National Education Association teachers in support of Palestinian rights are celebrating their breakthrough success at the NEA’s Representative Assembly in Portland this summer. After years of organizing with both one-on-one conversations and state delegation talks, NEA delegates voted to pass a Drop the Anti-Defamation League motion that rejects the ADL as a curriculum and professional development partner.

We are witnessing a sea change in people’s understanding of who the Palestinians are and what colonialism has done to them,“ said Merrie Najimy, former President of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) and Founder of MTA Rank and File for Palestine. “In the past, too many people didn’t see the humanity of Palestinians because Israeli propaganda erased and dehumanized them. We call that anti-Palestinian racism.”

While the Council for Islamic Relations (CAIR), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and CODEPINK applauded the motion, the Anti-Defamation League blamed a “pro-Hamas” cabal inside the NEA for rejecting an organization that smears peace activists and slams Muslims and anti-Zionist Jews.

The “pro-Hamas” accusation echoes the verbiage of Project Esther, the Heritage Foundation’s MAGA blueprint for crushing pro-Palestinian voices amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The product of Christian nationalists, Project Esther has earned the ire of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace for blasting anti-genocide protesters as members of a fictitious U.S. Hamas Support Network.

In response to the motion’s passage at the NEA Representative Assembly (RA), an enraged ADL sent out a mass email urging its supporters to tell the NEA executive committee to reverse the NEA delegates’ recommendation that teachers not “use, endorse or publicize” ADL materials, nor “participate in ADL programs or publicize ADL professional development offerings.”

A national Drop the ADL from Schools campaign has long criticized the ADL’s materials for whitewashing the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, where Zionist militias destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages in the Nakba (Arabic word for catastrophe) of 1947-48 when the State of Israel was declared.

The ADL’s mass email made no mention, however, of........

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