Race,“National Values,” and the Policing of Palestine Solidarity Protests

Strategic Incapacitation and the Suppression of Protests

Police have a long history of repressing protests that challenge dominant power relations. Scholars of public order policing have utilized the concept of “strategic incapacitation” to describe the layered and innovative ways in which police control and demobilize protests (Gillham et al. 2013). Key mechanisms of the framework include special containment, surveillance and pre-emption, and information management. The influence of “new penology” frameworks (Feeley and Simon 1992)—focus on surveillance and targeted intervention against suspects who are brought into focus through risk assessments—is evident in the conceptual development of strategic incapacitation (Noakes and Gillham 2006). Notably, much of the policing toolbox described by strategic incapacitation scholarship is preemptive: control techniques deployed against protests that are assessed as threatening or illegitimate far in advance of an actual protest event. Unlike previous periods of protest policing, especially the “negotiated management model” that emerged and consolidated as the consensus framework of the 1980s (De Lint and Hall 2009), strategic incapacitation is inclined to view the population differentially. Particularly with global justice and anti-war movements of the 2000s, police regarded such protestors through an oppositional lens (Crosby and Walby 2023), perceiving these movements as lacking hierarchical organization, uninterested in police-directed management systems, and prone to violence. Police responded by developing classification systems to sort and differentiate among the protests subjecting those assessed as “risky” to incapacitation responses.

Additionally, strategic incapacitation involves concerted communication campaigns against “transgressive protesters” (Noakes and Gillham 2006:101). Following from the ways in which new penology conjures objectivity rituals to “black box” discriminations (Hannah-Moffat, Maurutto, and Turnbull 2009), strategic incapacitation relies on calculated public legitimacy campaigns (Cheng 2023) that promote policing as neutral and unbiased when applying control techniques toward demonstrations. This form of public posturing is even more pronounced in demonstrations that are met with counter-demonstrations (L. Wood 2020), such as movements for racial and Indigenous justice and, more germanely to our study, Palestine solidarity marches.

In her study of the transformation from protest policing models, Lesley Wood (2014:8) suggests that the “combination of context, organizational dynamics and interaction with protesters influenced protest control strategies and led to the fortification of summit sites, the escalation of coercive strategies, incoherent negotiation, generalized and indiscriminate information gathering, and ‘intelligence-led’ and what is described as ‘pro-active’ policing.” Informed by new penology’s objectives of “identifying and managing unruly groups” (Feeley and Simon 1992:455), police adopted surveillance and control systems as best practice against protests. While protest policing has a long history of using violence toward protestors who are believed to be illegitimate, the strategic incapacitation model allows for more variation in the pre-emptive tools and penchant for a general philosophy where violence is more honed, more targeted, and less generalized. Protest incapacitation reflects a highly scientific model, using pools of data, risk assessments, pre-planning and outreach, and cataloguing of people and behaviors, in order to manage future events (Howe and Monaghan 2018). As we detail below, the organizational practices that shape strategic incapacitation are evident in the policing of Palestinian solidarity demonstrations after October 2023 in Canada.

Police Knowledge, National “Values,” and Public Legitimacy Campaigns

While useful, strategic incapacitation alone does not fully account for police suppression of Palestine solidarity protests. An element of discussion within public order policing literature is that the management of protests is directed by mercurial “police knowledge” (Della Porta and Reiter 1998; L. J. Wood 2014) that interprets social realities through the prism of how police understand the world. Citing Della Porta’s work, Noakes and Gillham (2006:97) further expand this point when they write that “[d]ecisions about how to police demonstrations are mediated by police knowledge, or how police construct external reality, collectively and individually.” Strong institutional dynamics of policing alongside the particularities of police identity, shared and individualized, shape a sense of shared knowledge held by police. Police knowledge is depicted as a “filter” to interpret a wide range of influences on how police will control protests (Della Porta and Reiter 1998:25); this informs how police distinguish between “good” and “bad” demonstrators or “legitimate” and “illegitimate” protest.

