The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has gone all-in on the smear campaign. Founded in 1913 to combat anti-Jewish bigotry, the ADL was once respected for its civil rights work. Today, amid nationwide protests over what the ADL has done, UN Special Rapporteur and others have called Israel genocide in Gaza, but Israel is destroying that reputation with reckless and unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism.
Under the leadership of CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL has launched a crusade against any of them criticism of Israel, mocking its statements assignment not only “to end the defamation of the Jewish people,” but also “to ensure justice and fair treatment for all.”
Today, the organization labels as anti-Semitic anyone who dares to criticize Israel, even progressive and anti-Zionist Jews belonging to groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace. He has encouraged Universities will be turned into weapons anti-terrorism laws to silence the pro-Palestinian group Students for Justice in Palestine. It corrupts its widely cited hate crime data by putting Jewish peace rallies in the same category as anti-Semitic attacks, lumping together liberal Jews calling for a ceasefire with those who hate Jews and prompting Wikipedia editors to warn that the organization “has repeatedly published false and misleading statements” on “topics related to anti-Semitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
The ADL is increasingly seen as a hired gun for McCarthyist Zionism, an ADL employee who spoke to the Guardian I didn’t mince my words: “The ADL has a pro-Israel bias and an agenda to suppress pro-Palestinian activism.” Indeed, Greenblatt has vowed to “enforce more concentrated energy in the face of the threat of radical anti-Zionism.
The organization is carrying out its threat in Southern California. Among its recent targets is my alma mater, Occidental College. The ADL announced in May that it and another pro-Israeli group, The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed a complaint against Occidental and Pomona College with the U.S. Department of Education, accusing them of “enabling serious discrimination and harassment of Jewish students in violation of the Constitution.” Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which allows the federal government to withhold funds from institutions deemed discriminatory.
Citing heavily redacted testimony from four anonymous students, the complaint — one of several groups that have filed lawsuits against universities across the country — alleges that since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, “Jewish students at Occidental College have been subjected to discrimination, disparate treatment and harassment based on their common ancestry” and that the university’s administration has allowed “this hostile environment to flourish.”
The complaint fans the flames by calling the students’ leaflets “pro-Hamas leaflets” and those who occupied the school’s administration building last fall “pro-Hamas protesters” who “plastered” the walls with “anti-Semitic and anti-Israel posters.” The occupation in question, it should be noted, took place on September 15, 2008. short and peaceful. The complaint does not provide any detailed descriptions, photographs or other evidence to support its accusations of pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic messages.
When I spoke with Matthew Vickers of the Western chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, he readily admitted that he and his fellow student activists were clearly anti-Israel in that they described the mass bombing of a herded civilian population as genocide, denounced illegal settlements in the West Bank as violent colonialism, and deplored the systematic domination and dehumanization of Palestinians as apartheid. But he flatly denied that there were any anti-Semitic posters or chants at the occupation or the group’s rallies, let alone a general climate of anti-Semitism on campus.
Of course, the ADL’s complaint against Occidental is not really about anti-Semitism. Rather, it is about using the charge of anti-Semitism as a weapon to discredit, silence and punish critics of Israel at a time when Israel’s actions have sparked a storm of protest on campuses.
The ADL’s claim that “a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students” prevails at the school rests on its assumption that “Zionism is a key element of the shared ancestral and ethnic identity of many American Jews.” Until recently, this assumption, as Pew Study 2020 As the complaint states, the claims cited were generally true.
But Israel’s grotesquely disproportionate response to Hamas’s atrocities has made Zionism extremely divisive, even among Jews, and inflammatory among Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. Support for Israel, a cornerstone of many Jews’ identity, has become a burden for some.
One of the unnamed Jewish students named in the ADL’s complaint against Occidental chose not to wear her “Star of David necklace after being confronted about it in the dining hall,” noting that she “did not feel able to continue to publicly affirm her Jewish identity without being harassed.” No one should be harassed for their identity. But if a “connection to the State of Israel is integral” to a person’s identity, as the ADL insists it should be, and Israel is waging a war against what many see as genocidal indifference to the lives of civilians, things will become complicated.
“When Israel is singled out because of Jew-hatred, it is anti-Semitism,” the ADL states in its complaint, with solemn obviousness. It is all too true, as tautologies always are: Jew-hatred is indeed anti-Semitism. But, as hard as it may be for the ADL to imagine, there are other reasons why Israel is singled out, chief among them being the fact that more than 1,000 Jews are Jews. 37,000 killed by Israeli forces since October 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The ADL complaint makes much of the sense of insecurity among Jewish and Israeli students at Occidental, but its concern for Jewish safety seems limited to self-righteous Zionists. What about anti-Zionist Jewish students who could see their reputations tarnished, or worse, if they were labeled “anti-Semitic” because of the ADL’s pressure campaign? According to Vickers, of Occidental’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, the encampment there was a collaboration with Jewish Voice for Peace. “The Jewish participation in the encampment was quite disproportionate,” he told me. “Thirty to forty percent of the people sleeping in the encampment were Jewish, which is about 10 percent of the student body at Occidental College.”
The ADL’s attacks on speech it doesn’t like—and Greenblatt’s conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-war protests and anti-Semitism—denigrate and threaten not only Jewish students but also LGBTQ+ students and students of color, who Vickers said showed up in large numbers at the protests.
These students feel so moved by a sense of solidarity with oppressed peoples halfway around the world that they are willing to risk punishment from administrators and violence from police and counter-protesters – as they did in UCLA —as well as the ADL’s legal bullying. They understand, far more deeply than Greenblatt, that one cannot “guarantee justice and fair treatment to all“while defending the rights of only a few.
Mark Dery is a cultural critic and a 1982 graduate of Occidental College.
