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Rights Group Applauds Vote by Largest US Teachers Union to Cut ADL Ties
"Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be," said the National Education Association.
Jul 08, 2025
A leading Muslim civil rights group was among those applauding on Tuesday after the largest labor union in the United States took a major step toward "fostering respect for the rights and dignity of all students in public schools" by voting to cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League.
The National Education Association (NEA), which represents nearly 3 million educators, approved a measure saying it "will not use, endorse, or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or statistics."
The move is significant considering the influence the ADL has had over curriculum related to Israel in U.S. schools for decades, with the organization devising recent lesson plans about antisemitism "in the extreme political left" in the U.S., noting that such supposed antisemitism "is often centered on opposition to the state of Israel."
The ADL published a report last year that equated antisemitism with anti-Zionism and pointed to nationwide demonstrations against Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Palestinians in Gaza as evidence that antisemitism is on the rise in the United States. The group has also lobbied in favor of legislation like the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which critics have said could be used to limit the right to criticize Israel on school campuses.
The NEA's 7,000-member Representative Assembly voted for the measure on Sunday, finding that "despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be."
In the lead-up to the vote, former Massachusetts Teachers Association president Merrie Najimy cited the ADL's attacks last year in the MTA as evidence that the national group is focused on rooting out and ostracizing critics of Israel's U.S.-backed policies and defenders of Palestinian rights—not on promoting civil rights for all members of school communities.
"This principled move is a significant step toward fostering respect for the rights and dignity of all students in public schools, who must receive an education without facing biased, politically driven agendas."
When the MTA's elected board of directors called on the union to create resources for teachers to use to educate themselves about the history of Palestine, the ADL accused the union of "glorifying terrorism" and displayed what the MTA called "manipulated" resources at a state commission hearing on antisemitism in February.
"We had been led to believe that the commission hearing would provide the opportunity for a thoughtful discussion about how to teach this very difficult conflict with our students," said the MTA about the ADL's use of the resources. "The way these resources were manipulated in such a fashion, so as to label the state's largest union of educators as promoters of antisemitism, remains one of the more deplorable displays witnessed at the State House."
Labor Notes reported on Monday that MTA members are still facing attacks stemming from the ADL's claims that the union was promoting antisemitism in schools.
"Why would we partner with an organization that does us harm?" Najimy said ahead of the NEA vote.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said Tuesday it welcomed the vote "to stop exposing public school students to biased materials provided by the Anti-Defamation League," and noted that in addition to "using false allegations of antisemitism to silence advocacy for Palestinian human rights," the ADL has historically demonstrated "opposition to Black movements for racial equality, including Black Lives Matter and the South African anti-apartheid movement."
ADL CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt wrote in the New York Jewish Week in 2016 that Black Lives Matter leaders "have expressed support for efforts to boycott and divest from the state of Israel" and claimed those efforts "often are rooted in bigotry." The group also targeted activists who opposed apartheid in South Africa
"The ADL has only become worse under its increasingly unhinged director Jonathan Greenblatt, who has repeatedly smeared and endangered students in recent years," said CAIR. "This principled move is a significant step toward fostering respect for the rights and dignity of all students in public schools, who must receive an education without facing biased, politically driven agendas."
CAIR pointed to recent statements made by Greenblatt in which he reportedly equated pro-Palestinian protesters to ISIS and falsely claimed that Jewish and other students protesting Israel's bombardment of Gaza are "campus proxies" for the Iranian government.
Palestinian-American civil rights attorney Huwaida Arraf said the ADL "has long masqueraded as a civil rights organization while actively working to suppress antiracist movements."
The anti-war group CodePink has led efforts to end the ADL's influence over public education, with organizer Marcy Winograd speaking out against the group's so-called "No Place for Hate" program earlier this year.
"The ADL's stated mission is to empower students, teachers, and parents to 'stand against bias and bullying...' with schoolwide pledges, projects, and games aimed at celebrating diversity and stamping out hate," wrote Winograd in a column at Common Dreams.
But when the Los Angeles Unified School District instituted the No Place for Hate program, its official website shared "an article attacking American Muslims for Palestine for 'being at the core of the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist movement in the United States.'"
"While selling schools on activities to bolster respect and community, the ADL... engineers the death of debate over Israel's right to exist as a Jewish nationalist state in historic Palestine," wrote Winograd.
"Schools," she wrote, "are no place for the ADL."
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'Guilty of Genocide': Protesters Condemn Trump-Netanyahu Meeting and Ethnic Cleansing Push
At the White House, Trump and Netanyahu once again discussed plans to forcibly remove Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
Jul 08, 2025
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he'd nominated U.S. President Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize during an Oval Office meeting on Monday. He did so shortly after the two reiterated their goal of forcibly removing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, a policy that humanitarian groups have described as "ethnic cleansing."
The meeting went on with protesters assembled outside the White House from both Muslim and Jewish groups and other anti-war organizations who called on Trump to end military support for the Israeli government led by Netanyahu, who has been charged, along with his former defense minister, for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
One demonstrator held a banner that read, "U.S. + Israel Guilty of Genocide."
"This is not a diplomatic visit. This is a disgrace," said Robert McCaw, Director of Government Affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). "Every handshake, every deal, every photo op [of Netanyahu] with American leaders stains the hands of all Americans with the blood of children from Gaza."
According to official estimates, more than 57,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's military campaign in Gaza since 2023, including over 17,000 children. The total casualty number does not include the more than 11,000 estimated to be buried beneath rubble.