Within the strategic incapacitation scholarship, scholars have pointed to how broader political dynamics shape police response to protests. Police knowledge remains central to methods of protest management where “construction of reality by police shapes their role in the maintenance of social control” (Noakes and Gillham 2006:99). The new penology literature stresses how actuarial models are designed as “objective” or “value neutral” yet gendered and racialized logics become embedded within these risk-oriented practices (Hannah-Moffat and Maurutto 2010; Struthers and Hannah-Moffat 2021). Notions of “good” citizenship, reformatory commitment, proclivity to criminality, and “pro-social” integration capacities represent knowledge constructs that emerge from classist, nationalist, heteronormative, and ableist assumptions, among others. These rationalities, as extensive scholarship has noted, motivate the unleashing of police violence against Indigenous land defenders (Howe and Monaghan 2018), Black Lives Matter protests (Blouin 2022), queer and feminist movements (Kinsman and Gentile 2010), leftist, religious, migrant, and labor groups (Kinsman, Buse, and Steedman 2000), and anti-globalization and anti-capitalist mobilizations (Hussey and LeClerc 2011). The same logics have been cited to contrast the lack of police action against far right movements (Castle 2021), such as the Freedom Convoy in Canada, which consisted of an amalgam of anti-vaxxers, Islamophobes, anti-immigrant activists, and white supremacists who blockaded border crossings and brought the capital city of Ottawa to a standstill for weeks in 2022 (Gillies, Raynauld, and Wisniewski 2026).

Contrasts in approach can be explained by how police knowledge typically draws from repertoires of usual suspects in an effort to extend surveillance and criminalization powers (Dominique-Legault 2016). But the overlaps in referential infrastructures between far-right actors and police knowledge systems also point to an alignment of interests that are structured around race (Crosby 2021). Writing about the US, Shanahan and Wall (2021:85) suggest that police have a long history of political “demonology” where police narratives distort (almost always racialized) adversaries. These narratives present police as the “only hope for the world” and provide “rank-and-file cops and their admirers with a framework for understanding, and organising, themselves as at war with enemies below and above” (Shanahan and Wall 2021:85). Police crackdowns on Black Lives Matter protests but sympathetic treatment of far-right protests accounts for the centrality of racial thinking within policing and, as we discuss below, can be extended to an analysis of how the War on Terror has shaped anti-Muslim infrastructures of police knowledge.

When engaging with Palestine solidarity protests, we posit that the Canada’s shared “international racial contract” (Abu-Laban and Bakan 2008) with Israel configures how police view protestors and organize responses against demonstrations. As settler colonial nations, shared worldviews between Canada and Israel are expressed not only in ongoing material relationships of security, trade, and exchanges between Canadian policing agencies and Israel’s forces (Maimann 2025; Ralph 2022) but also in police knowledge which is imbued with the shared national “values” discourse invoked across the Canadian political spectrum. Our intervention extends previous works have noted the role of the “Israel lobby” in mobilizing discourse to seek Canadian favor for Israel while dehumanizing Palestinians and their allies (Sucharov 2024; Whitaker 2004; Zine 2022).

The “Thin Blue Line” and Race-based Civilizational Discord

While racial contours of the War on Terror informs policing systems, further insights on police knowledge can be drawn from literature on police culture. This scholarship attempts to articulate the informal and formal practices animating everyday policing and how these shared knowledge practices are honed by powerful, collective cultural forces within policing (Waddington 2008). O’Neill and Singh (2007:2) have described what emerges from police culture is “the ways things are done around here,” pointing to police practices being a messy combination of rules by-the-book with experiential and informal practices. Other scholars use the term “subcultures” (instead of culture) to insist there should be more nuance and less determinism in debates around a homogenous police culture (Cockroft 2007; Fielding 1988; Paoline 2003). Nevertheless, as Reiner (2010:18) documents in his influential work, policing reflects a “patterned set of understandings”—comprising of suspicion, insularity, solidarity, machismo, racial prejudice, and other elements—that are transmitted, mediated, and adapted to local circumstances.

