For as long as the Jewish Diaspora has existed, the image projected onto the Jew has adapted itself to whatever a society abhors most. In medieval Europe, Jews were accused of poisoning wells and spreading the Black Plague. Christian authorities branded them “Christ-killers.” In Nazi Germany, Jews were labeled as “race polluters,” corrupters of blood and nation. In the Soviet Union, they were condemned as capitalist parasites and imperialist conspirators. The accusation changes with history, but the pattern remains remarkably consistent: Jews become the symbolic embodiment of a society’s deepest anxieties and insecurities.
Today, in many progressive circles across the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has emerged as one of the country’s most hated institutions. As immigration protests spread and activists organize against deportations and detention centers, a new claim has gained traction on college campuses and social media alike: that Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are responsible for training ICE agents and exporting surveillance tactics to be used against immigrant communities. These accusations are often referred to as the “Deadly Exchange” conspiracy.
The phrase refers to a campaign promoted by organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which argues that exchange programs between Israeli and American security officials contribute to police militarization and immigration enforcement in the United States. The claim is persuasive to some people precisely because it is built around something real, albeit a highly distorted version of it. American police officials and federal agencies like ICE have indeed participated in seminars and informal exchanges with Israeli counterparts over the years, often focused on counterterrorism, border security, and emergency response. These are public and well documented.
The broader accusations drawn from these programs — that police brutality in the US can be attributed to Israeli tactics — were nonsense in 2017 when this campaign first began and is a complete conspiracy theory today.
The implication behind “Deadly Exchange” is not merely that American officials learn from foreign security services. Countries routinely share policing and intelligence practices with one another. The deeper implication is that the most objectionable features of recent American policing and immigration enforcement can somehow be uniquely traced back to Israel or to Jews. That leap transforms a limited and ordinary security relationship into a grand explanatory theory.
This does not necessarily mean that security exchanges should be beyond criticism. Democracies should openly debate policing practices, surveillance technologies, and immigration policy. The danger, as JVP, to their credit, pointed out in a June 2020 statement, arises when Israel is labeled as a symbolic source of nearly every injustice activists oppose. Yet in that same statement, they write that “Black and Palestinian leaders… remind us that justice is indivisible, and that all fights for freedom are intertwined at their roots.” The logic that these accusations make implies that Israel exists as the root of these issues.
The names and accusations evolve with time but the underlying instinct to make Jews stand at the center of society’s fears does not.
If we, as Americans, truly wish to fix these perceived injustices, overseas scapegoats are not the answer. This narrative absolves us from our own responsibility. This is the issue with the broader narrative that all struggles are supposedly intertwined: it creates the opportunity for people to feign activism and point to a scapegoat as the “knot” that is at the center of all international struggles.
This article was originally published in the Times of Israel Blogs. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CAMERA.
