Jamal Juma' on militarised policing in Palestine

My name is Jamal Juma', I am the coordinator of the Palestinian grassroots movement against the wall and settlements, which is ghettoising and limiting the population in very limited areas surrounded by walls nine metres high, with all the surveillance and cameras and watch-towers and machine guns that have been fixed there, and military guards that are patrolling the area. So these are the kind of things that they are doing and it is a kind of widening of the prisons of the people so you don't imprison ten or twenty people, no, you imprison the whole people. So the wall is kind of this.

This wall devastated the people's land and the reaction was demonstrations. We were facing the police, not even the police, the military. The military, fully-armed, and they come to kill, they come to make you bleed, they come to take you to jail, they come to paralyse you by shooting you in sensitive parts of your body. Using several kinds of weapons, testing them against us. From several kinds of tear gas to bullets, different kinds of bullet, plastic bullets, rubber-coated bullets, there are so many other kinds of bullets that I don't know their names. They are called something like “dum-dum” which is an explosive bullet that they shoot at your leg and explodes in your leg and your leg will be smashed. So all these techniques have been used against the demonstrators. I remember days when we were marching and suddenly, without hearing any shooting, we see the people who were walking in the march falling down, falling down, falling down. At the end they were sniping them with silent guns. They were knocking them down one after the other. This is horrible, these were people who were marching holding in their hands slogans protesting against their land being confiscated and isolated.

These kind of military techniques that they were using against us, unfortunately they have been transferred and exported to other oppressive regimes. We saw that in Latin America when we started activism in Latin America. We saw that the Israeli military and security companies are training different regimes in Latin America in oppressing their people, on how to attack and confront the demonstrators, the civilians who are demonstrating for their rights. They are exporting the techniques, they are exporting these evil ways of oppressing the people and harming them. Even lately, we saw that in the favelas in Rio and in Brazil where they are building the same system of surveillance and also the towers from which they are watching and sniping people and killing them in the favelas. So this is the danger of the Israeli military, not just the drones that they are promoting and selling to the world. The same with the military oppressions, the police oppressions. They are exporting the techniques. And they are teaching the other regimes how to beat their people, how to oppress them, how to suffocate them, how to imprison them, how to paralyse them.