How the ADL’s Anti-Palestinian Advocacy Helped Shape U.S. Terror Laws

Final October, as protests in opposition to Israel’s battle on Gaza swept U.S. campuses, two distinguished pro-Israel teams wrote to just about 200 college and faculty directors urging them to analyze their college students for presumably violating federal regulation by selling pro-Hamas, anti-Israel messaging.

The Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, and the Louis D. Brandeis Middle for Human Rights Below Legislation advised that members of College students for Justice in Palestine, the biggest Palestine solidarity campus group within the nation, might have been violating a regulation that prohibits folks from offering “materials help” — a broad class that features cash in addition to providers or different help — to U.S.-designated terror teams. “We definitely can’t sit idly by as a scholar group gives vocal and doubtlessly materials help to Hamas, a delegated Overseas Terrorist Group,” the ADL and the Brandeis Middle wrote.

There is no such thing as a proof SJP has ever supplied materials help to Hamas, and the letter prompted widespread condemnation. The American Civil Liberties Union known as on leaders in increased training to “reject baseless calls to analyze or punish scholar teams for exercising their free speech rights.”

The federal materials help regulation has been probably the most steadily cited regulation in prosecutions all through the united statesled battle on terror. And its invocation by the ADL was a full-circle second for the group, which helped cross it three a long time in the past largely to undermine help for Palestinians in the USA. Lengthy earlier than 9/11, U.S. terror legal guidelines had been formed by a distinctly anti-Palestinian agenda and sometimes promoted by pro-Israel organizations, a brand new report printed on Wednesday reveals.

“Within the historical past of U.S. terrorism regulation, Palestine is the elephant within the room,” mentioned Darryl Li, an anthropologist and authorized scholar on the College of Chicago and writer of the report.

The authorized evaluation, co-published by the Middle for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Authorized, a bunch that fights the authorized harassment of pro-Palestine activists, attracts on 5 a long time of legislative historical past to hint how moments of upheaval in Israel and Palestine had been exploited by Israel advocates within the U.S. to broaden counterterrorism laws and enshrine antidemocratic rules in a spread of home legal guidelines.

“Many foundational antiterrorism legal guidelines arose throughout or had been tailored to pivotal moments within the Palestinian liberation battle, usually pushed by Israel-aligned teams to reflexively solid the veil of ‘terrorism’ nearly uniquely on Palestinians,” the report notes. “The identical Zionist organizations that pushed for expanded antiterrorism legal guidelines — most notably the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — now overtly tar all advocacy of Palestinian liberation as help for terrorism.”

Todd Gutnick, a spokesperson for the ADL, disputed the characterization as “false and an entire distortion of our place.” In an e-mail to The Intercept, he wrote that the group’s advocacy of antiterrorism laws was aimed toward completely different organizations it was monitoring on the time, together with the Kurdistan Staff’ Occasion, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and Hamas. “This advocacy didn’t lengthen to the Palestinian motion or its supporters broadly — until these supporters had been offering materials help to a terrorist group in violation of federal regulation,” Gutnick added.

He additionally dismissed criticism of the ADL and Brandeis Middle’s letter to campus leaders. “We absolutely acknowledge and help college students’ First Modification rights to freedom of speech, even odious speech, and have made that clear,” he wrote. “However at a time when some SJP leaders had been echoing the place of Hamas so intently and with such depth, and in a fashion that was tinged with threats of violence, we strongly imagine that an investigation is warranted.”

Emma Saltzberg, the U.S. strategic campaigns director for Diaspora Alliance, a corporation that fights “antisemitism and its instrumentalization,” informed The Intercept that the ADL’s name for terrorism investigations is opposite to its said mission as a civil rights group.

“Advocating this sort of investigation, criminalization in opposition to activists for Palestinian rights, is laying the groundwork for future repressive state exercise.”

“It’s an energetic try to deny Palestinian college students and college students who’re in solidarity with them — lots of whom are Jewish — their civil rights to free expression and free speech,” Saltzberg mentioned, “and to smear respectable political activism as outdoors the bounds of acceptable discourse and to connect actual materials penalties to that.”

She added that the hassle, whereas centered on advocacy for Palestinians, might have far-reaching implications. “Advocating this sort of investigation, criminalization in opposition to activists for Palestinian rights, is laying the groundwork for future repressive state exercise,” Saltzberg mentioned. “And that’s one thing that ought to scare folks.”

An Anti-Palestinian Historical past

U.S. counterterrorism laws and insurance policies since 9/11 have predominantly focused Muslims overseas and at house, however earlier efforts to codify terrorism in U.S. regulation particularly singled out Palestinians, in line with the brand new report.

The earliest reference to “terrorism” in federal laws dates again to the 1969 Overseas Help Act and includes the United Nations Reduction and Works Company for Palestine Refugees within the Close to East, which is as soon as once more beneath assault amid Israel’s present battle on Gaza. Congress stipulated on the time that no UNRWA funding ought to go to “any refugee who’s receiving navy coaching as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation Military … or who has engaged in any act of terrorism,” the report notes. The primary sponsor of the supply, late New York Rep. Leonard Farbstein, singled out U.N.-run refugee camps, claiming — not in contrast to some legislators immediately — that “these camps are getting used for coaching functions and the younger kids for whom the faculties are being constructed and who’re being fed and clothed are being educated as terrorists in these refugee camps.”