These literatures inform our understanding of how the War on Terror has deeply institutionalized notions of racial and civilizational conflict within policing. A most illustrative element of these civilizational motifs is the revivalism of the thin blue line (TBL) symbology. The TBL image-thematic was popularized in the post war period of police professionalization and gained particular traction in the 1950s communications work of former LAPD chief William Parker. He popularized the image in his campaign against “cop hating” media and activists who were drawing attention to police violence against Black communities (Kramer 2007). He echoed a Hobbesian worldview in saying that between law-abiding citizens and criminals “stands a thin blue line of defense—your police officer” and the police “were combating the decline of Western civilization, the rise of Communism, the moral laxity of postwar America, the decay of the nuclear family, and so on” (Kweku 2024). Recent Black Lives Matter mobilizations and the “new visibility” into policing practices via new media and technology (Goldsmith 2010) has seen police retrench and respond with counter-movements like “blue lives matter” which center the TBL at the core of collective police identities (Cooper 2020; Keyes and Keyes 2022). Cooper (2020:636) describes the racial animus within these discourses by suggesting “it was against the Obama-thus-Race-thus-Police backdrop that Blue Lives Matter became the response of the police and their mostly white supporters to the new police criticism.”

While police maintain that the TBL represents respect for fallen officers, in police subculture it articulates racialized and violent imagery. In his discussion of the violence inherent in the TBL symbology, Tyler Wall (2020) underlines the civilizational tropes in police imagery, where police are protectors against (racialized) “beasts” threatening civilizational privileges. He argues that the TBL “authorizes racialized state violence in the name of humanity” (p. 327). Using an allegory of a “threatening ‘return’ to a state of nature,” the TBL “provides the ideological scaffolding on which the police power justifies itself as the invention of humanity” (p. 329). These invocations speak to a culture of dystopic violence woven into TBL culture.

Among police embrace of dystopic violence are recent flirtations with Punisher insignias. Drawn from the Marvel comic, the Punisher is a vigilante antihero, Frank Castle, adorning heavy-metal aesthetics most associated with white skulls over all-black backgrounds. Linnemann (2022:96) describes the broad-based appeal of the Punisher logo within policing circles, appearing on a badges, as an “embodiment of retaliatory rage, a no-nonsense anti-hero waging a literal war on crime without the encumbrances of due process afforded to underserving street criminals.” He traces how the logo represents police attraction to a fantasy-like violence that is transgressive, authoritarian, and breaks from the restraints of legal orders. With these cultural attachments to vigilantism, police curate their knowledge of who the “bad guys” are and demonstrate a moralistic embrace of the requisite violence to tame them. The TBL imagery enmeshes with the Punisher logo to affirm police power that is “for some the only means to achieve order in a disordered world, a necessary and righteous violence to balance the scales of not just legal but cosmic justice” (p. 25). ¹

Police and the Racial Infrastructure of the War on Terror

The War on Terror was an inflection point giving police knowledge and symbolic affinities to violence new vocabularies casting minoritized Arabs and Muslims as the ultimate civilizational threat to western order. The racialization of Arabs and Muslims as inherently violent, uncivilized, and irrational became a feature of the national security policing under the War on Terror (Cainkar and Selod 2018; Kumar 2021). These perceptions permeated into policing broadly as national security priorities became fused with domestic policing efforts, especially in search of the enemy within: Muslims who could commit terrorist attacks at any moment (Kundnani 2014). This resulted in wide securitization and surveillance of Muslims justified by risk models and radicalization “science” that are presented as neutral but carry deep Islamophobic assumptions about “menacing Islam” (Ahmad and Monaghan 2019). The Palestinian self-determination movement became subsumed within the War on Terror as the Palestinian struggle for statehood and independence against ever expanding Israeli occupation was suppressed by casting Palestinians as potential terrorists and Palestinian sovereignty struggles were dealt with draconian counter-terrorism measures (Abu-Laban and Bakan 2020). This deeply embedded anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism permeates into police knowledge, shaping engagement with the Palestine solidarity protests.

To summarize, in assessing the police suppression of Palestine solidarity protests, we focus on two neglected areas in the strategic incapacitation literature. First, we underline the racialized dimensions of policing of the post-9/11 period. Discussion of policing Palestine solidarity protests must account for how Islam has been refracted through the racial grammar of the War on Terror. We posit that the police knowledge filtering how police engage with these protests is pigmented by the contours of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism. Second, we engage with the recent policing literature on the police embrace of the TBL symbology. Especially within protest policing, the notion of civilizational discord—and police as violent guardians—has gained renewed currency within police rank-and-file. These dynamics, we argue, shape an intuitive and moralistic police worldview that intensifies an alignment with Israel and drives hostilities against Palestine solidarity protests.

