Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network is an endorser of the following petition, launched by Jews for Palestinian Right of Return.
SIGN THE PETITION: https://www.change.org/p/tell-the-adl-your-lies-will-never-silence-the-movement-for-palestinian-liberation
To add an organizational endorsement, please send a message to [email protected]
We, the undersigned, unequivocally condemn the Anti-Defamation League’s recent slanderous attack on the movement for Palestinian liberation.
At the organization’s Virtual National Leadership Summit on May 1, 2022, National Director Jonathan Greenblatt not only explicitly peddled the lie that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” but left no doubt as to how the ADL intends to muzzle and/or punish those who oppose the apartheid Israeli regime. “We will use our litigation skills to hold [anti-Zionists] accountable for their harm,” he declared, “[and] use our advocacy muscles to push policymakers to take action.”
Greenblatt specifically targeted Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) — who issued a joint statement in response (a group of prominent Jewish Palestine supporters also published an open letter answering ADL’s attack) — but his warning was clearly directed at all who stand up for Palestinian rights.
The ADL’s threats should not be taken lightly. In 2020, it reported net assets of $152m. The organization has close ties with police and the FBI (and a sordid history of surveilling anti-racist activists). It supports unconstitutional “anti-BDS” laws designed to silence Palestine advocacy. As Mondoweiss recently noted, “the ADL would be laughable if it weren’t dangerous.”
Greenblatt’s chest thumping, however, cannot save the Israeli regime’s crumbling public image. Three high profile reports in the past year — from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem — exposed the regime as an apartheid state, affirming what Palestinians themselves have been telling the world since the Nakba of 1948. The current ethnic cleansing in Masafer Yatta, approved by the Israeli High Court, is a stark reminder that the Nakba is not a distant memory but a permanently operating feature of the settler-colonial Zionist state.
Meanwhile, the Zionist establishment, desperate to distract from this exposure, and spreading its own version of white supremacist “replacement theory,” frames the mere presence of Palestinians in their homeland as a demographic and existential threat to Jewish people.
Ten days after Greenblatt’s address, and two days before Nakba Day, Israeli forces attacking the Jenin Palestinian refugee camp murdered Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a longtime reporter for Al Jazeera. Two days later, with the whole world watching, Israeli police violently assaulted mourners at her funeral procession, “a response,” wrote fellow journalist Belen Fernandez, “that can only be classified as acute and multitiered state savagery, in keeping with Israel’s modus operandi of refusing to let Palestinians live, die, or be buried in peace.”
In honor of Shireen, and in the spirit of anti-racist resistance from the Warsaw Ghetto to apartheid South Africa to the Jim Crow South to Standing Rock to Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate, we serve the ADL notice: your slanders and your threats will never silence the growing movement for a free Palestine from the river to the sea with equal rights for all.
Signed (in alphabetical order),
Adalah Justice Project
Al-Awda NY: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
Al Quds Day Committee of New York
American Muslims for Palestine – NJ
Arab Resource and Organizing Center
Black Lives Matter Paterson
Council on American-Islamic Relations – NJ
CUNY for Palestine
Decolonize This Place
Democratic Socialists of America BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group
Democratic Socialists of America North New Jersey
Democratic Socialists of America Metro DC
Football Against Apartheid
Friends of Sabeel North America
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
Jewish Voice for Peace – Central NJ
Jewish Voice for Peace – Los Angeles
Jewish Voice for Peace – Northern NJ
Jews for Palestinian Right of Return
Jews Say No!
Just Peace Advocates/Mouvement Pour Une Paix Juste
Labor for Palestine
Oakville Palestinian Rights Association (Canada)
Palestine Legal
Palestinian American Community Center`
People’s Organization for Progress
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network
Students for Justice in Palestine at Rutgers – New Brunswick
U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
U.S. Palestinian Community Network
Young Democratic Socialists of America, San Francisco State University chapter
SIGN THE PETITION: https://www.change.org/p/tell-the-adl-your-lies-will-never-silence-the-movement-for-palestinian-liberation
