Training for NYPD Officers Categorized the Keffiyeh and Watermelon as Antisemitic Symbols

On January 8th, senior New York Police Department (NYPD) staff joined over 150 law enforcement officers, city officials, and religious leaders at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan for a training on combating antisemitism. In a press release about the event, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM)—which led the training alongside George Washington University’s Program on Extremism (POE)—said the presentation aimed to teach the police “how to recognize and address antisemitism in its many contemporary forms” and offered “tools to counter it.” But the presentation itself, exclusively obtained by Jewish Currents, was in large part concerned with pro-Palestine activism, casting the Palestine solidarity movement as a significant threat to Jewish safety despite consistent documentation that antisemitism in the United States is most prevalent among far-right white nationalists. The training, which focused heavily on student protesters, repeatedly conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism. It categorized campus demonstrators as extremists tied to Hamas, and branded as antisemitic Palestinian symbols like the watermelon and the keffiyeh, as well as phrases such as “settler colonialism” and “all eyes on Rafah.”

Experts on antisemitism and civil liberties say the training reinforces a police culture that treats Palestinians (and Arabs and Muslims more broadly) with suspicion, while doing little to curb antisemitism. “They are actively conflating any care for Palestinian humanity or rights—and in some cases, Palestinian existence itself—with antisemitism,” said Dove Kent, the US senior director for Diaspora Alliance, a group that fights antisemitism and its weaponization. “None of this does anything to increase Jewish safety.” Instead, the trainings serve to worsen a situation where “law enforcement is on the front lines of violent anti-Palestinian repression—beating student protesters, surveilling them, and raiding them both on and off campus,” said Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal (and a contributing editor for Jewish Currents). “With this training, police are being fed a description of pro-Palestinian students that, merely on the basis of their political expression, categorizes them as a security threat.” (The NYPD, the New York City mayor’s office, CAM, and POE did not return requests for comment.)

The two groups that led the NYPD training occupy different roles in the pro-Israel landscape. CAM was founded in 2019 by Adam Beren, a Trump-supporting oil tycoon. One of the organization’s main goals is lobbying elected officials around the country to adopt the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism—which classifies some anti-Zionist speech as antisemitic—into state law. CAM’s advisers include individuals with close ties to government officials around the country, such as Joel Eisdorfer, a former senior adviser to New York City Mayor Eric Adams who helped coordinate the seminar for the NYPD, and Gabe Groisman, a top ally of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Meanwhile, POE, created in 2015 and housed at George Washington University, describes itself as a “research center on all forms of extremism,” with a particular focus on “global jihadism, Islamism, domestic extremism and antisemitism.” The organization is led by Lorenzo Vidino, who “promotes conspiracy theories about the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe and the United States,” according to Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, which researches Islamophobia. POE also employs numerous former national security officials—including a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who helped investigate the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim group prosecuted by the Bush administration for giving humanitarian aid to allegedly pro-Hamas Palestinian charities. (Legal experts have harshly criticized the prosecution and conviction of the Holy Land Foundation due to the government’s reliance on the testimony of anonymous Israeli intelligence agents, and the fact that the Palestinian charities funded by the foundation were also funded by the US government.)

Now, CAM and POE have capitalized on law enforcement’s interest in anti-Zionist activity, which has peaked in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023 amid an upsurge of campus protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Prior to the NYPD seminar this January, CAM and POE had teamed up in late 2024 to give trainings to law enforcement agencies in Virginia in sessions co-organized by Governor Glenn Youngkin. The presentations attempted to outline Hamas’s alleged “ongoing efforts to infiltrate the American education system,” and tried to link prominent Muslim American groups like American Muslims for Palestine and the Council on American-Islamic Relations to Hamas. Subsequently, Virginia lawmakers wrote a resolution commending the CAM and POE training for “resulting in real-world results,” with “investigators identifying and thwarting potential threats to public safety thanks to improved recognition of evidence associated with extremism during probes of unrelated criminal activities.” And Virginia is not alone in having CAM and POE present to its police. This January, then-Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (who is now a Florida senator) announced that Florida’s federal, state, and local law enforcement officers would attend an April 30th seminar given by CAM and POE on “the presence of Hamas in America and campus protests,” building on post-October 7th efforts by government officials and Israel advocacy groups to allege without evidence that student protesters are violating “material support” laws against assisting Hamas.

