The Anti-Defamation League has gotten into the business of defamation. Founded in 1913 to combat anti-Jewish bigotry, the ADL was once respected for its work defending civil rights. Now, amid nationwide protests over what the UN Special Rapporteur and others have called Israel's Gaza a genocide, and are destroying that reputation with reckless and baseless accusations of anti-Semitism.
Under the leadership of Executive Director Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL has mounted a crusade against the seemingly… any Criticism of Israel, mocking its statements mission not only “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people,” but also “to ensure justice and fair treatment for all.”
Today the organization labels anyone who dares to criticize Israel as anti-Semitic, even progressive and anti-Zionist Jews in groups like Jewish Voice for Peace. Has motivated Universities will become weapons anti-terrorist laws to silence the pro-Palestinian group Students for Justice in Palestine. It is corrupting its widely cited hate crimes data, putting up Jew Peace demonstrations are in the same category as anti-Semitic attacks, lumping together liberal Jews who call for a ceasefire with Jew-haters and prompting Wikipedia editors to warn that he “has repeatedly published false and misleading statements” on “topics of antisemitism and the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
Increasingly, the ADL is a hitman for McCarthyite Zionism. An employee of the organization who spoke to the Guardian He did not mince his words: “The ADL has a pro-Israel bias and an agenda to suppress pro-Palestinian activism.” Indeed, Greenblatt has vowed to “implement more concentrated energy “towards the threat of radical anti-Zionism”.
The organization is making good on that threat in Southern California. Among its recent targets is my alma mater, Occidental College. The ADL announced in May that it and another organization pro-Israeli group, The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law had filed a complaint against Occidental and Pomona College with the U.S. Department of Education, accusing them of “allowing gross discrimination and harassment of Jewish students in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which allows the federal government to deny funding to institutions deemed discriminatory.
Citing extensively redacted testimony from four anonymous students, the complaint —one of several complaints the groups have filed against universities across the country—alleges that since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, “Jewish students at Occidental College have experienced discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment on the basis of their shared ancestry” and that the college administration has allowed “the hostile environment to flourish.”
The complaint fans the flames by characterizing the students' flyers as “pro-Hamas pamphlets” and those who occupied the school's administration building last fall as “pro-Hamas protesters” who “papered” the walls with “anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli posters.” The occupation in question, it should be noted, was short and peaceful. The complaint does not provide detailed descriptions, photographs or other evidence to support its allegations of pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic messages.
When I spoke to Matthew Vickers of the Western chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, he readily admitted that he and his fellow student activists are unequivocally anti-Israeli, denouncing the country’s mass bombing of a cornered civilian population as genocide; denouncing its illegal settlements in the West Bank as violent colonialism; and deploring its systematic domination and dehumanization of Palestinians as apartheid. But he categorically denied that there were any anti-Semitic signs or chants at the occupation or the group’s demonstrations, much less a general climate of anti-Semitism on campus.
Of course, the ADL's complaint against Occidental is not really about anti-Semitism, but about using the charge of anti-Semitism as a weapon to discredit, muzzle and punish critics of Israel at a time when Israel's actions have unleashed a firestorm of protests on college campuses.
The ADL's claim that the school is “hostile to Jewish and Israeli students” is based on its assumption that “Zionism is a key component of the shared ancestral and ethnic identity of many American Jews.” Until recently, that assumption, like Pew Study 2020 What is cited in the complaint indicates that, in general terms, it was true.
But Israel's grotesquely disproportionate response to Hamas atrocities has made Zionism deeply divisive even among Jews and, among Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, incendiary. Support for Israel, the cornerstone of many Jews' identity, has become a liability for some.
One of the anonymous Jewish students cited in the ADL complaint against Occidental decided not to wear her “Star of David necklace after being confronted about it in the dining hall,” noting that she “did not feel she could 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, and Israel is waging war with what many consider to be genocida If there is indifference towards the lives of civilians, things will get complicated.
“When Israel is singled out for its anti-Jewish hatred, that is anti-Semitism,” the ADL states in its complaint, with solemn obviousness. True enough, as tautologies always are: anti-Jewish 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 the obvious. 37,000 killed by Israeli forces since October 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The ADL complaint emphasizes that Jewish and Israeli students feel unsafe at Occidental, but its concern for Jewish safety appears to be limited to right-wing Zionists. What about anti-Zionist Jewish students, whose reputations could be damaged or worse if they are branded “anti-Semitic” because of the ADL’s pressure campaign? According to Vickers, of Occidental’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, the camp there was a joint effort with Jewish Voice for Peace. The “Jewish participation in the camp was quite disproportionate,” he told me. “Thirty to forty percent of the people sleeping in the camp were Jews, who make up about ten percent of Occidental College students.”
The ADL’s attacks on speech it doesn’t like — and Greenblatt’s conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-war protest with anti-Semitism — denigrate and threaten not only Jewish students but also LGBTQ+ students and students of color, who Vickers says participated in large numbers at the protests.
These students are so moved by a sense of solidarity with oppressed peoples on the other side of the planet that they are willing to risk punishment by administrators and violence at the hands of police and counter-protesters, as in University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) — along with legal intimidation by the ADL. They understand, much more deeply than Greenblatt, that “justice and fair treatment cannot be guaranteed to the all“while defending the rights of a few.
Mark Dery is a cultural critic and a 1982 graduate of Occidental College.