Other estimates suggest that the death toll is potentially much higher when factoring in the indirect effects of Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid, which have caused widespread hunger and disease.
"Netanyahu doesn't belong in D.C. He belongs in The Hague," wrote Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group CodePink on X.
Anti-war Jewish groups and figures were among some of the loudest voices.
Another protester, Yehuda Cohen, the father of an Israeli hostage who has been trapped in Gaza since October 7, 2023, called on Trump to "force Netanyahu to end the war and go for a hostage deal," which would allow his 21-year-old son Nimrod to return home.
He echoed the accusation that the families of many other hostages still in Gaza have leveled at Netanyahu, that he has sabotaged efforts at a cease-fire to maintain his tenuous hold on power.
"He's got right-wing extremists in his coalition who want the total occupation of the Gaza Strip," Cohen said. "They want to rebuild settlements there, and that's why they are threatening that they will withdraw from the coalition if we go for a cease-fire."
Cohen was part of a separate rally organized by the group New Jewish Narrative, which brought dozens of protesters to the White House in anticipation of Netanyahu's visit.
"When Trump sits across from Netanyahu on Monday, I hope he doesn't just nod along," said Hadar Susskind, the group's president. "I hope he demands an end to the war. I hope he uses all of the leverage he has to bring an end to this war, to rush humanitarian aid into Gaza, and to bring all of the hostages home."
Those calls not only fell on deaf ears, they were thoroughly doused once the meeting began. Trump and Netanyahu seemed to be moving in lockstep, with both reiterating their desire to carry out a plan to permanently expel Palestinians from Gaza, which Trump first proposed publicly in February.
Netanyahu told reporters that he and Trump were working on negotiations with other countries that could take in the people of Gaza who'd been relocated.
"We're working with the United States very closely about finding countries that will seek to realize what they always say, that they wanted to give the Palestinians a better future. I think we're getting close to finding several countries."
Netanyahu framed this as a humanitarian effort to allow Palestinians to leave the "prison" in Gaza and suggested that those who want to stay "can stay." However, the prime minister's recent comments to the Israeli Knesset have shown that making Gaza uninhabitable so its residents will be forced to move is his explicit goal.
In leaked comments obtained by the Israeli magazine +972 in June, Netanyahu assured legislators: "We’re destroying more and more homes—they have nowhere to return to. The only natural outcome will be that Gazans will want to emigrate out of the Strip. Our main problem is with receiving countries."
In comments to NBC News Tuesday, Mustafa Barghouti, a politician with the Palestinian National Initiative Party, described Netanyahu's claim that migration from Gaza would be "voluntary" as a farce.
"When they say it would be voluntary, that is so misleading," Barghouti said. "When you bomb people every day, when you starve people for 126 days, who can call that a voluntary decision?"
[Update: This article has been edited to clarify that the rally hosted by New Jewish Narrative, at which Yehuda Cohen spoke, was a separate event from the one organized by the group American Muslims forPalestine.]
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Critics Aghast at Israel's Push for Gaza 'Concentration Camp'
A prominent Israeli human rights lawyer condemned the proposal outlined by Israel's defense minister as "an operational plan for a crime against humanity."
Jul 08, 2025
The Israeli government's new plan to push all residents in Gaza to live in a camp built atop the ruins of the city of Rafah is drawing heavy criticism from experts who see it as a precursor for ethnic cleansing.
In an interview with The Guardian, Israeli human rights attorney Michael Sfard accused Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz of laying out "an operational plan for a crime against humanity" with his announcement this week of an initiative to build a massive refugee camp at Rafah from which Palestinians would not be allowed to leave. Katz characterized the proposed camp as a "humanitarian city."
Sfard said that the entire camp was being built as a pretext for the mass deportation of Palestinians from Gaza.
"It is all about population transfer to the southern tip of the Gaza Strip in preparation for deportation outside the strip," he told The Guardian. "While the government still calls the deportation 'voluntary,' people in Gaza are under so many coercive measures that no departure from the strip can be seen in legal terms as consensual. When you drive someone out of their homeland that would be a war crime, in the context of a war. If it's done on a massive scale like he plans, it becomes a crime against humanity."
Dr. Amos Goldberg, a historian of the Holocaust at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, picked apart the Israeli government's claims that the camp in Rafah would be a "humanitarian city" where Palestinian civilians could live safely away from Israeli military operations being conducted against Hamas fighters.
"It is neither humanitarian nor a city," Goldberg explained. "A city is a place where you have possibilities of work, of earning money, of making connections and freedom of movement. There are hospitals, schools, universities and offices. This is not what they have in mind. It will not be a livable place, just as the 'safe areas' are unlivable now."
Ihab Hassan, a Palestinian human rights activist and director of the Agora Initiative, expressed a similar sentiment in an interview with The National.
"Israel's Defense Minister Katz isn't even hiding it any more—he's openly calling for a concentration camp for Palestinians in Gaza," he said.
Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of the Refugees International advocacy group, told Reuters that he wasn't at all buying the Israeli government's stated humanitarian intentions regarding the construction of the camp.
"There is no such thing as voluntary displacement amongst a population that has been under constant bombardment for nearly two years and has been cut off from essential aid," he said.
Reuters reported Monday that a $2 billion plan for so-called "humanitarian transit areas" inside Gaza was recently discussed in the Trump White House.
President Donald Trump earlier this year called for the mass removal of Palestinians from Gaza so that the area could be rebuilt as an international beach resort that he described as the "Riviera of the Middle East."
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