The international community, according to Khalek, has abandoned the Palestinians, helping to create conditions where the Occupied Territories serve as a laboratory for Israel to test state-of-the-art methods for controlling an isolated population.
In fact, Israel has built a billion-dollar homeland security industry by using Palestinians as test subjects. It then exports what it learns in Gaza and the West Bank to authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world. "What Israel does to Palestinians doesn't stay in Palestine," Khalek said.
Last summer, only weeks after killing more than 2,100 Palestinians in Gaza, Israel hosted an annual drone conference in partnership with the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. "Israel held this big drone expo to advertise the products that it used to kill Palestinians in Gaza," Khalek said. "Those products will end up being sold to other regimes around the world who want to suppress and oppress a marginalized population of their own."
Khalek also has reported that under the cover of counterterrorism training, nearly every major police agency in the United States has traveled to Israel for lessons in occupation enforcement, a phenomenon that journalist Max Blumenthal dubbed "the Israelification" of America's security apparatus.
Local police agencies in the St. Louis area that cracked down on people protesting the police killing of Michael Brown had trained in Israel. Khalek reported that in 2011, then St. Louis County Police Department chief Timothy Fitch attended the Anti-Defamation League's National Counter-Terrorism Seminar, an annual week-long Israeli training camp where U.S. law enforcement executives "study first hand Israel's tactics and strategies" directly from "senior commanders in the Israel National Police, experts from Israel's intelligence and security services, and the Israel Defense Forces," according to the ADL's website.
Former St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department police chief Joseph Mokwa also is listed as having traveled to Israel in February 2008 as part of a Law Enforcement Exchange Program conference, according to Khalek.
Even the CIA looks to Israel when it needs a legal foundation on which to justify its unsavory methods of collecting intelligence. In her reporting of the U.S. Senate's report on the CIA's torture program, for example, Khalek discovered that the CIA regularly invoked the "Israeli example" as a possible basis for arguing that torture was necessary to prevent imminent harm when there is no other available means.
The "Israeli example" refers to a 1999 Israeli Supreme Court decision that supposedly outlawed the use of torture to extract confessions from Palestinian prisoners, she reported in December 2014. But the Israeli court decision actually contained loopholes that have led to impunity for Israeli torturers, she wrote in an article.
Innate Propaganda Detector
Khalek's parents were born in Lebanon. Growing up in a family of immigrants from the Middle East helped her to sense and see propaganda in the news media. "I've always had a good overall general understanding of the fact that U.S. foreign policy is horrible and what you see on the news isn't accurate," she said.
At the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Khalek was a sophomore in high school in Northern Virginia. "9/11 was difficult because of the backlash toward Arabs and Muslims. I felt like I was marginalized and discriminated against in many ways. That was my first experience with that," she said.
Khalek remembers her high school American history teacher, the day after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, opening class by saying there would be no discussion about the war. The teacher thought open dialogue could lead to criticism of the invasion, which would upset students whose parents were in the military.
More than 10 years later, Khalek looks back at her experience in high school as yet another example of how Americans are taught to embrace dangerous forms of nationalism. This closed-mindedness is why Khalek believes some Americans reacted so viciously to her coverage of the Clint Eastwood-directed movie "American Sniper."
In her reporting for Electronic Intifada and on social media, Khalek highlighted the actual words that former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle used in his autobiography of the same name. Kyle, in the book, boasts of killing 160 Iraqi "savages" during his four deployments in Iraq. "Savage, despicable evil. That's what we were fighting in Iraq," Kyle writes in his book. "I only wish I had killed more," he writes, adding, "I loved what I did " It was fun. I had the time of my life."
In an article about the movie, Khalek described "American Sniper" as "brilliant propaganda that valorizes American military aggression while delivering Hollywood's most racist depiction of Arabs in recent memory, effectively legitimizing America's ongoing bombing campaigns across the Middle East."
While watching the movie, Khalek said she understood that it was propaganda, but at the same time she found the story line compelling. "That's what makes me so mad. This is a good movie and it's going to be effective," she said in the interview. "It re-writes the Iraq war that makes Americans feel good about it. It dresses up the whitewashing of the Iraq war with this story about soldiers and how hard war is for soldiers and their families."
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