This #DroptheADL webinar took place on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023 at 12 PM ET.
The Anti-Defamation League is denouncing anti-war protests, amplifying disinformation on violence, and partnering with right-wing organizations on anti-hate/antisemitism policy. Using social media, it has set out to redefine major concepts like settler colonialism to exempt the US and Israel.
Yet it still appears regularly in media as a source for reporting and commentary on civil rights.
Join experts on media, antisemitism discourse, and terror policy for a discussion of the ADL’s role in disinformation, racial repression, and war – and on efforts to push back.
Mari Cohen, Associate Editor, Jewish Currents
“Interpreting ADL’s Antisemitism Statistics”
Darryl Li, Univ. of Chicago
“The ADL & Repressive ‘Terrorism’ Laws”
Barry Trachtenberg, Academic Advisory Board of JVP/Wake Forest University
“Counteracting the ADL’s Appropriation of Settler-Colonial Narratives”
Host: Emmaia Gelman, #DropTheADL/Sarah Lawrence College
Transcript
EMMAIA GELMAN, SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE:
I’m Emmaia Gelman, I work with Drop the ADL, the website is droptheadl.org. I’m also a guest faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College in Social Sciences. The way this webinar is going to work is that we will hear from our three experts, and then we’ll take Q&A at the end. You can put your questions in the chat in the Q&A box that you see on your screen. I’m going to provide a short overview, then we’re going to hear from our three panelists. Mari Cohen, Darryl Li, and Barry Trachtenberg.
I’m going to talk a little bit about the reason that we’re here.
We are in a crisis of war and death. The death toll in in Gaza, including Israeli deaths, four days ago was over 10,000, about half of which were children. According to Al Jazeera’s breakout of the of the death toll, about 136 children per day are being killed in these assaults. By contrast in the Ukraine, which is another site of great violence, that number is in the single digits. Last night, we had news of attacks on Al-Rantisi Hospital. in which people were who were sheltering in the hospital were ordered to evacuate, and then as they evacuated they were shot at. We’re seeing horrifying videos of people with their limbs blown off. It’s a crisis that feels incomparable to others that we’ve felt partly because we’re watching it unfold on social media.
We are also — the reason that we’re here is that we are also in a US institutional crisis, in which the institutions of civic life here media and legislatures and universities are not only supporting Israeli state violence, and massive war crimes, and contraventions of international law – but also ducking and ignoring or attacking the massive anti-war movement that has activated millions of people around the world, including inside the United States. This disconnect between popular will and institutional power has been the subject of lots of commentary. People are really noticing and understanding that our institutions are not representing, and are not even subject to, the kinds of political will that’s being expressed to stop this violence.
I’m going to give a quick overview of what’s happening with the Anti-Defamation League, both the old and ongoing problems that DropTheADL was formed to contend with, and also the Anti-Defamation League’s new entry into disinformation. What I’m not going to do is provide much context on what the ADL is. It’s a poorly understood organization; it’s an incredibly important US political institution on which almost no research has been done. But I do invite you to visit droptheadl.org which has, in addition to its own research, a pretty substantial list on the information and resources page of the journalism and research that’s been done on the ADL. So if you’re not familiar, I encourage you to familiarize yourself.
The Anti-Defamation League is essential in US politics, not only because it establishes the narratives that are used by institutions to rationalize ongoing state violence and ignore popular outcry, but it’s also directly pushing and generating these attacks. So just a short recap. Since 2016 — which is certainly not the beginning — since 2016, the Anti-Defamation League has focused on pushing what’s called the IHRA definition of antisemitism, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, which declares criticism of Israel to be antisemitic. Sometimes the ADL has walked it back a little to say not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, essentially creating enough confusion to be able to claim that it’s being discerning. But fundamentally, its position is that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And in fact recently Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO, declared that “anti-Zionism is genocide.”
The ADL has already been using these definitions to attack critical race theory, demanding that universities and school districts deplatform scholars of race, and really setting up the criticism of Israel as a Cold War existential threat to the United States as well as to Israel, calling anti Zionism “Soviet talking points.”
On October 20, the Anti-Defamation League used its Center on Extremism to publish attacks on key anti-war organizers including Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, If Not Now, and DSA (Democratic Socialists [of America.]) On October 26 The ADL put out a letter calling on college presidents to investigate Students for Justice in Palestine chapters as “terrorist”-supporting organizations. And just to note, SJPs are often primarily made up of Palestinian, Jewish, and Black students and other students of color working together. That’s the old.
The new is disinformation. In this moment, we’ve seen the ADL amplifying already-debunked disinformation, including the idea that there was a call for a “Day of Jihad”, and the idea that Hamas was beheading babies. These are debunked pieces of reporting that the ADL has, even after their debunking, continued to push out. And this is unusual. It suggests that the ADL sees this moment as so powerful for achieving its goals that the ADL – either the ADL as an institution, or its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt – is willing to risk its reputation as a credible source among news agencies. We’ve also seen the media publishing the ADL without questioning it, and even in pundit conversations sort of doubling down and creating a camaraderie with the ADL as they discuss disinformation.
