Contra ADL
The ADL is widely recognized as an authority on racism and extremism. A closer look at its history and current activities betray its own racist and authoritarian agenda.
1951 meeting between the ADL and Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion. Retrieved from: ADL.
Alongside the SPLC, the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) is one of the go-to authorities for when journalists or liberal-to-moderate news stations need someone to explain or comment on an antisemitic or racist incident. CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in particular is a constant feature among talking head programs. With the ongoing genocide in Gaza, he has also emerged as the go-to commentator to manufacture consent for the billions in military aid sent to Israel and smear all opposition as antisemitic. This is egregious enough in itself, but he has shamelessly gone as far as to ally with antisemites so long as they support him in his Zionist agenda. Those familiar with the ADL’s history are likely not surprised. Anyone who considers themselves an anti-racist who still believes, promotes, or works with the ADL should seriously consider the following reasons not only to not take them seriously but also to ostracize them from anti-racist and civil rights organizing.
The ADL Suppresses Black, Arab, and Left-Wing Organizations
In the first place, the ADL has a long and storied history of surveilling, smearing, and undermining black and Arab-American civil rights groups, as well as any civil rights groups to its left. Those interested in this full history should read this entire article, but for the sake of brevity we’ll stick to the highlights:
In a 2013 interview with Haaretz, then-CEO Abe Foxman stated that calling for the surveillance of the entire Muslim community is a “natural response”. He also stated that Louis Farrakhan was the only leader the black community had.
It collaborated with the House of Un-American Activities Committee, which itself had clear antisemitic overtones.
In 1985, it circulated a blacklist of Arab-American organizations it charged with antisemitism, which resulted in dozens of individuals finding themselves disinvited from meetings with government officials.
In 1993 it was caught employing the services of art collector Roy H. Bullock to infiltrate and produce detailed documents on groups including the NAACP, Greenpeace, and the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. In one case, Bullock sold information on anti-apartheid activists to the South African government.
What emerges from this is a picture of an organization that is not only anti-Black, anti-Arab, and anti-left in orientation, but one that is willing to employ the McCarthyist tactics of blacklisting and surveillance to harass them out of their organizing work (as well as literal McCarthyism in the case of its willing collaboration with the HUAC). The case of Bullock is also illustrative of how the ADL shifted from advocating against antisemitism towards harassing critics of Israel: he told the police that he had largely shifted to tracking anti-Israel organizations by the 80s. As I will continue to show, the ADL does not oppose antisemitism but is willing to spread it to lobby for Israel.
The ADL Spreads Disinformation
The ADL has faced repeated criticisms from the anti-extremist research community not only for its role as a pro-Israel lobby and in suppressing other civil rights groups but also for the sloppiness of its research. Although it has published a yearly Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents since 1979, its methodology is not public and experts point out the difficulty in logging antisemitic incidents. While it admits that it isn’t perfect, it nevertheless uses this data to argue that antisemitism is rising year after year, even when that increase can be explained by better incident tracking methods or a change in the definition of antisemitism.
It also counts anti-Zionist incidents as antisemitic regardless of the context– even when Jews are the ones responsible. This trend is intensifying under Jonathan Greenblatt’s leadership according to ex-staffers. The media (and Congress!) nevertheless readily repeats the ADL’s assertion that anti-Zionism is antisemitism as fact despite how trivial it is to disprove by simply looking at the number of Jews present in anti-Zionist movements, including organizations led by Jews such as Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and Jews Against White Supremacy. True to form, it recently logged ceasefire rallies led by some of these groups as antisemitic incidents, ludicrously implying they’re comparable to a Nazi march or a hate crime.
Greenblatt’s continued insistence that anti-Zionism is antisemitism also implies that such individuals are self-hating Jews, an ugly charge reminiscent of Ben Shapiro’s infamous line about “bad Jews” that vote Democrat, which itself plays into antisemitic tropes about liberal Jews undermining society. This comparison is admittedly a little ironic since Shapiro also counts the ADL among those bad Jews, however, this only goes to show the absurdity of the ADL effectively speaking for the entire Jewish community– no one organization can speak for an estimated 15.2 million people. Not content with speaking for all Jews, the ADL is also well-versed in speaking for all Palestinians by making sweeping generalizations about them and their activism.
Despite repeated objections from Palestinian activists and academics alike that for most Palestinians, it is a call for the creation of a secular democracy among many other potential meanings, the ADL continues to insist that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is not only an antisemitic slogan but a call for the removal of Jews from Palestine. Every accusation is a confession, it seems.
As a final example, the ADL recently ramped up its attempted suppression of pro-Palestine organizations by claiming in an open letter that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters around the country may have materially supported a “foreign terrorist organization.” Its only evidence– and I use that term loosely– for this claim is that some chapters have allegedly endorsed Hamas or said “We are Hamas” and “We echo Hamas”. I could not find any evidence that anyone said that, and the letter does not link to evidence of this happening. The letter does not include any links to hard evidence of these alleged statements, let alone evidence of material support, except a series of tweets by Greenblatt, which in turn link to statements by local chapters. Some of these statements are admittedly vile, but the issue at hand is if the ADL provided any evidence whatsoever that SJP committed a crime that carries up to 20 years in prison. It did not. Every accusation is a confession.
The media seems to be largely complacent in entertaining the ADL’s farcical allegations. Greenblatt cannot possibly be unaware of how absurd it is to claim all anti-Zionists are antisemitic, so the only possibility remaining is that he hopes no journalist will question him on this– which has mostly panned out as far as I can tell. I have yet to see any instances of anti-Zionist Jews being invited on the news to challenge Greenblatt or any other representative of the ADL on this. I know I sound like a broken record, but Greenblatt cannot possibly be unaware of how unserious of a charge this is. He is simply leveraging the authority and reputation of the ADL to strike down his political enemies.
