The Anti-Defamation League has gotten into the defamation enterprise. Based in 1913 to fight anti-Jewish bigotry, the ADL was as soon as revered for its civil-rights work. Now, amid nationwide protests over what the U.N. particular rapporteur and others have referred to as Israel’s genocide in Gaza, it’s shredding that repute with reckless and unsupported accusations of antisemitism.
Underneath the management of Chief Government Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL has mounted a campaign in opposition to seemingly any criticism of Israel, making a mockery of its acknowledged mission not solely “to cease the defamation of the Jewish folks” but in addition “to safe justice and honest therapy to all.”
At the moment the group blasts as antisemitic any who dare criticize Israel, even progressive, anti-Zionist Jews in teams equivalent to Jewish Voice for Peace. It has inspired universities to weaponize antiterrorism legal guidelines to silence the pro-Palestinian group College students for Justice in Palestine. It’s corrupting its broadly cited hate crime knowledge by placing Jewish peace rallies in the identical class as antisemitic assaults, lumping liberal Jews calling for a cease-fire with Jew haters and prompting Wikipedia’s editors to warn that it “has repeatedly printed false and deceptive statements” on “matters of antisemitism and the Israel/Palestine battle.”
More and more, the ADL is a hitman for McCarthyite Zionism. An worker of the group who spoke to the Guardian didn’t mince phrases: “The ADL has a pro-Israel bias and an agenda to suppress pro-Palestinian activism.” Certainly, Greenblatt has vowed to “apply extra concentrated vitality towards the specter of radical anti-Zionism.”
The group is making good on that risk in Southern California. Amongst its latest targets is my alma mater, Occidental School. The ADL introduced in Might that it and one other pro-Israel group, the Louis D. Brandeis Heart for Human Rights Underneath Legislation, had filed a criticism in opposition to Occidental and Pomona School with the U.S. Schooling Division, accusing them of “allowing extreme discrimination and harassment of Jewish college students in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which allows the federal authorities to disclaim funds to establishments discovered to be discriminatory.
Citing closely redacted testimony by 4 nameless college students, the criticism — certainly one of a quantity the teams lodged in opposition to faculties throughout the nation — alleges that since Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault on Israel, ”Jewish college students at Occidental School have skilled discrimination, disparate therapy, and harassment on the idea of their shared ancestry” and that the faculty’s administration has permitted “the hostile atmosphere to flourish.”
The criticism followers the flames by characterizing scholar fliers as “pro-Hamas pamphlets” and those that occupied the varsity’s administration constructing final fall as “pro-Hamas protesters” who “plastered” the partitions with “anti-Semitic and anti-Israel posters.” The occupation in query, it needs to be famous, was transient and peaceable. The criticism offers no detailed descriptions, pictures or different proof to help its costs of pro-Hamas or antisemitic messaging.
Once I spoke with Matthew Vickers of the Occidental chapter of College students for Justice in Palestine, he readily granted that he and his fellow scholar activists are unequivocally anti-Israel in that they decry the nation’s carpet-bombing of a penned-up civilian inhabitants as genocide; denounce its unlawful West Financial institution settlements as violent colonialism; and deplore its systematic domination and dehumanization of Palestinians as apartheid. However he categorically denied that there have been antisemitic posters or chants on the occupation or the group’s rallies, not to mention a normal local weather of antisemitism on campus.
In fact, the ADL’s criticism in opposition to Occidental isn’t actually about antisemitism. It’s about weaponizing the accusation of antisemitism to discredit, muzzle and punish Israel’s critics at a second when Israel’s actions have sparked a firestorm of campus protest.
The ADL’s declare that “a hostile atmosphere for Jewish and Israeli college students” prevails on the faculty rests on its assumption that “Zionism is a key part of the shared ancestral and ethnic identification of many Jewish People.” Till lately, that presumption, as a 2020 Pew research cited within the criticism signifies, was broadly true.
However Israel’s grotesquely disproportionate response to Hamas’ atrocities has made Zionism sharply divisive even amongst Jews and, amongst Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, incendiary. Help for Israel, the bedrock of many Jews’ identification, has turn into a millstone for some.
One of many unnamed Jewish college students cited within the ADL’s criticism in opposition to Occidental selected to not put on her “Star of David necklace after being confronted about it within the eating corridor,” noting that “she didn’t really feel that she may proceed publicly affirming her Jewish identification with out incurring harassment.” Nobody needs to be harassed for his or her identification. But when a “connection to the State of Israel is integral” to at least one’s identification, because the ADL insists it should be, and Israel is waging warfare with what many regard as genocidal indifference to civilian lives, issues are going to get messy.
“When Israel is singled out due to anti-Jewish hatred, that’s antisemitism,” the ADL asserts in its criticism, with solemn obviousness. Too true, in the best way that tautologies all the time are: Anti-Jewish hatred is certainly antisemitism. However, tough as it might be for the ADL to think about, there are different causes Israel is being singled out, chief amongst them the greater than 37,000 killed by Israeli forces since Oct. 7, based on the Gazan Well being Ministry.
The ADL criticism makes a lot of Jewish and Israeli college students feeling unsafe at Occidental, however its concern for Jewish security seems to be restricted to right-thinking Zionists. What of the anti-Zionist Jewish college students who may face reputational harm or worse from being branded as “antisemites” due to the ADL’s strain marketing campaign? In keeping with Vickers, of Occidental’s College students for Justice in Palestine chapter, the encampment there was a joint effort with Jewish Voice for Peace. Jewish “participation within the encampment was fairly disproportionate,” he informed me. “Thirty to forty p.c of the folks sleeping on the encampment have been Jews, who make up about 10% of the scholars at Occidental School.”
The ADL’s assaults on speech it doesn’t like — and Greenblatt’s conflation of anti-Zionism and antiwar protest with antisemitism — denigrate and threaten not simply Jewish college students but in addition LGBTQ+ college students and college students of shade, who based on Vickers turned out in excessive numbers for the protests.
These college students really feel so moved by a way of solidarity with oppressed folks midway across the planet that they’re prepared to threat punishment by directors and violence by the hands of police and counterprotesters — as at UCLA — together with the ADL’s authorized bullying. They perceive, much more profoundly than Greenblatt, that you would be able to’t “safe justice and honest therapy to all” whereas defending the rights of just a few.
Mark Dery is a cultural critic and a 1982 graduate of Occidental School.