The goals that we’ve seen the ADL interested in empirically, although not necessarily stated, appear to be the total repression of Palestinians, whether by ethnic cleansing or total decimation of Palestinians, and the establishment of US and Israel and allied local forces in the Middle East into a new Middle East order that can anchor larger global power. So: this is a geopolitical project.
Now we come to our presentation. The push to support Israel is framed as an imperative in US politics using two key ideas, which we’ll hear about today. One is opposing antisemitism, which has in the past tapped progressives to try and bring them into this project, but is now much more freely used by the right, including by white supremacists. And the second idea that creates supporting Israel as an imperative is the idea of containing “terror.” And we’ll hear about how the ADL has played an essential role in both narratives and how they work.
I want to be clear that there’s also a proliferation of smaller organizations that are not the ADL, that do much the same work. There’s some research from the Forward journalist Arno Rosenfeld on those. Many of them are funded by billionaires and working in partnership with Israeli state strategists.
And finally, I want to be clear that there is action to be taken here. We won’t talk too much about it on this webinar, but there are action steps at droptheadl.org. Media organizations and universities especially are sites of this disinformation, and so we can push back on disinformation. We can push back on efforts to erase and marginalize Jewish voices, and efforts to demonize and discredit Palestinians talking about their own experiences of genocide. And we can push back, also, on efforts to claim that the US makes that Israeli officials who are calling for war are doing it for the benefit of Palestinians. Which is another piece of disinformation that we’ve heard, “to free them from Hamas.”
I’m going to introduce all three of our panelists, and then they will one at a time, make their presentations. And we can hear questions from them at the end. So we’re really quite pleased and honored to be joined by these three experts.
Mari Cohen is an associate editor at Jewish Currents magazine, where among other things, she covers Jewish institutions, and she’s done some of the only investigative journalism that looks under the lid the ADL statistics on antisemitism and hate, which so much US press coverage relies on. Mari also directs Jewish Currents’ work with incarcerated writers and has previously covered mass incarceration, transit, media and more.
Darryl Li is an anthropologist and legal scholar at the University of Chicago on war, law, migration empire and racialization. He’s participated in litigation arising from the “War on Terror” as party counsel, amicus, or expert witness. He is the author of a book The Universal Enemy, which is an ethnography of jihadists, and most recently an article with Noura Erakat and John Reynolds in the American Journal of International Law titled “Race, Palestine and International Law.”
And finally, Barry Trachtenberg is a historian of modern European and American Jewry at Wake Forest University, studying the Nazi holocaust and Jewish responses to it, the history of Zionism, American Jewry, and other topics. Some of his books are The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish and The United States and the Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance. And Barry is a member of the scholarly counsels of Jewish Voice for Peace and Facing History.
Thank you so much to all three of you for joining us. We will begin with Mari. Thanks so much.
MARI COHEN, JEWISH CURRENTS:
Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for having me on this webinar and thanks to all of you for joining. I’m really pleased to be able to talk about these important issues today. I am going to share my screen for a little PowerPoint.
What I’m going to be talking about is the antisemitism statistics that the ADL puts out as part of its functions. One of the big things that the ADL does is that they collect reports of antisemitism and then produce reports and numbers and statistics. They’re often cited as the main authority on how much antisemitism is happening, and specifically in the United States. There are parallel organizations in other countries. They’re cited as the authority on antisemitism in the US, and that is one of their main functions. The information in this presentation is sourced from reporting that I’ve done on this, basically dating back to 2021. For over two years now, I have been really digging in to the way that the ADL produces this data. A lot of that has involved engaging with sources who are sociologists, or data and survey experts, that have helped me come to understand how these issues work.
I think just to get started, it’s important to think about why does this matter? Why does it matter what the ADL antisemitism statistics are, and whether they’re accurate, and what they comprise? It’s because they are often called upon as an authority in the media, and are specifically often used to provide evidence for the claim that anti-Zionist political activity in the United States is a specific driver of hate towards Jews, and therefore, they’re used to prove that such activity is illegitimate. This is something that has gone on for a long time, and also specifically has been in evidence since October 7. I just have some examples here: the Washington Post op-ed, that cites ADL numbers in order to try to connect this antisemitism to rallies for Palestine. And then there’s a New York Times report that talks about these incidents of antisemitism since October 7, and then kind of connects that to a “sharp spike in anti-Israel rallies that threaten violence against Jewish people.” I also have — this is a still from a CBS program in which there’s a picture of a Palestine protest, and it’s captioned by citing the ADL’s numbers on antisemitism rising, and talks about hate incidents. So, the ADL is often considered the mainstream source of research on antisemitism, and it’s really cited regularly in the media. So, that is the background on why this matters.
