Israel police superintendent visits Milwaukee
The story goes that a male Israeli policy officer responded to a complaint about a loud party. On arriving at the scene, he found himself at a bachelorette party. The guests, despite his vehement protests, insisted he was the male stripper they had been expecting.
Israel Police Superintendent Gil-Yisroel Kleiman wasn’t there; however, in his capacity as the Israel Police Foreign Press Spokesman, he said he had to field questions about that story from foreign news media from as far away as South America.
But this incident is memorable to him because it was one of the few lighter moments in what is otherwise a very serious job in Israel’s national police force.
New York-native Kleiman, 46, came to Milwaukee last week as part of a national tour on behalf of State of Israel Bonds. As guest speaker at the local Israel Bonds Honor Society reception on May 13, which was attended by about 100 people, Kleiman talked about issues facing the Israeli police force.
Since 2001, when his job was created, he and other members of Israel’s police force have “found ourselves at the center” of foreign news media attention because of the force’s work against Palestinian terrorism, he said.
Some 80 to 90 percent of his work has to do with terrorism and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, everything from bombing incidents to the arrests of foreign “peace activists.”
About 10 percent, he said, relates to other Israeli police matters that less frequently attract international interest, such as the international traffic in sex slaves, significant drug smuggling, the murder of an Israeli abroad or Israeli actions in the international war against intellectual property fraud.
Moreover, Kleiman said, since Sept. 11, 2001, “hundreds” of members of U.S. law enforcement agencies have visited Israel to share information and explore common interests in fighting terrorism, drug smuggling, money laundering, among other matters; and Israeli police officials have come to the U.S. to meet law enforcement officials, from Attorney General John Ashcroft on down.
Childhood ambition
Kleiman came from a religious Zionist family and he received most of his early education at the Yeshiva of Flatbush. Even so, he said he knew he wanted to be a police officer since he was in fourth grade —to the alarm of at least one of his teachers, who called his parents when he happened to say this during a class.
“Police work, when the job is done well, helps people,” Kleiman said. “Yet it is considered an atypical Jewish profession.”
Still, he didn’t pursue this career dream directly. After earning a B.A. in history at George Washington University, he made aliyah and joined the Israel Defense Forces. He was assigned to the combat engineers and became a bomb technician.
And that, he said, led to his first assignment in the Israel police, as a member and then an instructor of the bomb squad. “There are more doctors and surgeons than there are bomb techs,” he said of his service in that field. “It is an elite specialty” that is both on a technological “cutting edge” and that saves people’s lives.
His career has brought him a variety of assignments: helping find witnesses in Israel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in English-speaking countries, working as chief inspector of Tel Aviv’s Central Investigation Unit and supervising security at government institutions.
Along the way, he earned a law degree at Bar-Ilan University and married a fellow police officer, Ilanit, an inspector who supervises investigators of sex crimes and domestic violence.
Their jobs subject them to contrasting kinds of stress, Kleiman said. He has been “concerned in every terror attack in the last three years,” while she “doesn’t deal with the amount of bodies I’ve seen, but she gets involved in each individual victim’s case, which is also distressing.”
And all his training and experience apparently have made him an effective spokesman. According to Bonnie Jacobson, executive director of Development Corporation for Israel/Israel Bonds in Wisconsin, Kleiman came across in his presentation as “honest, articulate, charming and charismatic,” and many audience members “stayed after the program to speak with him personally and enjoy his company.”
In commenting on other police issues, Kleiman said that the Israel police force has changed its approach in dealing with domestic violence in recent years. Whereas previously Israeli police strove not to interfere in family matters, today they “respond immediately” and have the power to order an abuser to leave a residence for some days. “There is almost zero tolerance” of domestic violence today in Israel, he said.
But then, Israel does not have a high rate of domestic crime generally, and very little “street crime,” he said. Last year, it had 163 murders — apart from terrorist murders — in the entire population of six million people, he said, while American cities with populations much smaller have rates as high or higher.
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