https://archive.md/d09D8

In 1993 I received a letter in the mail. It informed me that I was the victim of an illegal spy ring involving members of the ADL and a San Francisco Police Department intelligence detective called Tom Gerard. The letter came with an index card that included my full name, driver’s license, the license-plate number on my shitty old Subaru hatchback, and the Mission District addresses of my apartment and the leftie bookstore where I worked, near Guerrero and 20th Street. My file had been marked “Pinko,” one of five categories that the ADL spymaster used to flag the group’s targets.

But I was not alone. Police had seized thousands of index cards like mine in raids on the ADL’s San Francisco office, and in searches of the homes and storage facilities of the organization’s key figures. According to newspaper reports of the time, 12,000 Americans and 950 groups were victims of the now-forgotten scandal.

The ADL did not restrict its harassment of Arab-Americans to surveillance of the ADC. At least one Arab-American activist on whom the ADL kept a secret file, Mohammed Jarad, wound up arrested on a visit to the occupied territories. Jarad was subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, forced to sign a confession written in Hebrew, and released without charge after six months, and allowed to return home to America. U.S. officials at the time expressed serious doubts about Jarad’s signed confession.

The ADL spy ring also helped trigger the 1987 arrests of eight Los Angeles Muslims—seven Palestinian men and one Kenyan woman—who were falsely accused of supporting terrorism and ordered expelled from the United States. SWAT teams broke into the defendants’ homes, detained them without charge or trial, and subjected the group, known as the “Los Angeles Eight,” to an ordeal that only ended in 2007, when a Los Angeles judge finally dismissed all charges and denounced the case as “a festering wound on the body of respondents and an embarrassment to the rule of law.”

Expecting to find proof of spying in San Francisco, and possibly Los Angeles, the FBI learned that the ADL was running a covert spy network in cities across the country, and that in each spy ring hub, they had local police officers doubling as ADL moles.

I was in no condition to see that spy scandal for what it was: raw, unvarnished Israel-advocacy politics—an early preview of the sort of cynicism, paranoia and right-wing extremism we’ve come to expect from pro-Israel groups. When Israel took the occupied territories in 1967 and imposed Jewish-supremacist rule over the native Arab majority, that was it. Israel, Zionists, and their supporters crossed over to the dark side.