The ADL's Descent And The Trajectory of Zionism

Edited by Sam Thielman

BEFORE WE GET TO MY REFLECTIONS on Zionist institutions, I want to keep our focus on the ongoing genocide that Israel, with support from the United States, is committing against the Palestinians. The 320,000 children in Gaza who are younger than five years old are all at risk of "life-threatening malnourishment," according to the United Nations World Food Programme today. From dawn today in Gaza, Israel has killed at least 67 people, likely with the U.S. weaponry that the Senate did not vote to stop last week. Jasper Nathaniel wrote eloquently yesterday about the violence of Jewish settlements in the West Bank—where House Speaker Mike Johnson toured today—that shouldn't be separated from what Israel is doing to Gaza. 

Meanwhile, if you live in one of the few places in America that has voted to divest itself from Israel, FEMA said today that it will leave you to die. 

 MY FRIEND AND COLLABORATOR Noah Shachtman is the only person I've worked for twice. I'm aiming not to work for anyone ever again, but I would work for Noah a third time. He and I can disagree about any number of things, sometimes meaningfully but most often in the petty manner of friends, but we have so much history that it doesn't ultimately matter. I wouldn't be half the journalist I am if not for Noah. I know for a fact I would not have my National Magazine Award without him. 

Noah has a very good piece in New York magazine looking at, broadly, the transformation of the Anti-Defamation League from a civil-rights organization protecting the American democratic fabric into a Zionist organization ripping that fabric apart. Now: That dichotomy is too neat to describe the ADL's actual history. As Noah notes, Zionist tendencies within the ADL compelled the organization to surveil critics of Israel, and even to sell information on U.S. anti-apartheid activists to the government of South Africa in the 1980s. But in the years before and especially after October 7, the ADL has gotten out of what you might call the solidarity business. When I reported for The Nation in October 2023 about the ADL baselessly accusing campus groups of material support for terrorism, I quoted Arab-American Institute Executive Director Maya Berry: "The bottom line has been that the ADL has decided to prioritize its pro-Israel work at the expense of any contribution it’s made in the civil rights space for some time now."

A lot of the power Noah's piece contains comes from ADL staffers who quit over leader Jonathan Greenblatt's decision to align the group with engines of persecution. Post-10/7 attempts to "hyperrestrict" pro-Palestinian speech felt "frankly, evil to me," one ex-employee tells Noah. From my perspective, the most important quote in the piece comes from another former staffer, one who describes how the ADL wields the power to destroy peoples' lives through that hyperrestriction. "We have incredibly close and influential contacts with law enforcement,” the former staffer told Noah. “If we say groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace and CAIR are exactly the same as these neo-Nazi groups, like Atomwaffen, they’re going to go after them. They’re going to surveil them.”

We recently got confirmation in federal court that lists of anti-Zionist student activists assembled by Canary Mission and Betar led to surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security and then detention by ICE. We don't, at this point, have confirmation that lists from the ADL led to similar practices. It's accordingly very striking that this staffer treats an ADL-to-state-surveillance pipeline as a certainty.  

Noah makes framing choices that I wouldn't. People who follow the ADL and pro-Palestinian politics closely will probably share that criticism. But the value of the piece comes from Noah pursuing, narratively and closely, the contortions of the organization as its Zionist mission diverges from what one person Noah quotes calls "protecting the values that made America great for Jews." That person is the University of Michigan regent Jordan Acker, who had his home vandalized and FREE PALESTINE spray-painted on his car. Acker refused the ADL's help because he recognized and rejected its interest in exploiting his fear. 

Something Noah points out that I frankly forgot is that during the first Trump administration, the ADL clashed with Trump and MAGA over civil rights and governmental overreach. With the ADL an adjunct of Trump's agenda, that's a distant memory or a historical detail. But the ADL's current alignment points to a natural trajectory within Zionism. Zionism, as it exists in Israel and not in the now-eclipsed writings of thinkers like Ahad Ha'am, is a supremacist movement that justifies its expansive violence by claiming it is always on the verge of being exterminated through a great replacement. It uses nativist politics to entrench its dominance, persecute its critics and dehumanize its enemies. Israel seeks its place within the global nativist alliance without regard to what that alliance means for Jewry. A signal moment came when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embraced Hungary's Victor Orban despite the Israeli embassy in Budapest warning that Orban's attacks on George Soros came in the tradition of 20th century European antisemitism.

The main difference between Zionism and MAGA lies not in any essential divergence of ideology, but in the elite respectability that Zionism enjoys and MAGA both scorns and covets. Most American Jews who are Zionists are not MAGA. And, as Noah reports, inside the Trump administration, there is no trust for the "ACLU of the Jews." But however uncomfortable the fit, the similarities are striking. They were prominent amongst Jewish Zionist liberals who rallied in November 2023 for Israel and were horrified to do so alongside the antisemitic Christian Zionist John Hagee. "His history of hateful comments should disqualify him from decent company, much less from speaking on stage. He is not welcome and should not speak," Americans for Peace Now's Hadar Susskind objected. Since Hagee's speech went ahead despite his objection, perhaps Susskind should reflect on what his liberalism provides political cover for. Indeed, the contradictions of Zionism amongst liberals were a feature of Joe Biden's contributions to the post-October 7 genocide, during which Biden embraced a crackdown on free speech on campus while predicating his presidency upon protecting democracy from Trump. 

I might write about this further, elsewhere. 

But I read Noah's piece alongside Arielle Angel's Jewish Currents essay from mid-July on the need for anti-Zionist Jews to create new Jewish institutions. From her I learned that a prominent Jewish novelist recently said, "Most anti-Zionists are not going to be Jews in a generation." You can tell this person spends no time in Jewish anti-Zionist spaces. In my experience, the cohort of us who count ourselves as anti-Zionists have moved closer to our Judaism, precisely to reclaim Judaism from Zionism, something many of us have come to feel is our obligation to future generations. Angel's piece is about Jews opposed to fascism unapologetically taking power within our community, while Noah's piece provides a warning about what it looks like when we don't. 

THE INDEPENDENT'S JOSH MARCUS called to ask me about the Department of Homeland Security's Herrenvolk memes. You can read what I said about them and their War on Terror heritage here. 

I COULDN'T FIND A PLACE FOR IT IN THE MAIN ESSAY, but don't miss Education Secretary Linda McMahon talking about the Columbia settlement—that is, the exploitation of antisemitism to crush academic freedom and free speech more broadly—as "a monumental victory for conservatives who've wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time." She's right and I appreciate her candor, which should but won't shame people like Greenblatt.