Reading Anti-Muslim and Anti-Palestinian Racism in Strategic Incapacitation

The earliest Palestine solidarity protests in Canada were held on 9 October 2023. In Toronto, social democratic mayor Olivia Chow, called the Palestinian solidarity demonstrations “deplorable,” taking the stage alongside other elected officials to show support for Israel (Griffin 2023). The TPS chief tweeted to express concerns about “threats” while committing to increase police presence “to ensure the safety of our Jewish communities and all residents” (Lukacs 2024). The twinning of all Jews with the state of Israel in police statements provides an illustration of the affective dimensions through which Canadian police denoted protests in a frame that shows a natural alignment with Israel. The Deputy police chief of TPS said “there would be no tolerance for violence or hate crimes ahead of the expected large-scale demonstration,” setting a foundational discourse of associating Palestinian solidarity rallies with violence and hate. In Vancouver, mayor Ken Sim denounced the “anti-Israel” rallies, indicating he spoke with Vancouver police (VPD) who would “investigate and address any incidents of hate” (CBC 2023). Since then, cities across Canada have pre-emptively announced ramped up visible police presence outside religious institutions, particularly Jewish schools and synagogues.

On 10 November 2023, activists in Toronto targeted Indigo bookstore to protest its CEO, Heather Reisman, who runs a charity called HESEG foundation that funds scholarships for “lone soldiers” to participate in combat with the Israeli defense Forces (IDF) and subsequently continue studies in Israel (Lukacs 2023a). Reisman has long been criticized for using the HESEG Foundation to materially support the work of an army engaged in settler-colonial occupation, and, since October 2023, the genocide of the people of Gaza (Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East 2023). At Indigo’s downtown Toronto location, activists put posters of Reisman splashed with red paint alongside text that informed readers of her financial support of the IDF. Pro-Israel lobby groups described the event as “a vile antisemitic attack” and one group drew comparisons to “the Nazi-incited riots of Kristallnacht back in November 1938” (Gollom 2023). The TPS response was immediate and severe. In the early morning of 24 November 2023, TPS conducted no-knock home raids in the apartments of activists, kicking down front doors, ransacking apartments, and confiscating phones. Between these raids and subsequent arrests, 11 activists were charged “with mischief and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence” (Stewart 2024). While the arrestees faced no hate crime charges, in a press release on 23 November 2023 appearing under the title “Robust Response to Hate-Motivated Crime,” the TPS represented the charges as “arrests made in relation to the hate-motivated mischief investigation at the Indigo Store on Bay Street on November 10” (TPS 2023c).

Tying the arrests to claims around increasing antisemitic attacks, the 23 November 2023 TPS press release also spoke to “the significant spike in hate crimes in the city since the events in the Middle East began October 7,” announcing the expansion of the Hate Crimes Unit from 6 to 29 officers and an analyst and a researcher position. While giving nod to “hate-motivated graffiti” that was anti-Muslim/anti-Palestinian/anti-Arab, the statement singled out the rise of antisemitism citing the TPS Chief Demkiw saying “49% of the hate crime reported up until November 20 have been anti-Semitic.” This reflects foundational police knowledge where the pro-Israel position is the norm and Palestine solidarity activism is associated with hate-crimes and public disorder. The inclusion of antisemitism statistics as part of police communications by TPS after October 2023 additionally serves as a rationale for intensified police engagement with protests. However, hate crime statistics are mired with problems of underreporting by communities who have been marginalized or targeted by police, like Muslims and Arabs (Erentzen and Schuller 2020). Additionally, antisemitism statistics suffer from shortcomings as criticisms of Israel are counted as antisemitism, pro-Israel lobby groups peddle inflated antisemitism numbers, little regard is given to “attitudes about antisemitism of Canadian Jews themselves” (Nestel 2021:2; Ralph 2022). Despite Canada having experienced recent incidents of deadly racial violence targeting Muslims, police communications underemphasize the severity of this issue revealing selective empathy of police toward unsafety concerns of Jewish communities. ³

In a media quote, criminologist Kevin Walby suggested police “are influenced by a climate in which Palestinian solidarity protests are being delegitimized by the media and by politicians” (Lukacs 2023a). The delegitimization of Palestine solidarity protests is facilitated through racial understandings which cast Muslims and Arabs, prominent and visible in these protests, as prone to violence and illiberalism. Such tropes were on display at the 2024 Canadian Associate of Chiefs of Police (CACP) annual summit where the national association’s president, Thomas Carrique, noted that an uptick in protests was a result of individuals immigrating to Canada from countries in the “Middle East” where “the use of violence is an acceptable vehicle for social change” (Greene 2024). Presented at a prominent policing venue, such utterances speak to the latent and pervasive normalization of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim tropes with the police knowledge systems.

