In response to ADL National Director and CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s recent attack on the movement for Palestinian rights, including his threat to “use our litigation skills to hold [anti-Zionists] accountable for their harm . . . [and] use our advocacy muscles to push policymakers to take action,” over thirty U.S. and Canadian social justice organizations and chapters have signed on to the “Tell the Anti-Defamation League: your lies will never silence the movement for Palestinian liberation!” petition.
Greenblatt’s slander that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” echoes the “Working Definition of Antisemitism” adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) in 2016. This “definition” has been embraced by governments and private Zionist organizations around the world in the campaign to shut down growing Palestine advocacy. Palestine Legal, one of the petition endorsers, has played a leading role in exposing these “efforts to threaten, harass and legally bully activists into silence and inaction.”
The Palestinian-led call for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against the apartheid Israeli regime has been a prime target of this campaign. Indeed, shortly after the petition’s release, the US Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Arkansas’ anti-BDS law, a ruling, said Abed Ayoub, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), that “will flip the First Amendment on its head.”
The ADL is at the heart of the assault of Palestine advocacy. Although it poses as a civil rights organization, it in fact plays a much different function. As the #DropTheADL campaign notes in its “Open letter to progressives: The ADL is not an ally,” the organization “has a history and ongoing pattern of attacking social justice movements led by communities of color, queer people, immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, while aligning itself with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence.” This, in addition to its role as a leading enabler of and enforcer for the Israeli regime.
Greenblatt declared the ADL will “will use our analytic capabilities to expose [anti-Zionist] ideas and ideology.” However, his attack on Palestine solidarity makes clear that meaningful engagement with ideas — particularly those that threaten the status quo from below — is precisely what the ADL is dedicated to silencing.
To add your name to the petition as an individual, sign here. To add an organizational endorsement, please send a message to jfpror@gmail.com.
Tell the Anti-Defamation League: your lies will never silence the movement for Palestinian liberation!
June 16, 2022
We, the undersigned, unequivocally condemn the Anti-Defamation League’s recent slanderous attack on the movement for Palestinian liberation.
At the organization’s Virtual National Leadership Summit on May 1, 2022, National Director Jonathan Greenblatt not only explicitly peddled the lie that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” but left no doubt as to how the ADL intends to muzzle and/or punish those who oppose the apartheid Israeli regime. “We will use our litigation skills to hold [anti-Zionists] accountable for their harm,” he declared, “[and] use our advocacy muscles to push policymakers to take action.”
Greenblatt specifically targeted Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) — who issued a joint statement in response (a group of prominent Jewish Palestine supporters also published an open letter answering ADL’s attack) — but his warning was clearly directed at all who stand up for Palestinian rights.
The ADL’s threats should not be taken lightly. In 2020, it reported net assets of $152m. The organization has close ties with police and the FBI (and a sordid history of surveilling anti-racist activists). It supports unconstitutional “anti-BDS” laws designed to silence Palestine advocacy. As Mondoweiss recently noted, “the ADL would be laughable if it weren’t dangerous.”
Greenblatt’s chest thumping, however, cannot save the Israeli regime’s crumbling public image. Three high profile reports in the past year — from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem — exposed the regime as an apartheid state, affirming what Palestinians themselves have been telling the world since the Nakba of 1948. The current ethnic cleansing in Masafer Yatta, approved by the Israeli High Court, is a stark reminder that the Nakba is not a distant memory but a permanently operating feature of the settler-colonial Zionist state.
Meanwhile, the Zionist establishment, desperate to distract from this exposure, and spreading its own version of white supremacist “replacement theory,” frames the mere presence of Palestinians in their homeland as a demographic and existential threat to Jewish people.
Ten days after Greenblatt’s address, and two days before Nakba Day, Israeli forces attacking the Jenin Palestinian refugee camp murdered Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a longtime reporter for Al Jazeera. Two days later, with the whole world watching, Israeli police violently assaulted mourners at her funeral procession, “a response,” wrote fellow journalist Belen Fernandez, “that can only be classified as acute and multitiered state savagery, in keeping with Israel’s modus operandi of refusing to let Palestinians live, die, or be buried in peace.”
In honor of Shireen, and in the spirit of anti-racist resistance from the Warsaw Ghetto to apartheid South Africa to the Jim Crow South to Standing Rock to Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate, we serve the ADL notice: your slanders and your threats will never silence the growing movement for a free Palestine from the river to the sea with equal rights for all.
Signed,
Signed (in alphabetical order),
Adalah Justice Project
Al-Awda NY: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
Al Quds Day Committee of New York
American Muslims for Palestine – NJ
Arab Resource and Organizing Center
Black Lives Matter Paterson
Canadian BDS Coalition
Council on American-Islamic Relations – NJ
CUNY for Palestine
Decolonize This Place
Democratic Socialists of America BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group
Democratic Socialists of America North New Jersey
Democratic Socialists of America Metro DC
Football Against Apartheid
Friends of Sabeel North America
Green Party of New Jersey
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
Jewish Voice for Peace – Central NJ
Jewish Voice for Peace – Los Angeles
Jewish Voice for Peace – Northern NJ
Jews for Palestinian Right of Return
Jews Say No!
Just Peace Advocates/Mouvement Pour Une Paix Juste
Labor for Palestine
Oakville Palestinian Rights Association (Canada)
Palestine Legal
Palestinian American Community Center
People’s Organization for Progress
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network
Students for Justice in Palestine at Rutgers – New Brunswick
USA Palestine Mental Health Network
U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
U.S. Palestinian Community Network
Young Democratic Socialists of America, San Francisco State University chapter
My thanks to the Jews for Palestinian Right of Return for this extremely well-written article, and to all the others who have signed this petition standing up to the ADL’s slanders and threats.
It’s interesting that Jonathan Greenblatt threatens to use “litigation skills” and “advocacy muscles to push policymakers”. In his mind, as in ADL practice, these power plays take precedence over discussion, facts, reason, democracy, and justice.
But the growing chorus of individuals and groups who are standing up for freedom of speech and discussion, and ultimately justice, have the First Amendment at their back. The Zionist movement may well run aground and be destroyed trying to destroy the First Amendment.
Perhaps the ADL should stop pretending it is concerned about discrimination in the US, when everyone knows it mostly works hard to make sure Israel is never criticized, BDS movements are struck down, and anyone who does so, is attacked and immediately called “anti-semitic”, and focus on what it happening in the fatherland – Israel has one of the most dysfunctional governments, with 4 or 5 elections being held in 3 years, have parties that are fractured, and disagreeable with each other, and every attempt to form a stable government has failed. The ADL should transfer their “concerns” over there. They are looking after the interests of a nation with an unstable government, where parties cannot seem to agree on most things, maybe only on implementing apartheid policies.
For a nation that brags it “made the desert bloom” and keeps boasting how superior their technological expertise is, they basically FAIL at getting their act together, and having stable leadership and government, which even most third world nations seem to have.