We can look a little bit about what the ADL has been doing in terms of their research since October 7. They have produced a map on their website of antisemitic incidents, and they are also doing it alongside what they call anti-Israel rallies. Though it seems like they’re not including those rallies within their data for antisemitic incidents specifically. And basically, they’re citing this number – this was as of yesterday, when I pulled this map for the PowerPoint that the ADL has recorded 798 antisemitic incidents, and then they’re also saying that there are 642 rallies, and I’m assuming those are pro-Palestine rallies. And they’re saying 171 of of those rallies have demonstrated “support for terror.” They do not really say what that means, or how they’re determining that.
I think important background here is that, when thinking about these issues just in general — both for antisemitism but perhaps other forms of what we call hate or bias incidents — is that in general, recording hate crime data is actually a really challenging task. That doesn’t mean that when there appears to be a spike in a certain type of hate violence, as it sometimes called, that it’s not happening. I mean, I’ll talk about this a little bit later, but I actually do think it is clear that since October 7 we have seen a spike in antisemitic incidents, both in the US and elsewhere in the world…
These quotes that I’m going to talk about here, about data collection, are things that I reported on before this current period, so it’s not like everything applies one-to-one.
But I just do think it is important for us to consider that these are actually really difficult matters of data collection to try to figure out: what incidences of bias and violence are happening, and when they’re rising. It’s just in general a very complex problem. That’s because hate crime data, when it’s collected both by police departments and the government, as well as private organizations like the ADL, measures reports of incidents, It’s not possible for them to just empirically know every incident that’s happened. The only way we know an incident happens is when it’s reported. So that often means that there can be things that happen that make incidents more likely to be reported. I’ve got a quote from Mike German from the Brennan Center for Justice in 2021, who mentioned, you know, “we’re often measuring spikes in media attention to these crimes more than we’re actually measuring crimes”, and that’s kind of what law enforcement tends to respond to. As Matt Boxer, this Brandeis University sociologist told me earlier this year, “does more recorded incidents inherently mean there’s more antisemitism?” Not necessarily: it could be that the ADL did a better job of recording over a certain period or that more people felt comfortable recording incidents. Again, these notes specifically apply to the post October 7 period. But I just do think they illustrate some of the complexities and challenges that we are talking about here.
And then if we’re talking specifically about the ADL, and the way that this organization collects data on antisemitism, there are specific trends and things that the ADL have done that make them especially unreliable in terms of their statistical methodology, in terms of kind of a lack of honesty that they tend to display around these issues. The ADL does a bunch of different types of reporting of antisemitism statistics. They have a regular updated map that they call a heat map on their website. They used to have a running tracker, but that seems to not be there anymore. But they do these yearly audits, in which they’re like “this is all the antisemitism that happened in the previous year.” And then they compare it to the numbers that they recorded the year before. And they also will do these running, online – like the map that I just showed you since October 7, in a certain period of crisis, they’ll do another type of spontaneous reporting.
So they have a lot of different projects, but they’re just not always honest about when changes in methodology between the projects could affect the data and the numbers. An example of this is that, when they did their yearly audit of antisemitic incidences for 2021, which was published in 2022, they announced that they had partnered for the first time with certain other Jewish groups: Hillel International, Union of Reformed Judaism, other organizations focused on Jewish communal security, that would provide additional antisemitic incident reports. So then the ADL would add to the total the incidents that they heard about from these specific groups, and they had formalized that. But the fact of then changing their methodology, so that they suddenly had a much bigger pool of groups providing this information, was really buried in the ADLs promotion around the report. It was at the very bottom of the press release, it was kind of like a methodological caveat in the report. Instead they were just going around being like “this is the biggest increase in antisemitism we’ve ever seen,” and just talking about their top line findings. So that’s something that we’ve seen from them in the past.
Another thing is, every year in the past few years, they’ve talked about this being “the highest amount of antisemitism they’ve recorded since 1979,” which is when they started doing these audits. But they haven’t acknowledged that the American Jewish population has also increased significantly during that time, and maybe a per capita number would be more appropriate. But they really have not gotten into that.
So the result of some of these historical issues is that it can be hard to have trust in the ADL as an honest broker of statistical information because they’re just not always straightforward. And instead, they really kind of go into these very splashy headlines about the reports, you know, “most antisemitism of all time.”