TPS also heralded Project Resolute—a paradigm of preemptive policing, community outreach, and strategic communication—formed soon after October 2023 to organize police response to the Palestine solidarity protests (Lukacs 2024). The expansion of the Hate Crimes Unit and Project Resolute was given congratulatory treatment in mainstream press, noting the latter to be “an effort to increase police visibility in targeted communities” (Roumeliotis and Sheldon 2024). This inclusive language, recirculated in media, propagates the idea of neutral policing, yet the inauguration of the project was clearly intended to offer preferential protection. Per the police agency’s own communication, “the project was launched to increase police visibility and presence in Jewish communities, along with cultural centres, synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship across the city” (TPS 2024b), implying the primary beneficiaries were “Jewish communities” ostensibly being “targeted” from Palestine solidarity movements. Investigative reporting uncovered that Project Resolute is rife with anti-Palestinian racism and granted TPS wide mandate to investigate “any occurrence generated as a result of protests and/or demonstrations,” which has seen them use tactics such as “pre-dawn raids, snatching people on the street, trying to turn arrested individuals into informants, showing up unannounced at university lectures, and capitalizing on years of surveillance of activist movements” (Lukacs 2024). The Hate Crimes Unit is linked to intelligence services (Clarke 2024). Facets of strategic incapacitation are evident in TPS’ increased surveillance and pre-emptive controls against protests, direct and spectacular arrests, and well-curated media campaigns designed to link the protests with violence and hate. Project Resolute claims to thrive on community outreach but in reality, opens a channel to legally target Palestine solidarity activists.

VPD also used a combination of preemptive and coercive strategies in controlling the Palestine solidarity protests. In October 2024, VPD stated that due to “conflict between Israel and Palestine,” the department’s Diversity, Community & Indigenous Relations Section (DCIRS) has “increased engagement with local Jewish and Muslim communities, with dialogue focused on security, particularly for places of worship and culturally significant centres” (VPD 2024a:16). VPD claimed that a police liaison officer was regularly “listening to concerns, and encouraging the reporting of any hate-related or criminal incidents.” However, most VPD announcements assumed a pro-Israel orientation. In January 2024, VPD had announced that “[t]ensions from the Israel-Hamas war have fueled increases in protest activity and hate crimes in Vancouver, resulting in rising anti-Semitism and more than $2.5 million in overtime costs” (VPD 2024b). Though the department only highlighted antisemitism, subsequent reporting based on freedom of information requests would reveal that hate incidents against various ethnic and marginal groups had also increased dramatically (Basu 2024). The private citizen who obtained this data chose to remain anonymous due to concerns about the VPD’s consistent anti-Palestinian bias, stating in a news outlet: “[t]here’s some patterns that we see that if you’re standing up for Palestinian rights . . . you’re more susceptible to be labelled as antisemitic when you’re doing things like . . . waving the Palestinian flag and saying, ‘Ceasefire now’ or ‘Stop bombing children,’ . . . Boom, all of sudden, you’re a terrorist supporter” (Basu 2024). Of course, hate crime statistics have limitations as noted above; nevertheless, the selective emphasis on antisemitism indicates how police knowledge problematizes and categorizes particular social issues. Jewish communities have been immediately and consistently represented as primary victims, often by conflating criticisms of Israel as attacks on Jews (Walia 2024).

