This week Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said it’s antisemitic for people to tweet “Free Palestine” at him. The comments were first reported by Marc Rod at the Jewish Insider.
Greenblatt made the remarks at the annual Aspen Ideas Festival during a panel on free speech in social media. “When I tweet about the weather, or when I tweet about my mom, or in a tweet about anything, the vitriol directed at me from right-wing extremists and radical white supremacists and QAnon enthusiasts, and radical people on the left who say ‘free Palestine’ to me, is really stunning,” he told attendees. “And it is indicative of the deep dysfunction in these platforms.”
Greenblatt’s assertion was challenged by Meta’s Vice President of Civil Rights and Deputy General Counsel Roy Austin, who was also on the panel. “I don’t want to debate that issue, but the point is that people are going to disagree,” Austin explained.
“Saying ‘free Palestine’ to a Jewish person out of context is antisemitism, plain and simple,” responded Greenblatt.
The ADL is consistently cited by the mainstream media as an apolitical civil rights organization, but in recent years a grassroots movement highlighting the groups support for anti-Palestinian racism, racist policing, colonialism, and policies of surveillance has emerged. In 2020 the ‘Drop the ADL’ movement published a primer detailing its history. A coalition of civil society groups also published an open-letter calling on activists to sever ties with the ADL.
“We are deeply concerned that the ADL’s credibility in some social justice movements and communities is precisely what allows it to undermine the rights of marginalized communities, shielding it from criticism and accountability while boosting its legitimacy and resources,” it reads. “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.”
“We’re in conversation with educators and communities of color across the country and they’re naming the ADL as a primary force in attacking and undermining their ethnic studies work. You also have their recent efforts to suppress Amnesty International’s very moderate report condemning Israeli human rights violations,” Executive Director of Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC) Lara Kiswani told Mondoweiss in 2022. “I think the ADL can continue to talk a good game, but I would encourage people to think about what the ADL is actually doing and saying. For people on the ground doing the work and trying to advance a progressive agenda, they are the ones on the receiving end of the attacks on social justice issues.”
The ADL’s website states that anti-Zionism “isn’t always necessarily antisemitic,” but Greenblatt has consistently smeared anti-Zionists as antisemites since taking over the organization in 2014. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” he told a 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.”
“Anti-Zionism as an ideology is rooted in rage,” he declared at the ADL’s 2022 National Leadership Summit. “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.”
Mr. Greenblatt considers anti-Zionism to be “rooted in rage”. I disagree.
I consider myself an anti-Zionist for the same reasons I flatter myself to believe that had I been an adult in the 1850’s – 1860’s I would have been an avid Abolitionist, and utterly opposed to the Slave Power.
My engagement would not have been driven by rage – although I can well imagine that every single Black person, whether free or enslaved, would have been well-justified to be eternally, passionately rageful towards the myths, states and systems that composed the “peculiar institution”.
And just as the Grimké sisters and their anti-slavery comrades were motivated by the realization that slavery not only trapped millions of innocent Black people in unspeakable cruelty and injustice, so too did it simultaneously corrupt the morals, ethics and values of White society.
Today, many who oppose political Zionism – which includes a growing demographic of American Jews – stand against it primarily for how it oppresses the Palestinian people but also because of its corrupting influence on American culture, including Jewish culture.
I oppose political Zionism, that is, I am an anti-Zionist, for reasons having nothing to do with rage or any anti-Jewish bias, thank you very much Mr. Greenblatt. You don’t know me and you don’t speak for me or any of my comrades and friends.
I oppose Zionism because to not oppose it, to remain silent, I would cast myself as complicitous for a litany of American travesties – all of which echo in Zionism’s usurpation of Palestine:
The Slavocracy
Manifest Destiny
Jim Crow
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
The Three-Fifths Compromise
Anti-Suffragism
The Trail of Tears
Stonewall Riots
Internment Camps of Japanese Americans
Indian Removal ActFather Charles Coughlin’s anti-Jewish Golden Hour Radio Program
Not happening.
Political Zionism as practiced by, among others, Likud, ZOA, AIPAC, ADL and a host of other “pro-Israel” organizations and their supporters are, like all the moral outrages listed above, on the wrong side of history.
Rage has nothing to do with my dissent: Rather, an understanding of my country’s vast and dismal record of denying, delaying or diminishing human rights informs my world view.
The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis preserve their neutrality. (JFK interpreting Dante’s Inferno)
Mr. Greenblatt will find no neutrals among the stalwarts of BDS, BLM, SJP, JVP, IAW, Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, Mondoweiss and, increasingly, the Democratic Party.
Question for Any Zionist: Is it antisemitic according to IHRA to assert that political Zionism is a system of concerted political oppression in Palestine, clearly exposed at this time by the violence associated with Settler Colonialism?
View here 728 Palestine posters on the themes of Jewish Colonization – Zionist Kibbutzim – Israeli Settlements
And then the ridiculous by the top man in the ADL, trying hard to find “anti-semitism” where there is none, just to play victim again. You have to wonder if he is even aware that he is making a fool of himself while doing the bidding of that apartheid nation. No self respect eh? To what lengths will our American citizens go to show their complete devotion to the zionists?
To paraphrase, Greenblatt in the headline:
“It is antisemitic to advocate for human rights*”
*if the humans are indigenous Palestinians
The Zionist terrorist never run out of an answer…
Message for mr greenblatt !!!
Free Palestine.