Then there’s the question of the content of what gets included in ADL antisemitism data, which I think is obviously super important for us to talk about in this moment – and whether they include anti-Zionist incidents as part of this data. Important context here is that, since May 2022, the ADL has explicitly defined anti-Zionism as antisemitism. It’s not entirely new, they often did so in practice before that, and as Emmaia mentioned, they had touted the IHRA definition of antisemitism for a long time and had fought against anti-Zionist activism for a long time. But they did allow themselves a little more caveating and wiggle rooming, you know, “it’s not always antisemitism.” But since May 2022, their position has really been that anti Zionism is antisemitism, full stop. Now, that being said, in their audits and statistics, they still don’t always include all anti-Zionist political activity as examples of antisemitism. But they definitely do include certain anti-Zionist incidents, and it kind of depends on the conditions. So for example, in the audit for 2022 that they published in 2023, they included anti-Zionist incidents “when it can be determined that they had a negative impact on one or more Jewish individuals or identifiable localized groups of Jews”, which is also kind of a strange and vague excuse for when they include it. As a consequence, this audit in 2022 counted as “antisemitic” an event in which Drexel University’s Students for Justice in Palestine staged a banner dropped from a highway overpass with a message “Zionism is racism.” So incidences like that clearly do end up in the data. And I will say that in terms of this map that I just showed you guys before about ADL data since October 7, it’s not clear what methodology they are using, but obviously they are quite focused on anti-Zionism and anti-Israel politics in this moment, just in terms of how they’re framing all of it as related to, in their words, the “Israel-Hamas war.”
I do want to give some important caveats. I’m going to talk a little bit more about that data specifically. I have not done a completely comprehensive examination of that data since October 7. So I didn’t have a chance to like pull everything out of their map and categorize it, and figure out how much of it is anti-Zionism versus how much of it are incidents that seem to be more straightforward antisemitism. So I’m not currently in a position to make claims about that. And I want to be clear, and the other thing is that I think it is important to note that there probably has been a rise in worldwide antisemitism since October 7, and also a rise in antisemitism in the United States. It just seems pretty clear from the news reports that we’re seeing various incidences around the country and around the world. There are certain high profile examples you know, like anti-Jewish riots that happened in Dagestan, firebombing of a Montreal synagogue. It does seem like more things like that are happening. So I think when we talk about the problem with the ADL’s data, that doesn’t mean that we should say that there hasn’t been a rise in antisemitism since October 7. The point is really more that the ADL has not proven itself to be a reliable source. The fact that there would be this spike in antisemitism is not necessarily unprecedented or surprising. There are studies that show that there often is a rise in antisemitism when there’s increased violence in Israel/Palestine, and it’s especially correlated with the brutality and lethality of Israeli military actions. So that is a historical phenomenon. And there also is the fact that there are white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups in the US who will take advantage of a moment like this to increase their activity, and try to coopt certain pro-Palestine messaging, and that is something that I have seen recorded on the ADL data as well. So those are just some important caveats to keep in mind.
I do want to quickly give some examples of incidents that the ADL has put in the map since October 7, so that we can get a sense of what kind of stuff the ADL is categorizing under what it calls “antisemitic incidents.” So, first one is: here’s an example of one thing that they put on this map, which says, “an individual wearing jewelry with Jewish symbols was allegedly assaulted by an attacker who grabbed their necklace and ran and shouted antisemitic statements.” From the information that I have here, just based on what they put in the map, no other real specifics, it does seem like this is a straightforwardly antisemitic incident that they included, and that it’s not an example of them grabbing anti-Zionism and conflating it [with antisemitism.] So that’s one of the types of things that you’ll see them record.
Then there are some things that you’ll see them record here that are examples of perpetrators that are combining some anti-Israel rhetoric with more straightforward antisemitic messaging. There’s this one here, which is an example of the words “don’t allow your children to die for Israel”, “No more Jew wars”, and “Heil Hitler” were projected onto a highway overpass in Georgia. And so that’s an example of a neo Nazi group that is then pulling Israel into its messaging. Or the one on the right is “an index card with the words ‘U R colonizer’ and a swastika that was left in the classroom of a Jewish professor at UCSD.” There’s a swastika that was used. That also seems like more of an example of somebody with a more antisemitic lens, bringing in also some of this, what they’re seeing as maybe anti-Israel discourse. So that is something that the ADL records.
But then one of the things that they’ll also record is an incident that I think we could read as clearly anti-Zionist. So one of the things that appeared on this map, alongside the other ones that I just showed you, is that “fliers with pictures of a map of Israel/Palestine with the words ‘land back’ were posted in a public area.” Now, the use of “land back” makes connection to the US Indigenous rights movement, and it calls for a decolonial future in Israel/Palestine. I would argue that that is not antisemitic, and is an anti-Zionist political claim. But the ADL is including it on this map alongside those other incidents that I just showed you.
Another example, I think a slightly less straightforward example but something else that I saw in the map, is an example of “a Jewish student who was harassed, shoved and called ‘fucking Zionist’ while painting a free speech rock with an Israeli flag on the campus of Wayne State University.” This incident is maybe a little bit more ambiguous. Obviously, it’s clear that perhaps the student was harassed and violently shoved – that’s obviously concerning if there’s violence against the students, for sure. But can we say that that violence is antisemitic? If the student is being targeted for painting an Israeli flag, are they targeted for being Jewish? Or is this more of a kind of a political violence that’s being undertaken because of them showing support for Israel? And obviously, it’s still violence, it’s still concerning, but does it make sense to include it on a map of antisemitic incidences? The problem is that the ADLs framework simply does not allow us to have those complex conversations and to discuss those things. Because the ADL said that this is antisemitic, the same as the thing about the swastika and the anti-Jewish rhetoric that I showed you earlier. So that’s what tends to go on in these ADL statistics.
