ADL’s Campaign to Silence Criticism of Israel By Calling it “Anti-Semitism”

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2023, pp. 30-31

Israel and Judaism

By Allan C. Brownfeld

IN RECENT YEARS, there has been an effort to redefine “anti-Semitism” to include not simply bigotry toward Jews and Judaism, but also criticism of Israel and Zionism. In May 2022, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), declared that, “Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.” He argued that groups calling for equal rights for Palestinians in Israel are “extremists” and equated liberal critics of Israel with white supremacists.

This view has been sharply criticized by many Jewish observers. In his book The Jewish American Paradox, Harvard Law School Professor Robert Mnookin notes that, “Since World War ll, institutionalized anti-Semitism [in the U.S.] has virtually disappeared.” Mnookin describes “the alarmist approach by the Jewish advocacy organizations, especially the ADL,” as “often exaggerated.” He points to the ADL’s approach to the 163 bomb threats to synagogues in 2017: “Although virtually all of them had been attributed to the disturbed Jewish teenager in Israel (who has since been indicted), the ADL included them in its ‘harassment’ statistics for 2017 and insisted they were evidence of anti-Semitism. By including these threats in its 2017 report, the ADL was able to claim a dramatic 41 percent spike in harassment cases in just one year…I don’t think the Jewish community is served by such hype.”

In an important assessment of the role the ADL is now playing in the campaign to silence criticism of Israel, Eric Alterman, CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College and author of the book, We are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, published an article in the New Republic on Aug. 21, 2023, titled “What Does the ADL Stand for Today?”

Equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a tactic to silence criticism.

He points out that “The far right is the source of the vast majority of anti-Semitism in the U.S. today…The ADL should be saying so more insistently… Greenblatt had virtually nothing to say about the rise of white Christian nationalism, together with its undeniably anti-Semitic ‘replacement theory’ that has mesmerized so many MAGA supporters and inspired murderous violence against Jews…and other vulnerable members of the population. Instead, he focused his ire on what the ADL calls ‘hostile anti-Zionist activist groups’ like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which loudly criticize and protest against Israel on America’s college campuses, calling them ‘the photo inverse of the extreme right.’”

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Ron Kampeas noted that Greenblatt ignored the anti-Semitic advertisements that have been featured in many Republican campaigns and the fact that more and more Republican politicians have been turning up at extremist right-wing gatherings.

While Greenblatt assaulted alleged “anti-Semitism” on the pro-Palestinian left, the ADL’s own “Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents 2022” found that the liberal groups he focused on were responsible for just two percent of the “anti-Semitic” actions to which the ADL objected. Lara Friedman, a Middle East policy analyst and frequent critic of the ADL, points out that of these incidents cited, 53 out of 70 were attributable to a single marginal group in Ann Arbor, MI.

The ADL’s overall count of anti-Semitic incidents, Alterman points out, “does not allow for crucial distinctions to be made among them. A tragic massacre like that in October 2018 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh or the Jews held hostage in a Dallas synagogue for 11 hours by a gunman last year, are accorded the same statistical significance in the ADL’s counting as, say, a report of graffiti written on a stairwell of a college dorm. In the ADL’s statistics, they both count the same.”

The motive for promoting the false idea of mounting anti-Semitism is clear. “A major reason for the ADL’s addiction to alarmism,” writes Alterman, “is the same institutional imperative that drives virtually every other issue-oriented nonprofit: Bad news in the world is good news for the organizations committed to fighting it. Climate change catastrophes fill the coffers of environmental groups. Attacks on choice fill the coffers of Planned Parenthood...” 

Alterman continues, journalists who write about escalating anti-Semitism “are sufficiently intelligent to understand this phenomenon, but they tend to ignore it when reporting their stories and therefore pass along the ADL’s skewed and self-interested version of the problem as the political equivalent of scripture.” 

Of course, another motive for focusing on anti-Semitism is to deflect attention from the actions of the Israeli government, soldiers and settlers. Journalists and academics who stray from the ADL’s talking points may find their livelihoods threatened. 

