American Library Association Buries Israel Censorship Issue

By Adam L. Chandler

A four-year battle within the 56,000-member American Library Association (ALA), in which B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League took a leading role in activating thousands of Jewish librarians to attend conventions and revoke a resolution condemning Israeli censorship of Palestinian libraries, appears to have ended at this year's annual conference in Miami.

The ALA's Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) Action Council voted 17 to 1, with 1 abstention, in a 30-minute closed meeting, to abolish the Israeli Censorship and Palestinian Libraries Task Force (ICPLTF), and to prevent Action Council member David Williams from serving out his three-year term. The vote at the June 24-29 ALA conference followed accusations that the Chicago librarian used the organization as a platform for "anti-Semitism" and harassment of other Action Council members.

Williams was purged through the passage of two resolutions. The first, titled "A Resolution on the Restatement of Certain Ideals of ALA's Social Responsibilities Round Table," may be applied to any Action Council member. The second, "A Resolution on David Langlois Williams and his Position Within the Social Responsibilities Round Table of ALA" specifically calls for the abolition of the ICPLTF, which Williams chaired.

Officially, the ALA has an open meetings policy. The reason given for the closed session was the personal nature of the charges. The resulting decision transferred the issue of intellectual freedom and Israeli censorship of information from or about Palestinians to another SRRT committee.

The Social Responsibilities Round Table was created in the late 1960s to move progressive concerns onto the ALA's agenda. Although it is one of many ALA units, few have engendered such acrimonious debates among members as has the SRRT. In recent years, SRRT has been criticized by conservative ALA members for such actions as organizing the cancellation of ALA conferences in cities that pass homophobic legislation.

However, the level of controversy over the Israeli censorship issue was unprecedented. It became the catalyst for a movement to centralize control by the ALA Council over all positions taken by the Association and its affiliated committees.

The votes during the ALA's Miami convention resulted largely from pressure placed on the ALA over several years by pro-Israel activists both inside and outside the organization. While members of the SRRT Action Council said it was Williams' uncompromising insistence on advancing his position that brought about the decision to abolish the task force he chaired, Williams saw it as a case of "blaming the victim."

"Blaming the Victim"

Williams first forced the issue of Palestinian intellectual freedom onto the ALA's agenda in 1990, when he was attacked by members of the Chicago Jewish community, including B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League, over a bibliography he had compiled for the Chicago Public Library about the Arab-Israeli conflict.¹

At the ALA's June 1992 convention in San Francisco, after receiving extensive documentation (including Information Freedom and Censorship: World Report 1991, co-published by the Article 19 organization and the American Library Association) detailing the existence of censorship and other human rights violations in the Israeli-occupied territories, the ALA Council took a stand. It adopted a resolution that "calls upon the government of Israel to end all censorship and human rights violations in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza, and in Israel itself; encourages the Israeli and Palestinian peoples in the quest for a peaceful and just solution of their conflict; and encourages ALA members to develop ways to support librarians, journalists, educators and others working for peace, human rights and freedom of information and expression in the Middle East." The ALA resolution also noted the "special relationship" between the U.S. and Israel "as the recipient of the largest amounts of annual U.S. aid per capita."

During that conference, one SRRT meeting was nearly canceled when hecklers tried to shout down Michal Schwartz, an Israeli journalist and peace activist who sought to describe her own experiences with Israeli censorship, and her arrest by Israeli authorities. At the same meeting, fire alarms were set off, apparently to prevent panel members from presenting the issue to the ALA membership. A second resolution also was passed at the San Francisco meeting protesting the then threatened expulsion of Omar al-Safi, a Palestinian librarian living in the West Bank.

At that 1992 conference, however, during one of the SRRT meetings, a difference between two proponents of the anti-censorship resolution led to problems within the Social Responsibilities Round Table itself, and perhaps planted the seeds for this year's purge. Williams challenged a phrase in the proposed ALA resolution's preamble: "Whereas Israel considers itself to be a democracy established with the express purpose of creating a safe haven for the Jewish people." Williams questioned the use of "the" in the phrase "the Jewish people," calling it a capitulation to Zionism—in that it refers to the Jewish people of the world as one nation.

Sanford Berman, an activist Minnesota librarian, questioned Williams' motivation. Williams says he attempted to pursue a dialogue with Berman on the disagreement over the following two years, but the Minnesota librarian declined to discuss the matter with him.

The ALA had passed resolutions condemning violations in other countries.

Proponents of the 1992 resolution pointed out that the ALA, the world's oldest library organization, established in 1876, had passed resolutions condemning violations in South Africa, China, the former Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, among others, but none had created as much controversy as the resolution involving Israel. Opponents of the resolutions said it was diverting too much attention from more pertinent library issues.