So that’s just an introduction to how these things work. I think we’ll do questions later once everyone has gone, but we’ll be happy to answer questions then if anyone has any.
DARRYL LI, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO:
Thanks to everyone for making the time to join us. Thank you, Emmaia, for bringing us together and leading us in this, and thank you to Celine and everyone else who’s facilitating this conversation.
I’m going to talk a little bit about some research that I’ve been doing, sort of at the behest of, and in conversation with, Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights, around the history of U.S. terrorism law, which is not shocking for most people, but it hasn’t been adequately mapped the extent to which hostility to Palestinian Liberation has been one of the central motivating factors in the rise of “terrorism “as a legal category in the United States. Now, there’s a broader history. Terrorism is not new and it doesn’t just come from this. There’s a longer history, early 20th century stocked with anarchists and communists, and of course in the 60s, radical movements of all kinds Black radical movements, others were called terrorists. But as a legal category, as a legal technology that emerges from the late 1960s onward, there’s something very specific to Palestine that’s at work. So that’s sort of what I’m what I’m trying to map and, you know, there are reasons for that that we can get into in the Q&A. So just to concretize this, I’m going to share my screen if that’s okay.
This is the first mention of terrorism in federal law that I have been able to find. It’s from the 1969 Foreign Assistance Act, and it basically restricts U.S. funding to the UN Refugee Agency for Palestinian refugees, and says that you know, big money can’t go to people who are members “of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army, or… those who are engaged in in any act of terrorism.” Now, of course, as I mentioned, this is the first time the word “terrorism” is even showing up in the law. So there’s no definition of “terrorism” at this time. But it’s an example of how from very early on the Palestinian cause and “terrorism” are rendered synonymous in US legal discourse. And that’s broadly true in public discourse, at least in the pre-9/11 era. The congressman who introduced this legislation, the co-sponsor Leonard Farbstein of New York – he gives this speech on the on the floor of the House of Representatives, where he talks about the way that UNWRA schools in Palestine are indoctrinating Palestinian children to grow up to become terrorists. It’s all of the sort of racist tropes that are familiar to many of you today. So there’s anyway there’s a longer history here, and there’s many awful terrorism laws to discuss.
But the one that I want to zoom in on, for the for the few minutes that I that I’m going to speak, is the 1996 statute that creates a new crime called “material support to a foreign terrorist organization.” If you want to be technical about it, it’s codified 18 USC 233 9B. Now, this law… this is the most commonly charged crime, most commonly charged terrorist crime, in the context of the War on Terror. It has been used in all sorts of attempts to entrap Muslims in the United States. What it basically does is to say that any assistance that you render — not to people who are engaged in violent acts unnecessarily but to an organization that’s on a list of so called foreign terrorist organizations — that that assistance is criminalized. So it takes activity that would ordinarily be protected as associational activity or speech activity under the First Amendment, and it criticizes it in relation to certain groups that are on a list. And of course, the composition of the list is entirely political. So the Secretary of State decides what group counts as a foreign terrorist organization. And it’s not shocking to know, of course, that of the original groups that were put on the list, a very, very significant number of them were Palestinian or otherwise antagonistic to Israel, such as Hezbollah.
So that 1996 law, the ADL played a very important role in getting it passed. So I’ll just say a little bit more about kind of that history. First of all, there’s a longer history of the ADL and terrorism law, but I’m going to put a pin in. But the story that I want to focus on starts in the early 1990s, where Israel starts pushing this narrative that this relatively new so-called terrorist group that’s emerged on the scene, called Hamas, is not only wreaking havoc in Israel, or Palestine; it’s also actively raising funds and even planning military activities from safe havens in the United States. And they focus particularly on the arrest of an American citizen of Palestinian origin, Mohamed Salah, in Palestine. He’s put on trial and Israeli military courts, and he lives in the Bridgeview suburb of Chicago. So his arrest is kind of used by the Israelis to kind of pump up this narrative that that the Americans are actually contributing to terrorism fomenting terrorism, and that the United States needs to do its part and crack down on terrorist supporters in its own country, instead of lecturing Israel about its human rights violation. Now, of course, to be clear, there wasn’t that much lecturing going on at the time, but you know, be that as it may. It’s also important to note that this period in the early 1990s, and Emmaia is kind of the leading expert on this, the ADL was itself in some hot water. It was in the news because its own domestic spying operations in the United States were being exposed. Their offices were raided by the FBI and it turned out that they were engaged in spying on Palestinian activists, anti-Apartheid activists, various left wing groups, as well as right wing groups. So that’s another important part of the context.
