BY EMMAIA GELMAN

Yesterday, campus communities watched in horror as news unfolded that Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University who bravely acted as negotiator between the Palestine solidarity encampment and Columbia administrators, had been snatched from university housing by ICE agents on orders from the White House. It is the cataclysm that has been building on campuses: political speech smeared as “terror support,” students arrested (and perhaps soon faculty and staff) as university leaders instruct us to cooperate and comply. As the Trump regime draws ever more parallel to Nazism, it is impossible not to draw comparisons with the Gestapo. But the Trump regime’s fixers in these attacks are, outrageously, the Anti-Defamation League and a set of smaller related organizations claiming to combat antisemitism. Their claims are just as specious and tactical as Trump’s, but even more dangerous because they speak in the language of civil rights—and university leaders have treated them as good-faith actors.

Last week, the Anti-Defamation League’s annual “Never is Now” summit gathered a chilling mix of far-right politicians—the ones currently fast-tracking US fascism—in a chummy environment with media personalities, university leaders, and far-right groups that purport to be civil rights advocates. Last year, Jared Kushner was a headliner; last week it was Elise Stefanik. In the midst of the summit, Trump used social media to re-up his threat to deport or imprison students—mostly young people of color and Jews—who have protested the US-supported Israeli genocide of Palestinians. These two events are closely related. The Trump regime is trying to paint any efforts to confront racism and state violence terms as dangerous to “equality” and “national unity.” That’s what fascists do. But Trump didn’t set it up: the ADL did.

If you thought of the ADL as an antiracist organization, they would like to set you straight: as of last week, the ADL scrubbed its website of hundreds of lesson plans on race, gender, and other forms of discrimination and said it’s no longer doing that work. But that’s not really a sea change. Antiracism groups have long decried the ADL’s use of civil rights work as cover for conservative, and indeed racist, political advocacy. And this week, a former ADL education director published an exposé about just how bad it is.

For the last decade, the ADL has led a set of Israel advocacy groups, who share much of Trump’s agenda, in using universities as a staging ground to attack basic ideas about racial justice. Those attacks ramped up steeply in 2024 as students protested Israeli assaults on Gaza. Like the Trump regime, they purport to be advocating for civil rights, “standing against hate,” and “opposing antisemitism.” And, like Trump, in reality they’ve been doing something quite different. Through Zionist groups’ advocacy, many universities have taken measures that enact Trump’s aims in advance. As University of Michigan President Santa Ono touted at the ADL summit, these have included elevating antisemitism as “the real issue on campus” even as anti-Palestinian racism is driving police and vigilante violence against students and serving as rationale for shutting down the study of colonialism. Universities have adopted policies including criminalizing protest on topics that administrators dislike, inviting police to attack campus communities, and stripping housing, healthcare, and education from students and faculty with whom they disagree. Far from supporting Jews, these policies have disproportionately targeted Jews on campuses, alongside Palestinians, immigrants, and other minorities. That’s because Jewish students have widely opposed Israel’s genocide, making them a particular target of Zionist hostility.

As right-wing Zionist groups have trampled universities, their actual destination has been federal policy. The ADL has spent years pursuing laws that would equate criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish discrimination. This definition of antisemitism, known as the IHRA definition, has been rejected by hundreds of scholars in Jewish studies and related areas and human rights groups. Still, the ADL has used the discredited IHRA definition to ramp up racist, repressive policing and conversely paint political opposition to US and Israeli state violence as “hate” and “domestic terror.” In short, it has been working to turn civil rights and anti-hate laws into powerful weapons against progressives.

But federal legislation proved difficult to pass. So the ADL and its allies—including many new astroturf, megadonor-backed organizations—have focused on universities, where a few malleable leaders can set policy for a lot of major institutions. Alongside the ADL, a host of those new right-wing groups are now household names in higher ed, like the Academic Engagement Network, Mothers Against College Antisemitism, and the Combat Antisemitism Network. All are Israel advocates pushing universities to attack students, faculty, and staff while rolling back academic freedom, free speech, and supports for marginalized groups.

Right-wing Zionist organizations have gotten what they wanted from universities. New university policies have treated antiracism, DEI, and opposing genocide as a danger—just as Trump is now doing. Using language supplied by Zionist advocates, university policies now class many students and faculty as hateful or threatening. As a result, universities are fertile ground for Trump’s plans to deport or imprison those who would organize to oppose him. Some Zionist organizations who focus on campus policy are already endorsing mass deportation. Mothers Against College Antisemitism recently responded to Trump’s chilling anti-immigrant executive order by urging its members to file mass complaints about immigrant students in order to have them deported. The same anti-immigrant call appeared in a chat of Hillel, which bills itself as a Jewish campus life group but explicitly excludes Jewish students who disagree with its unconditional support for Israel.

The ADL summit put its tactics on display: a lethal mix of civil rights claims with racism, police repression with claims of protecting democracy, and universities as laboratories for implementation. It was no accident that, alongside speakers intended to signal the ADL’s ties to Black, Arab, Asian, and LGBTQ advocacy, the summit featured right-wing leaders and university administrators. Mothers Against College Antisemitism, fresh from campaigning for student deportations. Trump’s cheerleader and election denier, UN Ambassador Elise Stefanik. The leaders of University of Michigan and Washington University of St. Louis, both of whom have embraced policies demanded by right-wing groups and used police to brutalize student protesters. With “campus climate” advocates like these, who needs white nationalists?

To survive this time, we have to know who is attacking us. We must recognize the “campus antisemitism” canard as right-wing machinery and recognize the ADL and its partners as right-wing organizations who have instrumentalized universities to enact repression in a vastly broader sphere. We have to openly, vociferously expose them, and stand with students—including Mahmoud Khalil—to defend against them.

Emmaia Gelman’s forthcoming book, with the University of California Press, is a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League (1913-1990) as a Cold War neoconservative institution. She researches the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as political levers in the realm of “anti-hate” and “anti-terror” policy, surveillance, and war. She is the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and cochair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism.