The ADL declares war on Palestine solidarity groups

In a prerecorded speech, shown at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) annual National Leadership Summit on May 1, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, tagged Palestine advocacy groups as “extremists”, and equated left critics of Israel with white supremacists.

“Anti-Zionism as an ideology is rooted in rage,” said Greenblatt. “It is predicated on one concept: the negation of another people, a concept as alien to the modern discourse as white supremacy. It requires a willful denial of even a superficial history of Judaism and the vast history of the Jewish people. And, when an idea is born out of such shocking intolerance, it leads to, well, shocking acts.”

The ADL’s own website states that anti-Zionism “isn’t always necessarily antisemitic,” but this isn’t the first time that Greenblatt has seemingly contradicted the organization’s official view. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” the former Obama special assistant told an ADL crowd in November 2021. “Denying the right of Jews — alone among all peoples of the world — to have a homeland is antisemitism. Singling out just the Jewish state for condemnation while ignoring others, is prejudice.”

Greenblatt’s latest speech declares that “radical left” groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) are just as dangerous as the right-wing insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “Unlike their right-wing analogs, these organizations might not have armed themselves or engaged in an insurrection designed to topple our government, but these radical actors indisputably and unapologetically regularly denigrate and dehumanize Jews,” he said.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who have been denounced by pro-Israel groups for embracing the BDS movement, were also a target of Greenblatt, who compared their arguments to those of “1950s Kremlin supporters.”

Some of the organizations that Greenblatt attacked have already pushed back. “For far too long, the ADL has prioritized promoting the state of Israel over its other work – now they’re saying the quiet part out loud,” JVP Executive Director Stefanie Fox told Mondoweiss in an email. “Instead of dismantling antisemitism by fighting white supremacy, the ADL is dangerously conflating all Jewish people with the state of Israel and attacking groups that hold the Israeli government accountable for running an apartheid regime. We’re not backing down. The anti-Zionist left and the movement in solidarity with Palestinian liberation is growing stronger daily – we won’t stop until we’ve built a future grounded in justice and equality.”

“The ADL’s latest unhinged, hypocritical attack on Jewish, Palestinian and Muslim human rights activists is another sign of its isolation and desperation,” tweeted CAIR. “The #ADL is increasingly desperate to halt growing support for a #FreePalestine among diverse communities in America.”

Another target of Greenblatt’s speech was the Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd, who the ADL recently devoted an entire page of its website to. Last month Georgetown Law School faced pressure, from the ADL, right-wing media, and members of the school’s community, for inviting El-Kurd to speak. The event ended up taking place anyway, but this hasn’t stopped the campaign against the school. In his remarks Greenblatt accused El-Kurd of using a medieval antisemitic trope about Jews consuming the blood of non-Jews. “Georgetown SJP invited Mohammed El-Kurd to its campus, a man who alleged that Jewish Israelis and Zionists eat the organs of Palestinians and claimed that Zionism is inherently linked to ‘blood thirsty and violent’ actions,” he said.

Greenblatt’s assertions are demonstrably false. One of El-Kurd’s poems (which he says he wrote when he was 14 or 15) contains the line, “They harvest organs of the martyred, feed their warriors our own.” The first part of this line is referencing documented cases of Israeli pathologists harvesting the organs of dead Palestinians during the 1990s. When this news initially broke, the Israeli military admitted that such a program had been in place. El-Kurd’s poem contains a footnote with this information.

As for the part about warriors being fed, El-Kurd says that it’s clearly for literary effect. “It’s a metaphor, it’s not something I literally believe, I’m just now realizing that they actually think, or are pretending to think for purposes of exaggeration, that I actually believe Israelis eat Palestinian organs,” he told The Intercept. “At first it was comical, but now it seems very sinister. The line is about the practice of withholding Palestinian bodies and using them as bargaining chips and in the past, exploiting the bodies in ways that have been documented and are widely discussed. It’s not a conspiracy theory.” El-Kurd also points out that the ADL never attempted to reach out to him about the line or engage with him about his views.

“This attack on El-Kurd reeks of a disturbing tendency,” reads an open letter from a Georgetown University Law Center Alumni. “It undermines and subjugates his message—about state-sponsored dispossession of Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem—to concerns about antisemitic slurs and dog whistles. The condemnation of El-Kurd is first, foremost, primary, and elevated above concerns about Israel’s structural violence, which has been recognized as an apartheid regime by B’tselem, Yesh Din, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Harvard International Human Rights Clinic, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, and the UN Committee for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, among so many other organizations and scholars. The cause of Palestinian liberation is buried under bad faith interpretations of El-Kurd’s poetry. A single metaphorical line, subject to interpretation, becomes prioritized over the vile condition of Palestinian unfreedom.”

The reference to the El-Kurd poem isn’t the only part of Greenblatt’s speech that stretches the truth. At one point he refers to a recent BDS campaign launched by Tufts University’s SJP group. “When campus organizations like SJP interrupt speeches, disrupt events and call for an end to any action that normalizes any relationships, or programs associated, with Israel or Israelis – including participating with the local J Street chapter as happened at Tufts University, my own alma mater, last month, that is extremism,” he told viewers. However, the Tufts campaign has nothing to do with boycotting Israelis, or individual people, it’s a call for students to embrace BDS and stop joining pro-Israel groups. “The idea that it’s divisive and this idea that we’re asking people to boycott students is just false,” a Tufts SJP member told Mondoweiss last month. “You can’t boycott a person and clubs are not people.”

In 2020 a coalition of pro-Palestine groups launched a campaign aimed at getting progressive organizations to sever their connections with ADL. The groups penned an open letter, and created a website, detailing the ADL’s long track record of smearing black activists, collaborating with law enforcement, surveilling political enemies, and engaging in Islamophobia. “Even when it may seem that our work is benefiting from access to some resources or participation from the ADL, given the destructive role that it too often plays in undermining struggles for justice, we believe that we cannot collaborate with the ADL without betraying our movements,” reads the letter.

Greenblatt mentioned this campaign in his speech too, claiming that the effort “uses innuendo and untruths to libel our organization.” However, with awareness of Israeli apartheid seemingly increasing and the BDS movement gaining more momentum it seems likely that calls to “Drop the ADL” will only increase in the coming months.