Anyway, in 1994, as part of this broader push to convince the United States to crack down on so-called terrorist groups in the United States the ADL issued a so called “counterterrorism action agenda.” It was essentially a legislative wish list. And one of the points on this wish list was to criminalize so-called “material support to terrorist organizations.” Now, at this time, there was no there was no list of terrorist organizations that the government could use that had legal consequences. Like, the people in the government called groups “terrorist” all the time, right? It was a rhetorical label and a very powerful one. But as a as a formal legal category, it didn’t actually exist at this time.
So the first major step in this direction is in January 1995, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order that freezes any assets in the US held by groups on a list that was attached to the executive order. This was the list of groups that are “terrorist groups that threatened the Middle East peace process,” I think that was the title of the list. And essentially, it was all of the Palestinian factions who were opposed to the Oslo Accords. So you had Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the so-called “rejectionist factions”, as well as Hezbollah, to armed opposition groups in Egypt, and for the sake of balance, the cognate the Israeli branch of the Kahanist movement was put on this list. So that was the first time there was actually a list of terrorist organizations that triggered former legal consequences, that triggered sanctions. Clinton issued this executive order, not only as a concession to the pressure from the ADL, but also as a way to show solidarity with the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was engaged in a tough reelection struggle at the time. It also was a way to encourage other clients states of the United States to crack down on Hamas and its supporters in their own jurisdiction – countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia. And finally it provided cover to the Palestinian Authority, and people like Yasser Arafat. It provided cover but also pressured them to “crack down on terrorism in their own midst” – so, to arrest Hamas supporters in the few areas where the Palestinian Authority had jurisdiction. So this executive order sets up the template for a lot of the government instruments later, especially after 9/11, that are used to freeze terrorist assets, put people on watchlists, so on and so forth. That’s an instrument that comes out of the executive branch, it’s an administrative tool, I should say.
The much bigger development is the law that I talked about the “material support” law, which is something that’s set up by Congress as part of legislation. So the key event here is the April 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which was carried out by a group of white nationalists. The Clinton administration, use the opportunity to introduce legislation that has stuff that you would kind of expect in terrorism legislation, right. There was stuff in there about restricting the sale of certain kinds of weapons, restricting the sale of certain kinds of explosives, expanding wiretap authority, things that we can have debates about, but are roughly consistent with what expanded law enforcement power to deal with armed groups would look like. …And also they included many items from ADL wish-list. In addition to the proposals to do things that would crack down on these sort of white militia groups, they also included these proposals to have a foreign terrorist organization list that would criminalize material support, that would streamline deportation, and that would include instruments to freeze assets.
So this sort of omnibus legislation to deal with so-called “domestic terrorism” and so-called “foreign terrorism”, gets put in Congress. And the Republican majority proceeds to gut this bill, and instead turn it into a “tough on crime, tough on immigrants” law. It streamlined the federal death penalty. It crippled federal judicial oversight of the state death penalty. It radically expanded the authority of the government to detain non-citizens. Really, in many ways it kind of set the foundation for the massive expansion of immigration detention later on. And that was the Republican vision of “anti-terrorism.”
What’s really fascinating is that the ADL and other Zionist organizations then swung into action, and lobbied very intensively for the for the items from their wish-list to be put back into the legislation. This was basically the only area of bipartisan consensus, where the Clinton administration, the Republican majority in Congress, and groups like the ADL agreed that – at the very least, if there was going to be any terrorism measures in this law – that it would be the ones that the ADL was pushing for. The so called “foreign terrorist provisions” that set up the FTO list, and that criminalized material support for terrorism.
And that’s what happened: the ADL put out a press release praising the reinsertion of these provisions into the law, and kind of patting itself on the back for mobilizing many Zionist organizations to support this aspect of the of the legislation. And that is how we got a law that is now called EADPA, the Effective Anti-Terrorism and Death Penalty Act of 1996. A law that was prompted by an attack by several white nationalists, but then in response, radically expanded state violence against marginalized communities, black communities, brown communities, communities of color, more broadly. Which I think is an important lesson for conversations around so-called “domestic terrorism” and “extremism” today, of course, in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection. Anyway, so that’s one chapter in the longer story of how the ADL has been a key player in steering U.S. terrorism legislation as an instrument, or rather as a weapon, against Palestinian Liberation. And of course, it’s not surprising that among the earliest and most prominent prosecutions under this law after 9/11 were ones that were targeting Palestinian community organizations, especially the Holy Land foundation in suburban Chicago, which was the largest Muslim charity in the United States at the time. As well as prosecutions in Florida and Texas.
BARRY TRACHTENBERG, JEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE ACADEMIC ADVISORYCOUNCIL/WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY:
Hi, everyone. Thanks very much for this opportunity to speak. It’s an honor to be here.
