HOW THE ADL’S ANTI-PALESTINIAN ADVOCACY HELPED SHAPE
U.S. TERROR LAWS
Long before 9/11, Zionist groups like the
Anti-Defamation League lobbied for counterterror legislation that singled out
Palestinians, a new report reveals.
February 21 2024
https://theintercept.com/2024/02/21/adl-palestine-terrorism-legislation/
LAST OCTOBER, as protests against Israel’s war on Gaza swept U.S.
campuses, two prominent pro-Israel groups wrote to nearly 200 university and
college administrators urging them to investigate their students for possibly
violating federal law by promoting pro-Hamas, anti-Israel messaging.
The Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, and the Louis
D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law suggested that members of Students for Justice in
Palestine, the largest Palestine solidarity campus organization in the country,
may have been violating a law that prohibits people from providing “material support” — a broad category that includes money as well as
services or other assistance — to U.S.-designated terror groups. “We
certainly cannot sit idly by as a student organization provides vocal and
potentially material support to Hamas, a designated Foreign Terrorist
Organization,” the ADL and the Brandeis Center wrote.
There is no evidence SJP has ever provided material
support to Hamas, and the letter prompted widespread condemnation. The American
Civil Liberties Union called on leaders in higher education to “reject baseless
calls to investigate or punish student groups for exercising their free speech
rights.”
The federal material support law has been the most
frequently cited law in prosecutions throughout the U.S-led war on terror. And its
invocation by the ADL was a full-circle moment for the group, which helped pass
it three decades ago largely to undermine support for Palestinians in the
United States. Long before 9/11, U.S. terror laws were shaped by a distinctly
anti-Palestinian agenda and often promoted by pro-Israel organizations, a new report published on Wednesday reveals.
“In the history of U.S. terrorism law, Palestine is
the elephant in the room,” said Darryl Li, an anthropologist and legal
scholar at the
University of Chicago and author of the report.
The legal analysis, co-published by the Center for
Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal, a group that fights the legal
harassment of pro-Palestine activists, draws on five decades of legislative
history to trace how moments of upheaval in Israel and Palestine were exploited
by Israel advocates in the U.S. to expand counterterrorism legislation and
enshrine antidemocratic principles in a range of domestic laws.
“Many foundational antiterrorism laws arose during or
were adapted to pivotal moments in the Palestinian liberation struggle, often
pushed by Israel-aligned groups to reflexively cast the veil of ‘terrorism’
almost uniquely on Palestinians,” the report notes. “The same Zionist
organizations that pushed for expanded antiterrorism laws — most notably the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — now brazenly tar all advocacy of Palestinian
liberation as support for terrorism.”
Todd Gutnick, a spokesperson for the ADL, disputed the
characterization as “false and a complete distortion of our position.” In
an email to The Intercept, he wrote that the group’s advocacy of antiterrorism
legislation was aimed at different organizations it was monitoring at the time,
including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,
and Hamas. “This advocacy did not extend to the Palestinian movement or its
supporters broadly — unless those supporters were providing material support to
a terrorist organization in violation of federal law,” Gutnick added.
He also dismissed criticism of the ADL and Brandeis
Center’s letter to campus leaders. “We fully recognize and support students’
First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, even odious speech, and have made
that clear,” he wrote. “But at a time when some SJP leaders were echoing the
position of Hamas so closely and with such intensity, and in a manner that was
tinged with threats of violence, we strongly believe that an investigation is
warranted.”
Emma Saltzberg, the U.S. strategic campaigns director
for Diaspora Alliance, an organization that fights “antisemitism and its
instrumentalization,” told The Intercept that the ADL’s call for terrorism
investigations is contrary to its stated mission as a civil rights group.
“It’s an active attempt to deny Palestinian students
and students who are in solidarity with them — many of whom are Jewish —
their civil rights to free expression and free speech,” Saltzberg said, “and to
smear legitimate political activism as outside the bounds of acceptable
discourse and to attach real material penalties to that.”
She added that the effort, while focused on advocacy
for Palestinians, could have far-reaching implications. “Advocating this kind
of investigation, criminalization against activists for Palestinian rights, is
laying the groundwork for future repressive state activity,” Saltzberg said.
“And that is something that should scare people.”
An Anti-Palestinian History
U.S. counterterrorism legislation and policies since
9/11 have predominantly targeted Muslims abroad and at home, but earlier
efforts to codify terrorism in U.S. law specifically singled out Palestinians,
according to the new report.
The earliest reference to “terrorism” in federal
legislation dates back to the 1969 Foreign Assistance Act and involves the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near
East, which is once again under attack amid Israel’s current war on Gaza. Congress
stipulated at the time that no UNRWA funding should go to “any refugee who is
receiving military training as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation
Army … or who has engaged in any act of terrorism,” the report notes. The main
sponsor of the provision, late New York Rep. Leonard Farbstein, singled out
U.N.-run refugee camps, claiming — not unlike some legislators today — that “these camps are being used for
training purposes and the young children for whom the schools are being built
and who are being fed and clothed are being trained as terrorists in these
refugee camps.”