The ADL Collaborates With the State and Police
How any organization can claim to be anti-racist and collaborate with the police is beyond me, but I can overlook that disagreement. Plenty of respectable civil rights organizations with their hearts in the right place do so. It would also be forgivable in the case of the ADL— if its heart was in the right place.
In addition to the previously mentioned collaboration with HUAC and calls to crack down on SJP, the ADL boasts on its website of providing intelligence and training to law enforcement— including through exchange programs with Israel, where abuse of Palestinians in the name of “anti-terrorism” is routine. Although an ADL employee stated that criticizing these exchange programs is tantamount to arguing that “American Jewish institutions are responsible for rising levels of police brutality and racism against minorities here in the United States,” an internal memo showed that some inside the organization worried the exchange program would worsen police brutality. And it has.
The ADL Allies with Antisemites
All of this is underscored by the fact that Greenblatt himself is perfectly willing to work with antisemites so long as they align with him on Israel— namely Elon Musk and Elise Stefanik. Both have endorsed a version of the Great Replacement Theory, the same one that motivated the Tree of Life synagogue attack, the Buffalo shooter, and the Christchurch shooter. Nevertheless, both have found a surefire way to get back into Greenblatt’s good graces: promise to silence critics of Israel.
Musk later tweeted that the term “decolonization” and the slogan “from the river to the sea” were genocidal and would result in suspension from Twitter. Although I could not find any statements by the ADL praising Elise Stefanik, it did share a clip of her grilling University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill on alleged antisemitism on campus, a PR disaster that led her to resign and threatens Harvard President Claudine Gay’s job as well. I also could not find any statements by the ADL condemning Stefanik’s antisemitism or at least acknowledging her past rhetoric. This, despite the outcry from the Jewish community.
Greenblatt’s actions not only endangers Jews, but also people of color, Arabs, Latines, and all immigrants and refugees. The Tree of Life shooter, after all, was motivated by the synagogue’s work with those communities. By collaborating with these individuals, the ADL throws not only fellow Jews, but all targets of the far-right under the bus just to protect Israel. The irony of an organization declaring itself in opposition to antisemitism while indirectly helping perpetuate an antisemitic conspiracy theory cannot possibly be lost on Greenblatt.
Why Work With Antisemites?
Greenblatt is likely operating on a belief that goes back to the earliest days of Zionism: Jews can only be safe in their own nation, so Israel must be supported no matter what.
While I can’t necessarily fault any Jew for believing they would be safer as a majority in their own nation in the abstract sense, in practice it hasn’t worked out so far. Any country where everyone has to serve in the military out of constant fear that its neighbors will kill them is, in fact, not safe. Maybe Greenblatt believes that the days when Jews are safe in Israel are not far off– but he likely also views the total removal of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza as a prerequisite for that. Moreover, Israel will still be surrounded by Palestinians in Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon unlikely to forget this act of ethnic cleansing. This is about ideology, not safety.
It’s more likely that Greenblatt isn’t motivated by a clear-headed, practical calculation about where Jews are safest, but by sheer ideology. This has been true of Zionism from the beginning: the first two waves of Jewish settlement in Palestine, or aliyah, were certainly triggered by pogroms and other persecutions, but their choice to migrate specifically to Palestine was religiously and politically motivated. Even after the Holocaust, most Jews chose to move across the Atlantic (Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 51). Of the approximately 15 million Jews in the world, around 6 million live in the United States. You cannot tell me that the United States is a deadlier place for Jews to be than Israel. This is about ideology, not safety.
Moreover, this argument cedes ground to antisemites that Jews cannot possibly live in the so-called West; indeed, the earliest people to argue Jews should settle in Palestine were antisemitic Christians aiming to fulfill a Biblical prophecy (Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel, 13, 20). This line of thought undoubtedly informed the Balfour declaration of support for the creation of a Jewish state over a single Palestinian state in which Jews happened to live, as Arab leadership had offered (Ten Myths About Israel, 53). This is about ideology, not safety.
If You’re Serious About Peace…
My alma mater once hosted a talk by Jon McCourt of Derry, Northern Ireland. He’s a former Official IRA member who saw his friends shot in the back on Bloody Sunday in 1968. He later became a peace activist working to negotiate an end to armed conflict. The question of a united Ireland is not yet solved, but that wasn’t the point of the talks. To quote him, “This was about taking the gun out of Irish politics.” Without a hard border in Ireland, that peace has largely held. Recent polls show that Northern Ireland is rapidly trending towards voting to join the Republic of Ireland. The process of creating a united Ireland has become a political one instead of a military one. Yes, politics is the continuation of war by other means, but countless precious lives have been spared.
If Greenblatt wants Jews to be safe in Israel, he should be serious about peace. If he wants to be serious about peace, there are several things he can do. He should use his platform to demand:
A guarantee of the right of return or compensation for dispossessed Palestinian refugees
An end to the siege of Gaza
An end to settlements
An end to the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank
Many other demands
Although it is not widely acknowledged, these policies are acts of military aggression, or what Ilan Pappé has called incremental genocide. So long as these policies exist, Palestinians will resist violently and nonviolently– and they are right to. This conflict will be finally solved only when there is a singular, secular, and democratic society with equality for all, but these measures at least mean violence will be removed from the equation. Any Israeli offers of peace that do not include a right to return at the very least are pure theater. If you want Jews to be safe, Mr. Greenblatt, you need to be serious about peace.