I want to start by showing you an example of the ADL’s new disinformation campaigns that Emmaia introduced to us earlier. I’m going to share my screen, and I guess I should probably give a trigger warning here. This is going to be some 90 seconds or of ADL propaganda that I’m going to play for you.
So this type of reasoning is neither new nor particularly insightful, but it does represent yet another push by the ADL to discredit, confuse and obfuscate. This clip — and being so short is obviously designed for social media, TikTok and Instagram – it seems targeted in particular to Zionist activists looking to challenge those voices speaking on behalf of Palestinian human rights. We should know it’s part of a very well-funded strategy on social media, and it’s also a continuation of a century long history of the ADL shoring up Jewish and Zionist institutional power and to oppose activism from both the Jewish and the more general political left.
As an aside, this is a this topic is particularly relevant to me at my university. On Wednesday night, just a few days ago, we had a very successful teaching with well over 80 people, most of them students of the university, to talk about Israel’s onslaught in Gaza. There was a teach-in scheduled for our law school that was going to bring in a variety of different perspectives, but it was suddenly canceled. And what I was told from several universities administrators was that it was canceled because the ADL has been distributing a letter to colleges and universities asking presidents to not hold such events because it will lead inevitably to the rise of antisemitism on campus. So I’m making my pitch to law school that our students can handle it. We’ll see how that goes.
So there’s two points that I want to address with this, very quickly. I want to be mindful of everyone’s time.
The first is this issue of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism here is obviously defined in very narrow terms. They set up a definition, say that Israel doesn’t fit the definition, and therefore settler colonialism (the critique) can’t be applied here. So the first aspect is that settler colonialism requires a “sponsoring country”, right. Two problems with this: first, if you require that there’s a sponsoring country for settler colonialism, it seems to divest any responsibility of the Zionist movement for actually engaging in settler colonial practices. But it’s historically accurate, because by the 1920s the Zionist project did have a sponsor – two of them, I would argue, in fact. One of course is the British Empire. The British Empire, even before it takes over the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, had already with the Balfour Declaration helped to facilitate the creation of the Zionist parastate in Palestine that was ready to assume control over Jewish life in May of 1948. Following the 1917 Balfour Declaration – which was in fact a violation of agreements that had been made during World War One with Palestinian Arab leaders – the British authorities assist with the round up, execution, expulsion, and imprisonment of Palestinian leaders. They permit multiple Zionist militias to be formed and they foster the creation of a state structure, including Parliaments, ministries, education systems, alternative economy, cultural institutions or the like. So first, we have the British as the sponsor. And the second sponsor, we can say is the Zionist Congress movement that exists worldwide. It’s working within Britain, the United States and other countries to foster Zionist settlements in Palestine, both within the halls of Congress and in European Parliament. The Zionist organization creates political parties, fundraising mechanisms, cultural products – all promising the rebirth of the Jewish people on land that was inconveniently occupied by Palestinian Arabs.
This line of reasoning is also disingenuous because it’s an attempt to cover up what the Zionist movement both in Europe and in Palestine are saying about their own efforts in the half century before the creation of the state itself.
Zionists refer to their own work in the language of colonialism. They set up the Jewish Colonial Trust. They set up the Jewish National Fund. They set up Jewish Colonial Associations. These are the names of the groups that they are creating: the institutions. They are very proudly using the language of colonialism to define their project, and basing their project on other colonial activities by European states. I did a search through Herzl’s Der Judenstaat to see that there’s 41 references – all of them that I saw — to the word “colony”, “Jewish colonization”, just as the name of the project of what they’re engaging in. So for the ADL to say this was never a colonial project, or doesn’t fit the model of settler colonialism, is denial of what the Zionists themselves were actually saying. They are explicit about this. And this is why some Zionists looked to the model, for example, of the Mormon movement heading out to Utah in the United States, taking Native American land in order to settle whites. There’s no sponsor for this, in fact they’re being slaughtered often on their way, but this is another form of settler colonialism.
It’s also a reason why the movement itself in the early stages was so divided as to where the Jewish state should be. Over the course of his short lifetime active with the Zionist movement, Herzl advocates for not only Palestine, but Argentina, Uganda… He’s not so clear where that state should be someday. That’s why there are, to this day, remnants of labor Zionist colonies around the world in various colonized spaces from the Pacific Northwest, to upstate New York, to Montevideo, and on and on.
