The ADL is leading the attack against free speech on Palestine

Columbia University’s recent suspension of its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) chapters was just the latest examples of the unfolding attacks on free speech when it comes to Palestine in the United States. Among the troubling aspects of this trend is the role outside groups are playing in university actions since October 7, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has been leading the charge against SJP chapters nationally.

Despite being widely understood as a mainstream civil rights organization, the ADL has a long history of surveilling and infiltrating social justice and human rights organizations, silencing advocacy for Palestine, and particularly working to silence any and all criticism of Israel. 

Students for Justice in Palestine, in particular, has been in the crosshairs of the ADL’s repression campaign for at least a decade. One of the main avenues for doing so has been to equate anti-Zionism, and really any form of criticism of Israel, with antisemitism. Such conflations lay the groundwork for the ADL to make its oft-repeated claim that SJP and JVP are the “photo inverse of the extreme right” and even to implicate them in the rise of antisemitic hate crimes. 

These talking points have culminated in calls from the ADL for law enforcement to surveil, investigate, and possibly prosecute student activists. In a public letter released on October 25, the ADL and Brandeis call on university administrators to investigate and potentially criminalize Students for Justice in Palestine on baseless charges of “material support” for terrorism, a call echoed and aggrandized by ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in his November 15 call for the FBI and the IRS to investigate these student groups.

In addition, the ADL recently described Jewish Voice for Peace – a group long devoted to dismantling antisemitism – as a “hate group.” The impetus for the claim was the October 27 sit-in in Grand Central Station, which called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Repeating the mantra that anti-Zionist groups are the “photo inverse of white supremacists,” the ADLs weaponization of antisemitism effectively censors critics of Israel.

For instance, the ADL works hard to ban the use of words like apartheid and genocide in relation to Israel, even though leading human rights institutions and scholars have used the same words to describe Israel’s actions. Moreover, in a move that is clearly aligned with white supremacist goals, the ADL has even taken legal action against a K-12 school, claiming that the content in its ethnic studies curriculum is antisemitic for, among other things, describing Israel as “settler colonialist.” 

Belying the political aims of repression behind its “No Place for Hate” campaign, the ADL makes ample space for the hateful and despicable policy of criminalizing dissent.

In reality, the ADL’s conflation of criticism of Israel with hate speech and right-wing extremism serves three purposes. First, it works to reinforce the conflation of Zionism and Judaism. Second, it works to distance the ADL from its own support for right-wing extremism. And lastly, not unlike the right’s appropriation of leftist identity politics, it functions to weaponize the language of civil rights for the purpose of upholding the status quo. It is through this triangulated process, for instance, that the ADL evokes “hate speech” to demonize the non-violent BDS movement.

The ADL’s calls to investigate SJP and other groups, ratchet up the ADL’s longstanding efforts to silence criticism of Israel to a new level of McCarthyite climate of fear and repression. It is through this new McCarthyism that the ADL’s investments in institutionalizing white supremacy become abundantly clear.

The history of working with law enforcement to criminalize Black and brown communities is well documented. It is no surprise, then, that the ADL would invoke the “material support for terrorism” clause, introduced in Title XII (Terrorism) of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and and Law Enforcement Act, which Michelle Alexander and others have credited with the rise of mass incarceration that especially targeted Black men. It’s also no surprise that the ADL has found support for these baseless accusations of “material support for terrorism” with the Biden administration, since Biden was the architect of the 1994 Crime Bill. Though he originally won support for the Bill by stoking fear about “predators on the streets,” some 25 years later – in the aftermath of the George Floyd uprisings – Biden admitted the bill was a mistake. We can’t wait 25 years to realize the dangerous precedent of baselessly charging student groups with a felony linked to terrorism.

Legislation aimed at curtailing extremism has also served to vastly expand the surveillance of Black and brown communities. One historian’s point that McCarthyism should more accurately be called Hooverism is applicable to the ADL, given its history of working with the FBI to surveil Black liberation movements, Arab and Muslim groups, and other civil and human rights organizations. Indeed, the ADL continues to spy on organizers, including groups like SJP and JVP, through affiliates like the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), which infiltrates and spies on the groups and then feeds the ADL data from the ICC’s web of campus spies. 

For the ADL – or any entity – to charge a student group with material support for terrorism while the U.S. sends billions of material support to aid a genocidal military campaign that has so far killed over 13,000 civilians in Gaza is unconscionable. It keeps no one safe – neither from violence nor discrimination. By designating pro-Palestinian advocates as “extremists,” the ADL uses the alibi of white supremacism to foment repression, censorship, and policing of those on the left who are critical of Israel. This is the moment to see the ADL for what it is: an organization that will not hesitate to weaponize antisemitism to chill speech and squash liberation movements. Drop the ADL.