While the bill offered no definition of terrorism, the
reference “set down a decades-long pattern that legally inscribed the
Palestinian — and especially the refugee — as the default terrorist,” the
report notes.
Throughout the 1970s, Congress passed a series of laws
aimed at restricting assistance to states that were hosting or otherwise
supporting members of the Palestinian resistance movement. Zionist groups
advocated for those laws, according to the report, and pushed for creating a
mechanism to trigger such sanctions. In 1979, those efforts culminated in
legislation that endowed the secretary of state with the authority to designate
foreign countries as “state sponsors of acts of
international terrorism.”
Since then, the U.S. has repeatedly applied the label to countries in the
Middle East and North Africa, excluding them from aid and trade and isolating them from the broader
international community.
In 1987, weeks after the outbreak of the largely
nonviolent First Intifada, Congress for the first and only time designated a
nonstate group, the Palestine Liberation Organization, a “terrorist
organization.” The move was part of an effort to oust the PLO from the U.S.,
including from the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where it had a
mission as a nonstate “observer.” While the ouster endeavor failed, the
congressional legislation also created the State Department’s “foreign terrorist organization” list, requiring the executive branch to make annual
designations of terror groups. Within a year, the State Department added dozens
of groups, many pro-Palestinian ones, to the list, which has since ballooned to
include a wide range of primarily Muslim groups.
In the following years, U.S. lawmakers inscribed
“terrorism” provisions in immigration and civil law, primarily in an effort to
target members of the Palestinian resistance movement. In 1990, Congress
amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to list “terrorism” as a basis for
deportation and the denial of entry into the United States. The legislation
once again singled out the PLO, noting that any “officer, official,
representative, or spokesman” for the group would be considered to be engaging
in terrorist activity.
Two years later, Congress passed the Antiterrorism
Act, incentivizing U.S. citizens to file civil suits over acts of international
terrorism abroad. The law came on the heels of the 1985 killing by members of
the Palestine Liberation Front of Leon Klinghoffer, a U.S. citizen who had been
onboard the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise ship. A small conservative think tank
drafted the bill, and several Zionist groups, including the ADL, advocated for
it. The Klinghoffer family twice testified in favor of the bill on the behalf
of the ADL, according to the new report. In the first decade after the law was
passed in 1992, some 63 percent of the lawsuits citing it were related to
Palestine, with the vast majority brought by dual Israeli American citizens in
the aftermath of the Second Intifada, the report notes.
Material Support
The ban on material support to foreign terrorist
organizations alone accounted for more than half of federal terrorism
prosecutions brought in the aftermath of 9/11, according to an Intercept analysis.
Federal courts have interpreted the material support
statute broadly, chilling
efforts to provide
humanitarian aid in areas, like Gaza, where groups that the U.S. government
deems to be terrorist entities operate. But while the legislation exclusively
applies to support for foreign groups, it originated domestically, in the
aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by the white supremacists Timothy
McVeigh and Terry Nichols.
The bombing — the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil
at that time — prompted calls for sweeping counterterrorism legislation that
would give the government ample powers to target domestic and foreign actors.
And it was shaped heavily by the ADL.
The Clinton administration supported a version of the
legislation that included several elements from the ADL’s “counterterrorism
agenda,” including bans on entry and fundraising for “members and supporters”
of terrorist groups, the report notes. Members of the ADL testified in
Congress in favor of the legislation, and when Republicans concerned about
government overreach struck many of the terrorism provisions in the draft
legislation, the ADL condemned legislators for “gutting” it. As Democrats and
Republicans disagreed over expanded federal law enforcement authorities, the
ADL led a campaign by a dozen pro-Israel groups to fuel fears that Hamas would
fundraise in the U.S. and convince legislators to reintroduce the terrorism
provisions aimed at foreign groups. In the end, the Oklahoma City bombing led
to no legislative action against domestic extremism, but it set the legal
foundations upon which U.S. prosecutors have targeted hundreds of people since
9/11.
“Responding to a deadly mass-casualty attack
perpetrated by two white men with radically scaled up repression of Black,
Brown, and Muslim communities is an all-too-American response,” said Li.
Understanding that history, he added, is essential to
keeping the current war in Gaza from engendering even more draconian
legislation. Already, in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks, the Biden
administration has stepped up surveillance of Palestine supporters, while state governments
have cited their own terrorism statutes in crackdowns against critics of
Israel’s war. At the federal level, legislators have floated extreme proposals
like expelling
Palestinians from
the U.S. and setting up a committee to
investigate antisemitism.
“Since October 7, members of Congress have been trying
to out-grandstand each other by proposing racist anti-Palestinian bills,” said
Li. “While we must push back against the most outrageous initiatives, the
proposals that seem innocuous may end up doing the most harm.”
