Did the ADL really turn over a new leaf?
As the Trump regime ramps up its attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is finally starting to admit that the authoritarian crackdown he helped sow might have gone too far.
But the damage is already done. For years, anti-Palestinian lobby groups like the ADL have tried to shut down criticism of Israel by falsely conflating it with antisemitism. And when students rose up on their universities campuses in protest against Israel’s genocide, universities adopted the ADL’s line, using fears of antisemitism as a pretext to crack down on student activism.
In doing so, anti-Palestinian lobby groups and university administrators have empowered the Trump administration to dismantle constitutionally-protected rights and gut higher education.
Too little, too late.
In an article published in the Times of Israel last week, Greenblatt tentatively criticized what he referred to as government “overreach,” expressing his concern over “the extent and scope” of the administration’s dealings with Harvard in particular — which is currently suing the Trump administration after it froze over two billion in federal funding and threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status.
“Resolving the very real crisis of antisemitism should not jeopardize the entire enterprise of our system of higher education,” Greenblatt continued.
That’s far from the line the ADL took two months ago, when it cheered on the Trump administration’s abduction of Mahmoud Khalil — or last year, when Greenblatt compared student chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace to “proxies” of Iran.
Though Greenblatt refuses to acknowledge it explicitly, he can see the writing on the wall: The Trump regime, whose tactics the ADL enthusiastically endorsed not too long ago, is leading an authoritarian takeover, exploiting fears of antisemitism as a pretext to gut higher education and dismantle fundamental rights and freedoms — and groups like the ADL paved the path for them to do so.
But they don’t hold the blame alone. Universities themselves sowed the seeds of Trump’s authoritarian crackdown on dissent and attacks on higher education. Desperate to appease donors and avoid federal funding freezes, they led their own crackdown on student protesters before those students became targets of the Trump regime.
Laying the groundwork for Trump’s crackdown.
In a letter he dictated from his cell at an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, Mahmoud Khalil wrote that Columbia administration “laid the groundwork” for the Trump regime to target him and students like him.
As Gaza solidarity protests spread across the country, university administrators unleashed a vicious crackdown on their own students. Parroting the racist lie so often cited by the ADL — that calls to end the genocide were a threat to Jewish safety on campus — administrators suspended, expelled, and revoked the degrees of countless students, opened their campuses to militarized police, who arrested thousands, and happily cooperated with federal authorities, including handing student records over to Congress.
Once many of those students became targets of online doxxing — campaigns that would make it easier for the Trump administration to target them — administrators still did nothing.
Universities created an opening the far right could easily exploit to justify its anti-education agenda and whitewash its blatant attacks on fundamental rights. The Trump regime has done exactly that, attempting to deport the same students who were targeted by their universities for speaking out for Palestinian rights. In building its case against one of those students, Columbia graduate Mohsen Mahdawi, the Trump administration quoted verbatim from a statement issued by Columbia president Minouche Shafik that falsely accused peaceful protesters of “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” — a characterization that Shafik herself would admit was inaccurate.
Predictably, none of the draconian measures adopted by university administrators were enough for a federal government seeking any excuse to wage war on higher education. The Trump administration still froze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and launched investigations into dozens of universities for so-called antisemitism.
Still, many universities have totally capitulated to Trump’s demands, further militarizing their campuses and restricting freedom of speech. In some cases, they’ve done the Trump administration’s work for them: including informing hundreds of student visa holders that they had been legally stripped of their status and needed to leave the United States, even when that wasn’t the case.
The crackdown expands.
Though vulnerable student activists were an easy target, it’s clear the Trump regime always intended to expand its crackdown to anyone who speaks out for Palestinian rights — or against the Trump regime’s agenda.
On April 8, Mondoweiss contributor and U.S. citizen Dr. Musa Springer was detained at Tampa Airport upon returning to the U.S. For three hours, Dr. Springer was interrogated by Department of Homeland Security agents, who confiscated his phone and laptop and prevented him from accessing legal counsel.
“I was told that “most of your rights are suspended” because “this airport is a border crossing,” including my right to a lawyer. I was interrogated by a Counterterrorism agent and treated like a criminal and a terrorist—synonyms this empire has long made interchangeable with being Black, Muslim, and politically active.”
– Dr. Musa Springer
Dr. Springer isn’t the first U.S. citizen to be detained and interrogated by DHS agents. In March, lawyer Amir Makled was detained at Detroit Airport after returning from international travel and questioned by DHS agents, who pressured him to turn over his contact list, which included privileged legal information about his clients. One of those clients is a student at the University of Michigan who was arrested for protesting. As the Trump regime grows bolder, this kind of intimidation will grow more common.
Amid this expanding crackdown on dissent, it’s important we understand how we got here.
For years, the ADL has conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism, gifting the Trump regime convenient moral cover with which to mask its obvious authoritarianism. When protests broke out on college campuses across the country, university administrators were all too eager to adopt the ADL’s narrative: Slandering peaceful protesters as violent antisemites, deploying their own authoritarian tactics to silence dissent on campus, and refusing to protect students from harassment and doxxing. It should come as no surprise that the Trump regime is following suit, relentlessly pursuing the same students who were doxxed in online harassment campaigns and targeted by their universities.
It’s equally important that we understand that this expanding crackdown is a sign of political weakness, not strength. Like past issues of the Wire have argued, our movements have helped drive a massive shift in public opinion toward support for Palestinian freedom, challenging at every opportunity our opposition’s claims to act in the name of Jewish safety. Right now, our job is to refuse to allow fear to divide or intimidate us.
Write to TIME magazine: Don’t whitewash the ADL’s authoritarianism.
In April, TIME selected ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt as one of the top 100 most influential people in the world, praising him for his “moral clarity” in combating antisemitism “on both sides of the aisle.”
This is a blatantly dishonest attempt to whitewash the ADL’s complicity in Trump’s authoritarian crackdown on dissent. Will you email TIME now and tell them to stop whitewashing the ADL’s attacks on pro-Palestine activists?
Tell Congress: Act now to secure the release of Mahmoud, Mohsen, and all other imprisoned student activists.
Use the action tools provided by our sister organization to keep up the pressure on our elected officials to demand the release of student activists imprisoned for defending Palestinian rights.
What we’re reading: “Her smile was as magical as her tenacity.”
In this interview with Democracy Now!, the director of the upcoming documentary film Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk speaks to the devastating loss of Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona. The 25-year-old was murdered alongside nine of her family members in an Israeli airstrike last week — just one day after she was informed that the documentary telling the story of her life and work would be premiering at the ACID Cannes 2025 film festival.
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