The Anti Defamation League’s yearly conference features student-oriented sessions on “Anti-Zionism’s Global Reach” and how students can confront anti-Zionism on campus. As the ADL brings together youth and educators under the misleading banner of “fighting hate,” our movements must come together to affirm that the ADL is not an ally to working class and oppressed peoples, nor to students and teachers.

The Israel lobby just led an attack on Rashida Tlaib to stop any criticism of Israeli colonization of Palestinian land. What else can it do? It has helped stop the Iran deal and promoted Abraham Accords, bribery of Arab monarchies to normalize Israel and overlook Palestinian human rights. But surely the biggest sign of the lobby’s power is that it is not scrutinized in the press. When it is called out for corrupting influence, it says the criticism is antisemitic.

Rashida Tlaib hit a nerve. It is obviously very important to the Israel lobby to maintain the claim that you can be progressive and support Israel. Being truthful about Israeli apartheid undermines this effort. Liberal Zionists are divided. J Street has condemned Tlaib’s comment. But like nearly all the Dems who attacked Tlaib, they didn’t even mention the apartheid part of her comment. Democrats don’t want to address it. They don’t want to engage with what Israel actually does and how Palestinians live.

An Israeli official admits that designating six Palestinian NGOs as “terrorist groups” has hurt the country’s standing in the United States, particularly within the Democratic party as multiple lawmakers have condemned the move. So it seems like Israel is now scrambling to do some more damage control.

U.N. human rights investigator Miloon Kothari has now apologized for criticizing the “Jewish lobby.” But Israel advocates including Alan Dershowitz, Stu Eizenstat, JJ Goldberg and Bari Weiss have long acknowledged the power of the Israel lobby in forming U.S. policy, and said it expresses the goals of the Jewish community.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a non-profit organization founded in 1913. Masquerading as a “civil rights” group, the history of the ADL show its mission is to protect the mutual interests of the US and Israeli governments – and to eliminate solidarity among oppressed and colonized peoples, especially concerning Palestine.

Biden’s trip to the Middle East was a fiasco but the Israel lobby loved it. Former ambassadors Dan Shapiro and Martin Indyk celebrate the trip as a breakthrough and manage not to mention Israel’s killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh during an hour’s talk. While an AIPAC officials says of the speech Biden gave when he arrived, “you would have been hard pressed to write a better speech, for the things we believe in.”

Mainstream pro-Israel groups and politicians have made the Boston Mapping Project into a punching bag. Many are using the Mapping Project to bash the campaign targeting Israel with boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) and to affirm the center-right pro-Israel line that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. A group of Congress members even stated that the project was likely to result in “violent attacks by supporters of the BDS movement” against Jews and Jewish organizations. The FBI has met with Jewish groups in Boston and said it is “tracking” the project over these concerns.

In response to Jonathan Greenblatt’s recent attack on the Palestinian rights movement, over 30 organizations declare “ADL: your lies will never silence the movement for Palestinian liberation!”

After the Mapping Project published a study of links between establishment institutions responsible for the colonization of Palestine, and the economy of imperialism and war, and policing and gentrification, critics landed on it as a supposed antisemitic hitlist. We honor the Mapping Project’s work in a tradition of activist journalism; and recognize a familiar pattern: Whenever Israel lobby organizations in the Jewish community are held to account for their power over the discourse and U.S. policy, those same organizations seek to stifle the criticism by alleging antisemitism.