While the ADL and other Jewish organizations promote the idea that there is growing anti-Semitism on American college and university campuses, there is no evidence that this is true. In 2017 four scholars at Brandeis University conducted an in-depth study at four high-profile campuses and found that, “Jewish students are rarely exposed to anti-Semitism on campus. Jewish students do not think their campus is hostile to Jews. The majority of students disagree that there is a hostile environment to Jews on campus.” Scholars associated with the Jewish Studies program at Stanford University found a similar picture at five California campuses.

Some Israelis admit that the equating of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a tactic to silence criticism of Israel. Shulamit Aloni, a former Minister of Education and winner of the Israel Prize, describes how this works: “It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe, somebody criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When, in the United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are anti-Semitic.”

In an important book, Whatever Happened to Anti-Semitism?, all of this is examined by Antony Lerman, a British specialist on Jewish affairs who has served as director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. He is now senior fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna. At the core of the so-called “new anti-Semitism,” Lerman points out, “is the claim that Israel is the (persecuted) collective Jew among the nations.” This has no basis in reality: “a state cannot have the attributes of a human being. Second, it is a heretical corruption of Judaism because it entails an idolatrous deification and worship of the state. Third, it is an anti-Semitic construct because it treats being Jewish as a singular: ‘all Jews are the same.’”

As criticism of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians grow on the part of groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which have characterized it as “apartheid,” Israeli historian Neve Gordon notes that, “The Israeli government needs the ‘new anti-Semitism’ to justify its actions and to protect it from international and domestic condemnation. Anti-Semitism is effectively weaponized, not only to stifle free speech…but also to suppress a politics of liberation.”

Joshua Leifer, an editor of Dissent, provided this assessment: “The Israeli government long ago adjusted its public relations strategy for the post-two-state reality…so that today, the Israeli hasbara apparatus’ most active front is the attempted redefinition of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, with the goal of rendering any opposition to the occupation or Zionism—or even simply Israeli policies themselves—beyond the pale of mainstream sensibility.”

Those who are promoting the idea that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism—whether it is the ADL, the Israeli government, the authors of the IHRA declaration or others—are either ignorant of the long history of Jewish opposition to Zionism or choose to ignore it. Consider the words of Professor Morris Raphael Cohen in his article, “Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism?” which appeared in The New Republic in 1919, while the Versailles Conference was debating the nationalistic claims of Europe’s ethnic groups, including those of the Zionists.  Cohen, a highly regarded professor of philosophy at New York’s City College, rejected Zionist claims that Jewish assimilation was chimerical and that Judaism and Jewishness could prosper only in a Jewish state and that Palestine should be an exclusively Jewish state.

Cohen described the Zionist leaders as “zealous enthusiasts” and Zionism as a “mystic and romantic nationalism” which was “profoundly inimical to liberal or humanistic civilization.” The amelioration of the Jewish condition depended not on any Zionist tribalistic fantasy, Cohen concluded, but on the spread of the liberal values of toleration, individual liberty and reason.

Zionism, Cohen further claimed, was profoundly opposed to Americanism. He contrasted the American belief in separation of church and state and in individual freedom with the Zionist belief in the union of religion and state in Zion and in the immutability of group loyalties. “The glory of Palestine is as nothing to the possible glory of America,” Cohen concluded. “If history has any lesson at all it is that never have men accomplished anything great by trying to revive a dead past.”

Cohen’s views with regard to Zionism were typical of the New York intellectuals.  In the article “Judaism and the New York intellectuals,” published in the Summer 1989 issue of Judaism, Edward S. Shapiro writes: “The cosmopolitan New York Jewish intellectuals rejected Zionism as a solution to the Jewish question. Jewish nationalism, they avowed, was simply too parochial and unrealistic.”

The current campaign to silence criticism of Israel by calling it “anti-Semitic” ignores the long history of Jewish opposition to Zionism. It is an assault on free speech and tells us more about the nature of the Israeli government, the ADL, AIPAC and others who are engaged in this enterprise than perhaps they really want us to understand.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.