The Many Names and Faces of Enslavement: Policing and Containment in Georgia, the US South, and Israel.

Three organizers from the Movement to End Israeli Apartheid-Georgia (MEIA-G) will use a popular education approach to map and historicize the function and impact of the police system in Atlanta, Georgia and the U.S. South. With its origins rooted in the legacy of slavery, the police system’s intimate relationship with the prison-industrial complex is unequivocally connected to the fact that Black males make up 80% of Atlanta’s incarcerated population. We will connect this history and practice to how and why the Israeli National Police surveil, profile and incarcerate the indigenous Palestinian population.

In the second half of the workshop, we will expose the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE)—a police exchange program housed at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. Under the guise of international cooperation and education, this program facilitates drug enforcement and counterterrorism training exchanges between Georgia and Israel. We will detail how and why such a program is the target of MEIA-G’s divestment campaign as well as the strategy leading and urgency of this divestment campaign within the context of the U.S. South.