The same is true for the claim of Jewish indigeneity, which is the other piece which is so prevalent in that offensive clip. Again, this is not a new strategy by Zionists, who’ve been making this claim for a decade or more that Jews are somehow simply returning to the land that had once in theirs before foreigners took it from them, ruled over them, and finally expelled them. If we take the Bible as a historical document for making political claims – which I’m not advocating, I just want to be clear – we know that the people known as Israelites themselves did not first stem from the land of Israel. Abraham is a descendant of Ur in modern day southern Iraq. We know from Deuteronomy 26:5 that it was in Egypt, that the Jewish people became “a great nation.” The Covenant was received in Sinai. The land of Canaan was already home to numerous other peoples with whom the Israelites often clashed before gaining brief periods of sovereignty. The territory was often in the control of much larger empires, and on and on. What we also know is that by the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 – and now we’re moving into history and not mythology – that half of all the Jews in the world were living outside of the land of Israel/Palestine. And that a diaspora was so well established that Judaism could redefine itself in the absence of a religious and political center, after the destruction of the temple.
Now, as far as we know, of course, there have been Jews living in the land of Israel or in Palestine, from that time forward. And they were part of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious community that included Muslims, Christians and Jews. Sometimes that was convivial, sometimes those relationships were conflictual, sometimes that conflict was negotiated by violence. But there have been Arab Jews for millennia, and Palestinian Jews since at least the Ottoman Empire.
Now this is my third prop that I’m going to show you. This is the favorite book that I have on my shelf. This is a linguistic study of the Arabic components that exists within Palestinian Yiddish. It was organized by Yiddish linguist Mordechai Kosover in the 1920s and 30s, who identified hundreds and hundreds of examples of the way in which Arabic was incorporated into the Yiddish that was spoken in Palestine. Yet another example of the interconnectedness of Jews to that space but with other peoples. So when the Zionists claim Jewish indigeneity, they’re ignoring our own history, right? They’re denying that Jewish people had a rich existence in 2000 more years of living in and among other people, that this is what has shaped Judaism and any notions of Jewish peoplehood.
So the reason why this gets me sort of worked up, both as a historian and as someone who is an anti-Zionist Jew, is that they’re stealing my Judaism, our shared identity; in order to create an ethno-nationalist state based upon the simultaneous displacement and now genocide of Palestinian people. Jews have always been a product of encounters with other peoples, of mixing families and cultures and language and religious practices. That’s not to say there was never a present yearning to return to Eretz Isroel, to the land of Israel. But in truth, with one exception in the early modern period, there was never a massive effort by Jews to settle in Palestine and that one in the middle-late early modern period was incredibly short lived. Not until Zionism.
So as a way to conclude this very brief overview: the Palestinian scholar Raef Zreik and the Israeli scholar Yair Wallach who’s SOAS in London, have both recently raised concerns about the compatibility of the settler colonial model to the Zionist seizure of Palestinian land. Neither disputes, mind you, that Zionism is a settler colonial project, but they both think the model isn’t fully sufficient to encapsulate it. They think there’s complications, and these in some ways are important challenges for us. For Raef Zreik, he argues in a brand new essay that just came out called “When does the settler become a native?” that most cases of settler colonialism are over, they’re finished, in the sense of the horrific violence associated with these campaigns is passed. Think of the British in South Africa, France in Algeria, Germany in South Africa, British in Kenya, Portuguese in Mozambique, but Israeli violence continues relentlessly. He also points to the lack of a desire among most other settler colonials to adopt a position of indigeneity and to claim ancestral rights to that territory. For Yair Wallach, who has been writing quite a bit on Twitter recently, he’s posted on his feed that the settler colonial model is incredibly useful, but also limited in some ways that may be worthwhile for us to pay attention to. He says “it’s an absolutely vital lens for understanding history and the present. Yet, it’s insufficient to explain Zionism. As we’ve seen, some of its current political use is disastrous and hyperbolic.” And he says at the worst, it’s the discourse that “Israelis equals settlers equals civilians” of the last month which justified the murder and kidnapping of children and elderly. He goes on to say, though, that “for me, the key reason why we need to say that this is settler colonialism is because the settlement drive continues unchecked. Israel continues settling and colonizing. West Bank settlers are now colonizing Israel from within and plan to return to Gaza.” And he concludes the thread with “before we can start talking about things like equality, reconciliation, and addressing the injustice of the past, we need to stop the injustices as of today. Settlement must stop and the logic of colonization and dispossession must end.” I think those are good words for me to end on. Thank you.
EMMAIA GELMAN:
Thank you so much to all of our presenters really appreciate you. There’s questions for everybody in the chat, so please go have a look. I want to just take note of the fact that we’ve had this incredible breadth of discussion as a necessary way to intervene in the narratives that the ADL creates, is specifically because the ADL intervenes in so many different areas of knowledge. In the media, it’s defining “extremism” and “hate.” It’s defining terrorism laws and the ways that people are allowed to read to relate to anti-colonial politics and challenges to the state. It’s intervening also in Jewish identity in Jewish history, and in the very idea of settler colonialism. And the ADL is not a scholar. So I just want to acknowledge that this is like a very wide ranging conversation, because the ADLs work is so wide ranging and comprehensive, and that’s important to understand.
[Q&A]
#DropTheADL 