VPD policing efforts against Palestinian solidarity seeks public legitimacy through strategic communications. In late September 2024, VPD arrested a youth during a conflict between Palestine solidary and counterprotests (VPD 2024c). With the protest organized by Samidoun, the Palestinian prisoners’ rights group, the media framing emphasized the violence of Palestinian protests. VPD used this incident to expand anticipatory strategic incapacitation practices ahead of protests planned for the anniversary of October 7. At an October 4 press conference, VPD Chief Adam Palmer offered extensive details of the “special police operation” developed for October 7 (G. Wood 2024). The VPD mobilization included enhanced visible presence, risk assessments and intelligence sharing at multiple scales, camera surveillance outside synagogues, uniformed school liaison officers at “some faith-based schools,” and a mobile police command center outside the Jewish Community Centre. Together, police, politicians, media, and pro-Israel groups used this conjured attention to call for the listing of Samidoun as terrorist entity. Shortly after, on October 15, the federal government made the link between the solidarity marches and the label of terrorism explicit by placing Samidoun on the terrorist entities list (Public Safety Canada 2024). While VPD have persistently claimed neutrality, their preferential protection of Jewish communities contrasts starkly with their concerns—or lack thereof—for the rights of protestors. Consider, for example, that the Pivot Legal Society and the BC Civil Liberties Association filed an extensively documented official complaint against VPD for illegal surveillance and police brutality (use of military grade pepper spray, knees on necks, and strangling and choking) against Palestine solidarity protestors, leading to the launch of an official investigation (CBC 2024; Pivot Legal Society 2024).

The police aligning itself with pro-Israel actors while treating the Palestine solidarity movement with contempt and violence is a theme that recurs consistently within our study. On 10 December 2023, the Palestine Youth Movement channel captured a video of TPS brutalizing a protester. The video shows multiple officers pinning down a protester with at least one officer kneeling on him and another repeatedly punching him in the torso (PYM Toronto 2023). Two days later, the TPS would post about a Hanukkah event at TPS headquarters attended by Israel’s Consul General Idit Shamir, Vice President of the Israeli lobby group Centre for Israel & Jewish Affairs Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, and staunch pro-Israel councillor James Pasternak, among other pro-Israeli elites who “heaped praise on Toronto Police” (TPS 2023a). Later that month, TPS would go on to warn “anyone whose behaviour crosses the line from lawful demonstration to criminality can be arrested” (TPS 2023b). The contrast of police forces cavorting with pro-Israeli elites while using stern language and violence against Palestinian solidarity activists is a motif of Canadian policing. In the period we analyzed, the TPS did not issue a statement or hold an event to commemorate dates important to Palestinians or invite Palestinians as guests to TPS headquarters. Instead, protests on Land Day (March 30), a date important for Palestinians globally (Amensty International 2019), have been vilified and securitized. On 30 March 2024, two protestors were grabbed, thrown to the ground, kneeled on, beaten, and punched by TPS officers. In addition, the police made seven arrests including one person from the neighborhood who was racially profiled (PYM Toronto 2024c). The TPS response was defiant saying that non-cooperation with officers resulting in “physical aggression” toward officers was “a serious departure from the principles of lawful demonstration” and that TPS will “not hesitate to enforce the law and make arrests where warranted during ongoing demonstrations stemming from the crisis in the Middle East” (TPS 2024a). Subsequent protests through the year would find the TPS continuing with violent tactics including using pepper spray, kneeling, punching, shoving, and arresting protestors that included young women (PYM Toronto 2024a, 2024b). In a recent radio show, TPS chief Demkiw defended TPS use of force which has resulted in fractures, dislocations, and concussions (Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East 2025; Nolan 2025).

The distinct characteristics of Toronto and Vancouver notwithstanding, the above examples highlight the consistency in police actions in both cities to manage Palestine solidarity protests that are essentialized as propagating hate. In some regards, police actions reveal “the ideology of entrenched Orientalism” (Bakan and Abu-Laban 2009), echoed among politicians and media, when engaging with expressions of Palestinian self-determination. The rhetoric of pro-Hamas supporters and “hate marches” (Kui 2024) animates War on Terror tropes of violent Palestinians and Muslims, distracting from the substance of protestor demands. The material connections between policing in Canada and Israel is bolstered by the affective expression of supposed overlapping national values. Police use of symbolic messaging showing antisemitism statistics and preferential attention to Jewish unsafety not only speaks to the race-mediated social order that police efforts aim to produce but also their political and ideological solidarities (with Israel).