The CAM and POE training session for the NYPD drew top officials from the department: Commissioner Jessica Tisch offered opening remarks and NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force Commander Gary Marcus also spoke. The presentation itself was led by Lisa Katz, CAM’s chief government affairs officer, and David Zimmerman, a senior research fellow at POE. In one of the slides shown during POE’s presentation, Zimmerman labeled Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—whose supporters he characterized as “young, bored, and looking for purpose”—as campus extremists. The slide tied the call for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” to Hamas, and defined it as advocating the “complete annihilation of Israel.” (“From the river to the sea” is a phrase used widely across the Palestinian political spectrum, not only by Hamas, and is historically rooted in a call for a secular, democratic state in Israel/Palestine.) The slide went on to link SJP to an alleged 300% increase in antisemitic activity on college campuses, citing the Anti-Defamation League—a group whose audits of antisemitism conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism.

CAM’s portion of the session, delivered by Katz, centered on campus activism and pro-Palestine street protests. In one slide purporting to show “antisemitic symbols,” CAM listed the keffiyeh, a black and white scarf emblematic of Palestinian identity, and the watermelon, which shares the colors of the Palestinian flag, as examples of images that “incite hatred, violence, or discrimination against Jewish individuals or communities.” Another image deemed antisemitic was one from a Columbus, Ohio, city council meeting, where some attendees had their hands painted red. The local paper—CAM’s source for the image—explained that protesters used the paint “to simulate the blood of Palestinian civilians being killed in Gaza,” but CAM likened it instead to a famous photo taken in 2000 of Palestinian militants raising blood-stained hands after killing two Israeli reservists in Ramallah. CAM also identified the phrase “settler colonialism” and slogans such as “all eyes on Rafah”—a reference to a viral social media campaign urging people to speak up against Israel’s destruction of the Gazan city—as examples of antisemitic speech. The group ended the presentation by recommending that law enforcement train officers on the “symbols of antisemitism,” utilize the IHRA definition of anti-Jewish bigotry, and “prosecute consistently.”

“The presentation urges policing action and prosecutions based on the deeply problematic IHRA definition, which falsely equates criticism of Israeli government policy with antisemitism,” said Ramzi Kassem, a professor of law at the City University of New York and the co-director of the legal nonprofit CLEAR. “NYPD and city actions based on the IHRA definition probably would be unconstitutional, and would amount to nothing less than the criminalization of speech and dissent.” Civil liberties advocates worry that such advice could also fortify troubling NYPD policing practices. “The NYPD reportedly attended a training by an outside group that, under the banner of fighting antisemitism, fosters anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia, and misinformation and risks chilling constitutionally-protected speech,” said Veronica Salama, a staff attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union. “This reinforces our concern about the NYPD’s brutal treatment of pro-Palestine protesters based on their views.” (The NYPD has repeatedly responded to recent pro-Palestinian protests with violence, drawing weapons on demonstrators and dousing them with pepper spray.)

The CAM and POE trainings build on the NYPD’s longstanding willingness to partner with right-wing groups pushing anti-Muslim or anti-Arab ideas. In 2012, documents obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice revealed that the department had repeatedly screened an anti-Muslim film positing that American Muslim leaders want to “infiltrate and dominate” the US. The film was produced by the Clarion Fund, a group which portrays Islam as inherently violent, and was shown to over 1,200 officers. (In 2014, CAM founder Beren gave $50,000 to the Clarion Fund through his family foundation.) The revelation of the screenings came as the NYPD faced criticism over its invasive surveillance program targeting Muslim Americans that began after the September 11th attacks. Now, experts worry that this pattern is set to continue. “The NYPD’s enlistment in the war on terror set the stage for many generations of police to be trained to see Muslim and Arab people as a national threat,” said Kent. Palestinians and their supporters are now being easily assimilated into this framework, she said. “It is part and parcel of a worldview that casts Arab and Muslim people as the central international enemy.”