Anti-Defamation League accuses the Bay View of ‘being anti-Semitic’, by Jeff Blankfort, San Francisco Bay View, January 28, 2004 "The Bay View received a letter last week from the Anti-Defamation League (see page 5) suggesting that the paper had “crossed the line from being simply critical of the policies of the State of Israel, to being anti-Semitic.” One of the two examples provided concerned JR’s report on the unsuccessful attempt of workers at the Rainbow Grocery Co-op to implement a boycott of Israeli products in protest against Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian land and the brutal and inhuman treatment of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli army. What the ADL objected to and characterized as “misleading” was JR’s reference to “Israel’s founders having simply ‘invaded and settled Palestine in 1948;’ the use of inflammatory phrases such as ‘the Israeli Zionist government ... steal[ing] more and more of the Palestinians’ land;’ as well as direct comparisons to South Africa during the Apartheid era.” It is true that Israel did not invade and settle Palestine in 1948. The settlement of European Jews, what the indigenous Palestinian Arabs (and JR) correctly perceived as an “invasion,” began as a trickle in the latter part of the 19th century. When Lord Arthur Balfour, the foreign secretary of Great Britain, the reigning imperial power of the time, declared in 1917 that Palestine should become the national home of the Jewish people, the influx gathered steam and gained the support of the Western powers. That a minister of one country awarded the land of another to a third has never troubled many who oppose the abuses of imperialism, but make an exception when Israel is concerned. What did happen in 1948 was the establishment of Israel and with it the destruction and theft of 382 Palestinian villages and the expulsion of their estimated 750,000 inhabitants who have never been allowed to return despite UN Resolution 194 guaranteeing them the right to do so. The 150,000 Palestinians who remained were held under military law in 1966 and to this day, as non-Jews, are restricted from owning or leasing property within 93.7 percent of Israel’s 1967 borders. The “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians from their land has never ceased, nor has Israel’s expropriation of what remains, as attested to by Israel’s ongoing construction of the 25-foot high “apartheid wall” through sections of the West Bank that has received international condemnation and whose legality is soon to be reviewed by the World Court in the Hague. When it objects to comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa, particularly when it does so in San Francisco, the ADL is treading on dangerous ground. It was 10 years ago this month that an embarrassed SFPD revealed that one of its officers, Tom Gerard, working together with Roy Bullock, a long-time undercover agent for the ADL, had been spying on the African National Congress, Black South African exiles, and the anti-apartheid movement, for South African intelligence. Since Bullock had been spying on the apartheid movement for the ADL, as he told SFPD Inspector Ron Roth, doing the same for the South Africans meant little extra work, since much of the information the South Africans wanted he and the ADL already possessed. As would be expected, the pair were already spying on Palestinian and Arab groups and individuals. But what was revealed in the more than 700 pages of documents released by District Attorney Arlo Smith was that the ADL was keeping files on more than 10,000 individuals* and 600 political groups that ranged across the political and racial spectrum - from the NAACP to the Asian Law Caucus to the San Francisco Labor Council - and that similar operations were being conducted by ADL agents across the United States, making the ADL probably the largest private intelligence gathering operation in the country. At the time, Bullock had been paid through a cut-out, a Beverly Hills lawyer, who would send him a check every week. The ADL’s response to the “revelation” that their agent was moonlighting for the South Africans was to put him directly on its payroll. At the time, Israel was a close ally of the apartheid regime, selling it weapons, tear gas, water cannons and high tech electronic equipment, and jointly developing atomic weapons, in violation of the international sanctions then in effect. As they were then and remain today, the ADL’s policies are indistinguishable from those of the Israeli government. When questioned in May 1993 about his organization’s spying on the ANC and the apartheid movement, the ADL’s long-time national director, Abe Foxman, was unapologetic. “People are very upset about (the files) on the ANC,” he told the Jewish Bulletin. “At the time we exposed the ANC, they were communist. They were violent, they were anti-Semitic, they were pro-PLO, and they were anti-Israel. You’re going to tell me I don’t have the legitimacy to find out who they were consorting with, who their buddies are, who supports whom?” Comparisons between Israel and South Africa are not new and have been made by critics of both regimes, including Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. In 1987, Israeli Uri Davis wrote “Israel: An Apartheid State,” and, more recently, Israeli Professor Tanya Reinhart of Tel Aviv University wrote: “By July, 2002 … Israel’s ‘separation’ can no longer be compared with the apartheid of South Africa. As Ronnie Kastrils, South Africa’s minister of water affairs, said in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, ‘The South African apartheid regime never engaged in the sort of oppression Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians. For all the evils and atrocities of apartheid, the government never sent tanks into Black towns. It never used gunships, bombers, or missiles against the Black towns or Bantustans. The apartheid regime used to impose sieges on Black towns, but these sieges were lifted within days.’ Nor, we may add, had South Africa applied a systematic policy of bringing the Black population to starvation. What we are witnessing in the occupied territories — Israel’s penal colonies - is the invisible daily killing of the sick and wounded who are deprived of medical care, of the weak who cannot survive in the new poverty conditions, and of those who are approaching starvation” (“Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948,” Seven Stories Press, 2002). There is much more to this story that the ADL does not want us to know, so it will be continued."