Police Symbolism and Violence against Palestine Solidarity Protests

Soon after the October 7 attacks, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, justified Israel’s devastation of Gaza by calling it a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle” (Netanyahu 2023). Israel positioning itself is a civilizational battle resonates with “copaganda” that suffuses an ideological binary of good versus evil into everyday representations of policework (Drake et al. 2024). The War on Terror has only affirmed the reductive representations of Palestinians and Muslims casting them as in inherently violent and incompatible with “western values” (Abu-Laban and Bakan 2020; Kundnani 2014). The good versus evil binary of the police worldview is perhaps best articulated in the symbolism of the “thin blue line” (TBL). Not only has this symbolism become increasingly frequent in police knowledge over the past decade (Cooper 2020; Wall 2020), but the binary has become a central trope of the Israeli government in framing their persistent violence in Palestine. As we describe below, it is noteworthy to find this mix of racism and righteous violence in symbols worn by police at Palestine solidarity marches.

In April 2024, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) filed an official complaint against VPD two officers for respectively wearing the TBL patch and a patch with the Israeli flag alongside the logo of the comic book vigilante anti-hero The Punisher as shown in Figure 1 (BCCLA 2024; Zavarise 2024). The BCCLA complaint noted that “VPD are not permitted to wear the controversial ‘thin blue line’ patch because it contravenes the VPD’s long-standing policy against unauthorized adornments” and expressed alarm that “members of the VPD continue to wear unauthorized patches that are symbols of suppression, oppression, and violence for many in our community.” As noted above, the TBL symbology invokes a sordid history of racial violence and in recent years, has become a symbol for the “blue lives matter” movement. The TBL patch has been worn by police officers during violent repression of racial justice protestors and of Indigenous land back activists. As Wall (2020) posits, the TBL imagines police power to be “a defense of civilization,” which articulates conditions of inclusion into humanity with police guarding against a reversion to “savagery and bestiality.”

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Patch worn by a Vancouver Police Department officer at a Palestine solidarity protest.

When the TBL patch is fused with the flag of Israel and the Punisher logo, it becomes a representation for Israel’s position in the civilizational binary standing against the deluge of Islam—a racial signifier of those who are not worthy of humanity and against whom police violence needs to be naturally organized. We see the imbrication of Palestinian-ness within a reductive yet total racialization of Islam and Muslims as inherently violent and uncivilized (Abu-Laban and Bakan 2020; Kundnani 2014). Palestinians are denied agency, humanity, and even existence as a people with a distinct history. Palestinian claims of self-determination are seen as illegitimate and their allies as unreasonable. Such understandings are reflected in police understandings and intuitive alignment with Israel against Palestinian solidarity activists. So, whereas the VPD might officially ask officers to remove patches with the flag of Israel—just like it had asked officers to refrain from wearing TBL patches before—on the frontline, the practice continues because in the self-reflexivity of police officers, they are standing in defense against unruly and uncivilized Palestine solidarity protestors.

The internalization of the logic of Palestinians as incongruent with Canadian “values” was also evident in Toronto. In summer 2024, at the University of Toronto, TPS Chief Demkiw, took pictures with members of a self-declared “Jewish safety patrol,” Magen Herut, tied to extremist far-right groups like the Jewish Defense League (Rothman 2024). Operating as a registered charity, Magen Herut presents itself as a “self-defence” group. ⁴ With strong links to Israel’s far right Likud party, Magen Herut members patrol campuses across North America wearing a host of police-mimic paraphernalia like flak jackets, police duty belts, tactical gloves, radios, and sometimes weapons (Litvin 2024). In addition to mimicking the aesthetics of police, members of Magen Herut and J-Force, a private security firm claiming to provide “community security” solutions, were seen at university campuses on multiple occasion sporting TBL hats and patches (Heller 2024). Magen Herut founder, Aaron Hadida, posted the picture with Chief Demkiw on social media with a caption referring to Demkiw as “a true gentleman” (Hadida 2024). In this same picture, one of the men appears to be wearing a TBL patch and all the Magen Herut men are posing in tactical gear. That a police chief would be encouraging of an extra-state vigilante group is itself notable. Additionally, the deployment of the TBL patch by a pro-Israel militia claiming to mete out street justice showcases the affective affinities between Israel, holding the civilizational front, and police subculture that has embedded within it the sense that vigilante and racial violence as necessary for social order. Finally, is worth pointing to the sheer impossibility of Arab or Muslim groups to organize, like Magen Herut, for self-defense. Not only would such an initiative not receive encouragement from a police chief, but its very conception would be read as a national security threat subjecting it to state violence. The double-standards in the approach to policing are evident, yet more illustrative are how the symbolic instances point toward much broader ideological repertoires that are inseparable from race and racialized violence.