The ADL's troubling complaint against L.A.-area colleges

Students hold signs and Israeli flags during a demonstration near UCLA's Royce Hall

By Mark Dery

July 16, 2024 3 AM PT

The Anti-Defamation League has gotten into the defamation business. Founded in 1913 to combat anti-Jewish bigotry, the ADL was once respected for its civil-rights work. Now, amid nationwide protests over what the U.N. special rapporteur and others have called Israel’s genocide in Gaza, it’s shredding that reputation with reckless and unsupported accusations of antisemitism.

Under the leadership of Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL has mounted a crusade against seemingly any criticism of Israel, making a mockery of its stated mission not only “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people” but also “to secure justice and fair treatment to all.”

Today the organization blasts as antisemitic any who dare criticize Israel, even progressive, anti-Zionist Jews in groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace. It has encouraged universities to weaponize antiterrorism laws to silence the pro-Palestinian group Students for Justice in Palestine. It’s corrupting its widely cited hate crime data by putting Jewish peace rallies in the same category as antisemitic attacks, lumping liberal Jews calling for a cease-fire with Jew haters and prompting Wikipedia’s editors to warn that it “has repeatedly published false and misleading statements” on “topics of antisemitism and the Israel/Palestine conflict.”

Increasingly, the ADL is a hitman for McCarthyite Zionism. An employee of the organization who spoke to the Guardian didn’t mince words: “The ADL has a pro-Israel bias and an agenda to suppress pro-Palestinian activism.” Indeed, Greenblatt has vowed to “apply more concentrated energy toward the threat of radical anti-Zionism.”

The organization is making good on that threat in Southern California. Among its recent targets is my alma mater, Occidental College. The ADL announced in May that it and another pro-Israel group, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, had filed a complaint against Occidental and Pomona College with the U.S. Education Department, accusing them of “permitting severe discrimination and harassment of Jewish students in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which permits the federal government to deny funds to institutions found to be discriminatory.

Citing heavily redacted testimony by four anonymous students, the complaint — one of a number the groups lodged against colleges across the country — alleges that since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, ”Jewish students at Occidental College have experienced discrimination, disparate treatment, and harassment on the basis of their shared ancestry” and that the college’s administration has permitted “the hostile environment to flourish.”

The complaint fans the flames by characterizing student fliers as “pro-Hamas pamphlets” and those who occupied the school’s administration building last fall as “pro-Hamas protesters” who “plastered” the walls with “anti-Semitic and anti-Israel posters.” The occupation in question, it should be noted, was brief and peaceful. The complaint provides no detailed descriptions, photographs or other evidence to support its charges of pro-Hamas or antisemitic messaging.

When I spoke with Matthew Vickers of the Occidental chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, he readily granted that he and his fellow student activists are unequivocally anti-Israel in that they decry the country’s carpet-bombing of a penned-up civilian population as genocide; denounce its illegal West Bank settlements as violent colonialism; and deplore its systematic domination and dehumanization of Palestinians as apartheid. But he categorically denied that there were antisemitic posters or chants at the occupation or the group’s rallies, let alone a general climate of antisemitism on campus.

Of course, the ADL’s complaint against Occidental isn’t really about antisemitism. It’s about weaponizing the accusation of antisemitism to discredit, muzzle and punish Israel’s critics at a moment when Israel’s actions have sparked a firestorm of campus protest.

The ADL’s claim that “a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students” prevails at the school rests on its assumption that “Zionism is a key component of the shared ancestral and ethnic identity of many Jewish Americans.” Until recently, that presumption, as a 2020 Pew study cited in the complaint indicates, was broadly true.

But Israel’s grotesquely disproportionate response to Hamas’ atrocities has made Zionism sharply divisive even among Jews and, among Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, incendiary. Support for Israel, the bedrock of many Jews’ identity, has become a millstone for some.

One of the unnamed Jewish students cited in the ADL’s complaint against Occidental chose not to wear her “Star of David necklace after being confronted about it in the dining hall,” noting that “she did not feel that she could continue publicly affirming her Jewish identity without incurring harassment.” No one should be harassed for their identity. But if a “connection to the State of Israel is integral” to one’s identity, as the ADL insists it must be, and Israel is waging war with what many regard as genocidal indifference to civilian lives, things are going to get messy.

“When Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism,” the ADL asserts in its complaint, with solemn obviousness. Too true, in the way that tautologies always are: Anti-Jewish hatred is indeed antisemitism. But, difficult as it may be for the ADL to imagine, there are other reasons Israel is being singled out, chief among them the more than 37,000 killed by Israeli forces since Oct. 7, according to the Gazan Health Ministry.

The ADL complaint makes much of Jewish and Israeli students feeling unsafe at Occidental, but its concern for Jewish safety appears to be limited to right-thinking Zionists. What of the anti-Zionist Jewish students who could face reputational damage or worse from being branded as “antisemites” because of the ADL’s pressure campaign? According to Vickers, of Occidental’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, the encampment there was a joint effort with Jewish Voice for Peace. Jewish “participation in the encampment was pretty disproportionate,” he told me. “Thirty to forty percent of the people sleeping at the encampment were Jews, who make up about 10% of the students at Occidental College.”

The ADL’s attacks on speech it doesn’t like — and Greenblatt’s conflation of anti-Zionism and antiwar protest with antisemitism — denigrate and threaten not just Jewish students but also LGBTQ+ students and students of color, who according to Vickers turned out in high numbers for the protests.

These students feel so moved by a sense of solidarity with oppressed people halfway around the planet that they’re willing to risk punishment by administrators and violence at the hands of police and counterprotesters — as at UCLA — along with the ADL’s legal bullying. They understand, far more profoundly than Greenblatt, that you can’t “secure justice and fair treatment to all” while defending the rights of only a few.

Mark Dery is a cultural critic and a 1982 graduate of Occidental College.