November 9, 2023

Dear Workplace Leaders,

The undersigned legal organizations write to share with you the enclosed letter from over 600 legal organizations and lawyers throughout the US, urging institutional leaders to take immediate measures to protect against anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination, and to protect advocates for Palestinian rights from retaliation for their political views. This is urgent in this moment when advocacy for Palestinian rights is being punished on a mass scale, and is causing a discriminatory and hostile environment for individuals who are connected to and are morally compelled to speak out about the current crisis in Gaza and throughout Palestine.

We also share this urgently today as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) urges companies to undertake its “Workplace Pledge to Fight Antisemitism.” It is absolutely critical that workplaces create inclusive environments and prevent discriminatory and hostile environments for their employees based on their protected characteristics. Antisemitism, along with other bigotry based on people’s racial, religious, ethnic, and other backgrounds, should not be tolerated in any workplace.

It is incumbent upon us, however, as organizations that have a history of defending human and civil rights, and with a deep commitment to social justice, to expose the troubling history of the ADL, which reveals one of its objectives in asking employers to sign this pledge. For many years, the ADL has played a significant part in concertedly attacking speech critical of Israeli policy or favorable to Palestinian rights. While branding itself as a civil rights organization, the ADL has pursued an agenda that has undermined social justice movements and has used its positioning to attack Palestinian, Muslim, Black, LGBT+, immigrant and other communities and movements.

The primary tool that it has used in attacking Palestinians and their allies is to label critics of Israel and advocates for Palestinian rights as “antisemitic.” For example, the ADL’s website unequivocally states that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitic, in intent or effect, as it invokes anti-Jewish tropes, is used to disenfranchise, demonize, disparage, or punish all Jews and/or those who feel a connection to Israel, equates Zionism with Nazism and other genocidal regimes, and renders Jews less worthy of sovereignty and nationhood than other peoples and states.” To render opposition to Zionism as antisemitic is itself anti-Palestinian. Zionism is a political ideology that calls for a Jewish state in historic Palestine. As it has been implemented in practice, the creation of Israel as a self-described “Jewish state” has meant the dispossession, exile, military occupation, and unending violations of the international human and national rights of the Palestinian people. To declare that opposition to Zionism is the equivalent of antisemitism is to declare all Palestinians and their supporters as anti-Jewish because they aspire to end the decades-long occupation of their land and to live freely and in full equality in their homeland. Needless to say, political ideologies are not protected characteristics under anti-discrimination law, and any attempt to make them so should be rejected.

Signing this pledge will, unfortunately, put corporate offices in the position of being arbiters of political speech on Palestinian rights issues, lead to Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and other groups 2

feeling targeted for expressions of their identity, and thereby create a hostile environment for these groups and other advocates for Palestinian rights. A primary tool that the ADL has widely promoted to enforce its own political views on Israel is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism that it and other Israel-aligned groups have pushed in legislatures, institutions and now workplaces around the country. The IHRA definition has been widely discredited as a tool of censorship that, rather than making Jewish people safer, uses the stain of antisemitism to target critics of Israel.

In this moment, when the atrocities unfolding in the Gaza strip (“Gaza”) and throughout Palestine are undeniable, Palestinian and allied voices calling for an end to Israel’s genocide and for Palestinian freedom from Israel’s 75-year long occupation are more important than ever. As of the date of this letter, the Israeli military has so far killed over 10,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including over 4,000 children. The Israeli government—through its serial bombardment—has coerced the mass exodus of Palestinian civilians from northern Gaza to the south of the besieged strip, while attacking putatively safe and humanitarian exit-corridors. It has also struck other civilian targets and is depriving the entire civilian population in Gaza essential access to water, food, medical care, internet service and electricity—even while remaining hospitals are overrun with critically injured patients. Israeli soldiers and settlers have also killed over 150 Palestinians in recent weeks in the occupied West Bank, as settler rampages drive Palestinians out of their lands and homes. All of these measures against Palestinian civilians contravene international law, rise to the level of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and flout the condemnation of the World Health Organization and United Nations.

To condemn these state actions against Palestinians and demand their safety, hundreds of thousands of people have protested in solidarity with them worldwide. High-ranking officials within the U.S. and abroad have, too, undertaking defiant and public resignations. Unfortunately, as the enclosed letter details, the ADL and other Israel-aligned groups have undertaken a campaign of mass censorship, even calling for the criminalization of student activists.

To cast as antisemitic the criticisms that human-rights advocates globally have of Israeli state policy, which is infused with racist and genocidal rhetoric, lacks rigor and cheapens the serious dangers of bona fide antisemitism (meaning, animus against Jewish people because of their ethnic and/or religious identity)—an undeniably real and present danger that all of the undersigned take seriously and uniformly decry.

We therefore ask you, as the enclosed letter urges, to reject attempts to push a distorted definition of antisemitism that aims to censor criticism of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights by falsely labeling it anti-Jewish. The ADL’s pledge does just that – not explicitly, but in its reference to the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism and the Shine A Light Campaign, both of which make explicit reference to the IHRA working definition as a tool to combat antisemitism, and which the ADL has had a significant hand in shaping.

Following the lead of a group that has proven itself as dedicated to undermining Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities, as well as social justice causes across the country, will put you in the position of replicating the ADL’s anti-Palestinian agenda. It will counter the work of DEI offices by encouraging exclusion of and discrimination against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim 3

employees and creating a hostile environment for these groups and all people who support Palestinian rights, including many Jews. Instead, we urge you to address antisemitism along with other bigotry in the workplace in a holistic manner that allows you to create safety and inclusion for all people – not comfort for some at the expense of others. We recommend instead resources on antisemitism such as PARCEO’s “Curriculum on Antisemitism from a Framework of Collective Liberation,” and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice’s Understanding Antisemitism,” and Jewish Voice for Peace resources. In addition, it’s critical that workplaces understand how anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry manifests, and we urge you to reach out to this letter’s signatories for resources on those issues.

Thank you for your urgent attention to this matter, and for your careful consideration of any affiliation with the ADL.

Respectfully,

American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

The Center for Constitutional Rights

Council on American Islamic Relations

Law For Black Lives

National Lawyers Guild

Palestine Legal

Project South Encl.