Whereas the invoice supplied no definition of terrorism, the reference “set down a decades-long sample that legally inscribed the Palestinian — and particularly the refugee — because the default terrorist,” the report notes.

All through the Seventies, Congress handed a sequence of legal guidelines aimed toward proscribing help to states that had been internet hosting or in any other case supporting members of the Palestinian resistance motion. Zionist teams advocated for these legal guidelines, in line with the report, and pushed for making a mechanism to set off such sanctions. In 1979, these efforts culminated in laws that endowed the secretary of state with the authority to designate international international locations as “state sponsors of acts of worldwide terrorism.” Since then, the U.S. has repeatedly utilized the label to international locations within the Center East and North Africa, excluding them from assist and commerce and isolating them from the broader worldwide group.

In 1987, weeks after the outbreak of the largely nonviolent First Intifada, Congress for the primary and solely time designated a nonstate group, the Palestine Liberation Group, a “terrorist group.” The transfer was a part of an effort to oust the PLO from the U.S., together with from the United Nations headquarters in New York Metropolis, the place it had a mission as a nonstate “observer.” Whereas the ouster endeavor failed, the congressional laws additionally created the State Division’s “international terrorist group” checklist, requiring the manager department to make annual designations of terror teams. Inside a yr, the State Division added dozens of teams, many pro-Palestinian ones, to the checklist, which has since ballooned to incorporate a variety of primarily Muslim teams.

Within the following years, U.S. lawmakers inscribed “terrorism” provisions in immigration and civil regulation, primarily in an effort to focus on members of the Palestinian resistance motion. In 1990, Congress amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to checklist “terrorism” as a foundation for deportation and the denial of entry into the USA. The laws as soon as once more singled out the PLO, noting that any “officer, official, consultant, or spokesman” for the group could be thought-about to be participating in terrorist exercise.

Two years later, Congress handed the Antiterrorism Act, incentivizing U.S. residents to file civil fits over acts of worldwide terrorism overseas. The regulation got here on the heels of the 1985 killing by members of the Palestine Liberation Entrance of Leon Klinghoffer, a U.S. citizen who had been onboard the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise ship. A small conservative suppose tank drafted the invoice, and a number of other Zionist teams, together with the ADL, advocated for it. The Klinghoffer household twice testified in favor of the invoice on the behalf of the ADL, in line with the brand new report. Within the first decade after the regulation was handed in 1992, some 63 p.c of the lawsuits citing it had been associated to Palestine, with the overwhelming majority introduced by twin Israeli Americans within the aftermath of the Second Intifada, the report notes.

Materials Assist

The ban on materials help to international terrorist organizations alone accounted for greater than half of federal terrorism prosecutions introduced within the aftermath of 9/11, in line with an Intercept evaluation.

Federal courts have interpreted the fabric help statute broadly, chilling efforts to supply humanitarian assist in areas, like Gaza, the place teams that the U.S. authorities deems to be terrorist entities function. However whereas the laws completely applies to help for international teams, it originated domestically, within the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma Metropolis bombing by the white supremacists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.

The bombing — the deadliest terror assault on U.S. soil at the moment — prompted requires sweeping counterterrorism laws that will give the federal government ample powers to focus on home and international actors. And it was formed closely by the ADL.

“Responding to a lethal mass-casualty assault perpetrated by two white males with radically scaled up repression of Black, Brown, and Muslim communities is an all-too-American response.”

The Clinton administration supported a model of the laws that included a number of parts from the ADL’s “counterterrorism agenda,” together with bans on entry and fundraising for “members and supporters” of terrorist teams, the report notes. Members of the ADL testified in Congress in favor of the laws, and when Republicans involved about authorities overreach struck lots of the terrorism provisions within the draft laws, the ADL condemned legislators for “gutting” it. As Democrats and Republicans disagreed over expanded federal regulation enforcement authorities, the ADL led a marketing campaign by a dozen pro-Israel teams to gas fears that Hamas would fundraise within the U.S. and persuade legislators to reintroduce the terrorism provisions aimed toward international teams. In the long run, the Oklahoma Metropolis bombing led to no legislative motion in opposition to home extremism, however it set the authorized foundations upon which U.S. prosecutors have focused tons of of individuals since 9/11.

“Responding to a lethal mass-casualty assault perpetrated by two white males with radically scaled up repression of Black, Brown, and Muslim communities is an all-too-American response,” mentioned Li.

Understanding that historical past, he added, is crucial to preserving the present battle in Gaza from engendering much more draconian laws. Already, within the aftermath of the Hamas assaults, the Biden administration has stepped up surveillance of Palestine supporters, whereas state governments have cited their very own terrorism statutes in crackdowns in opposition to critics of Israel’s battle. On the federal stage, legislators have floated excessive proposals like expelling Palestinians from the U.S. and organising a committee to analyze antisemitism.

“Since October 7, members of Congress have been attempting to out-grandstand one another by proposing racist anti-Palestinian payments,” mentioned Li. “Whereas we should push again in opposition to probably the most outrageous initiatives, the proposals that appear innocuous might find yourself doing probably the most hurt.”