Photo: Michael Brochstein/Sipa via AP
If you listen to its most vociferous backers, Israel is doing a lot of winning. It’s winning in Gaza (read: the Strip’s total destruction). It’s winning in Lebanon (read: decapitated Hezbollah). It’s winning in Syria (read: seizing land in the chaos over the end of the Assads).
Amid the parade of self-congratulations for all the “winning” going on out there, it was easy to miss the head of one the most prominent U.S. pro-Israel groups, the Anti-Defamation League, admitting to Israel’s parliament that it has been failing on one important front: the fight against global antisemitism.
“Nobody likes to admit when they’ve fallen short,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO, told the Knesset on Tuesday, according to eJewishPhilanthropy. “I don’t like to lose. I personally hate to lose. However, sometimes we need to acknowledge the reality.”
The reality was stark: Antisemitism, Greenblatt said, is on the rise, especially online. The admission was a stunning one, since the ADL was founded to fight antisemitism. That is the banner under which all of its vociferous advocacy for Israel occurs. So for the group to fail in this way raises big questions — questions that need big answers.
Luckily, Greenblatt had ideas: Israel’s backers need to think like Israeli spies who secretly installed bombs in electronics all over Lebanon, killing dozens and wounding thousands.
“We need the kind of genius that manufactured Apollo Gold Pagers and infiltrated Hezbollah for over a decade to prepare for this battle,” Greenblatt said. “This is the kind of ingenuity and inventiveness that have always been a hallmark of the State of Israel, that have always been a characteristic of the Jewish people. I know we can do it.”
Is Greenblatt serious? Does he honestly think it’s possible for Israel to address global antisemitism by blowing it up like hundreds of pagers or by razing it to the ground? Can the ADL stage an attack on the hatred of the Jews relentlessly like everything else — as if it’s yet another front of a war — alongside Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran?
Sadly, this does seem to be what Greenblatt is talking about: pointing a gun at the collective heads of the entire world and demanding that they love Jewish people.
ADL’s Checkered Past
This type of militarist rhetoric is nothing new for supporters of Israel, certainly not since October 7, but it’s not where the Anti-Defamation League began.
The group was founded in response to the rise of the American KKK and the trial of Leo Frank, a Jewish American businessman convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl, likely a false allegation. When Frank’s death penalty was commuted to life in prison, he was kidnapped from prison and summarily lynched by an antisemitic mob. The ADL went on to expand its mission to combating all kinds of bigotry but retained its focus on antisemitism.
For over a century after that, the efforts of the ADL became a game of whack-a-mole. When Henry Ford’s newspaper published articles from antisemitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the ADL pounced. It pressured Ford until, in 1927, he issued an apology. In the 1950s and ’60s, the ADL was conducting spy operations inside neo-Nazi groups and campaigning for civil rights. By 2016, the ADL was slamming Donald Trump for his repeated use of antisemitic tropes.
The ADL has a darker side too, including spying on pro-Palestine organizations from the 1960s through the 1990s and surveilling them more recently, as well as taking overtly anti-Muslim positions in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Much of the the group’s more troublesome history was justified as part of its battle against antisemitism.
All Antisemites!
Classical antisemitism — and racism in general — is rooted in a basic fear of the Other. But its modern form, dubbed “new antisemitism,” has restructured the terms in a different way, arguing that anti-Zionism, and frankly any criticism of Israel’s policies, is inherently antisemitic. This isn’t a problem in abstraction.
Benjamin Netanyahu so regularly accuses every critic of Israel of antisemitism that the prime minister has become a parody of himself. College campus protesters? Antisemitic. International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan? “One of the great antisemites in modern times.” The United Nations? An “anti-Israel Flat Earth Society.” Gaza? Yemen? Lebanon? Iran? Ireland? Hollywood? All antisemites!
There is no controversy in noting that these blanket accusations of antisemitism provide political cover for Israel’s endless aggression against all of its perceived enemies, all the way to genocide. In many ways, it is simply a new form of “hasbara,” a diplomatic PR and propaganda strategy to explain Israel’s military actions, whether or not they are actually justified.
It is important to question whether advancing this theory of “new antisemitism” and equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism is actually serving the aim of peace and security for anyone in the Middle East.
And it is important to question whether Greenblatt childishly telling the Knesset that it needs to ramp up its war on hatred has any utility whatsoever.
It takes nuance, consideration, mutual understanding, and delicate engagement to address deep-seated racism in society. The Jewish community is not going to temper online trolls by blowing up TikTok commenters, either attacking them as enemies in an information war, or using the mechanisms of hasbara to overwhelm them with “alternative facts.”
