruption scandals, and operated as if the laws don't apply to them. In return for giving Israel billions of dollars in military aid, the U.S. gets tips on how to dehumanize populations more efficiently. This is no conspiracy. It's out in the open, and you don't even have to look that hard. An ICE official testified in court last summer that the agency had used the Zionist doxxing site Canary Mission in order to target pro-Palestine students for kidnapping and attempted deportation. In 2022, Jewish Currents reported that senior employees at the Anti-Defamation League urged the organization's CEO Jonathan Greenblatt to end the practice of sending law enforcement delegations to Israel. One law enforcement officer who spoke with the publication was amazed at the lower legal threshold in the apartheid state:
“The Israelis are very innovative, out of necessity, with technology and measures for providing security and detecting threatening behavior and criminal behavior,” said Bill Ayub, the sheriff of Ventura County in southern California, who went to Israel on an ADL trip in 2017, referencing controversial predictive policing tools that critics say can violate civil liberties and lead to racial profiling. He described being impressed by the “Hollywood-esque” surveillance systems he observed, which can record and track people’s movements and listen in on conversations. He admitted that the software is “a little more invasive than you would see here in the US,” and described the use of force during arrests as “shocking”: “It was like, ‘Wow, you do that?’ ... We’d be in jail if we did something like that here.” But he argued that the Israeli security force’s surveillance tactics “allowed them to have a really good handle on problems brewing and to track known dissidents or known criminals,” and that the exchange “broadened my perspective.”
You are what you fund. When the federal agents blocked a doctor from tending to Good as she bled out in her car, or when they also blocked an ambulance from getting close to her, they were not following some explicit procedure issued by Noem or Trump. They were operating in an environment specifically cultivated for them: minimal training, high arrest quotas, and no ramifications. The policy of the Israeli government has been to act as it pleases and dare anyone to stop them. Now, both abroad in Venezuela and at home in Minneapolis, the Trump administration is doing the same.
For years, people have warned of the precedent this would set, that loyalty to Israel would be destructive not just for Palestinians but eventually for everyone else. The poison that is created by this violent impunity cannot be contained in one region of the world. It will inevitably spread—to the Caribbean Sea, the streets of Minneapolis, and many other places. Left unchecked, it will sicken us all.