Williams contended the reason the issue was consuming so much of the organization's time was due to unremitting opposition it engendered. He cited, for example, what he called an attempt by one ALA member to bury the issue in 1990. At that time an ad hoc ALA committee was established to study the documentation on Israeli human rights violations. The self-appointed chair of the committee declared that the documentation was too biased, and that the uniqueness of Israel had not been taken into account.

At the 1991 convention the ALA Council deleted the term "occupied territories" from an SRRT written resolution because an ALA Council member believed such terminology constituted "Israel bashing."

After the resolution was passed in San Francisco, a campaign was mounted to persuade the ALA to correct its "mistake." At the ALA's Denver conference in January of 1993, members of the Anti-Defamation League who arrived to persuade the ALA to rescind its resolution were given ALA membership badges.

"ADL representatives arranged with the ALA Executive Office to have the customary guest registration fee waived, and were outfitted with membership tags instead of guest convention badges," Williams recalls. Surveillance and intimidation by the ADL members included writing down the names of participants in meetings pertaining to the Israeli censorship issue. As SRRT coordinator Stephen Stillwell described one such incident, "An ALA member, who identified himself as a member of the Anti-Defamation League, took hold of my convention badge, pinned to my sport coat, so that he might copy my name and affiliation down correctly, an action which I found rather threatening."

The ADL campaign against the resolution and its proponents took place at a time when its long-time spying operation, which included compiling files on persons who attended political meetings the ADL deemed hostile to Israel, was revealed through a San Francisco police investigation.

Another intimidation tactic the pro-Israel lobby used was a threat to mobilize a nationwide campaign against public library funding sources if the ALA continued to "target" Israel. The campaign began with a 450-word letter sent to and published by numerous Jewish community weeklies around the country. It was signed "Concerned Jewish Taxpayer," "Jewish Taxpayer," "Anonymous Librarian," or "A Librarian Whose Job Would Be Jeopardized By Identification."

Whether or not this was the work of the ADL or another group or individual is unknown. As published in the May 27 Chicago Sentinel, the letter said in part, "If the ALA cares more about the welfare of libraries and librarians than about political posturing, it will not want to imperil its constituents' survival by antagonizing the taxpayers who support them."

For whatever reason, at its 1993 conference in New Orleans, the ALA Council, in an unprecedented action, revoked the 1992 resolution condemning Israeli censorship. The decision certainly was influenced by representatives sent to the convention by the ADL, Hadassah (a Zionist women's group), CAMERA (a Likud-oriented press monitoring organization) and the Jewish Federation.²

Even more astonishing was formation during that same conference of a special committee, comprising past ALA presidents, to investigate Williams. Fortunately for ALA's reputation, the committee was disbanded after one session of interrogating Williams and Stephen Stillwell when critics suggested the procedure recalled the McCarthyite search for communists in American universities in the 1950s.

A Challenge to Debate

Meanwhile, Williams had challenged the ADL to debate the issue. The ADL declined his invitation for a joint appearance at the New Orleans convention, saying it would not participate in an "anti-Israel forum." Instead, Williams was attacked for assembling "biased" presentations, and for straying during panel discussions from the issue of Israeli library censorship and suppression of intellectual freedom by bringing in such topics as the history of Israeli land confiscations.

Williams responded that there was no way of untangling the problems Palestinian libraries face from the larger context of the history of Israel. There is little doubt, however, that his insistence on launching a broad attack on Zionism contributed to the collapse during the 1993 conference of the coalition that had supported him.

"There was consensus that David had abused his position as Task Force chair," said Mark Rosenzweig, an ICPLTF member. "He organized programs that were inappropriate."

As an example, Rosenzweig cited an appearance in New Orleans by Jeffrey Blankfort, editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin, who spoke about the history of Zionism and role of the ADL in American politics during the 20th century.³ The sketch of Zionist history that Blankfort presented included the Zionist/Nazi collusion reported by scholars such as Lenni Brenner and Edwin Black as an example of history that has been suppressed in the U.S.

Rosenzweig complained that the structure of that history has been appropriated by neo-Nazis. He maintained that, in any case, it was outside the context of a discussion about intellectual freedom in the occupied territories.

Blankfort disagreed, saying that the theme of his talk was how Israeli censorship in the occupied territories has spread into the U.S., using proxies like the ADL to stifle free expression in organizations like the ALA. "There has existed for many years, across virtually the entire American Jewish political spectrum, a 'circle the wagons' mentality that measures the reporting of history, or news events in general, by a single standard: whether or not 'it is good for the Jews,'" Blankfort said. Using such criteria, the telling of some of the ugly truths about Jewish history is considered dangerous because of the possibility that it will be used by anti-Semites to promote Holocaust revisionism and denial.

"This, on the face of it, is patent nonsense," Blankfort said. "If Jews collaborated with the Nazis, whether it was from opportunism, to save Jewish lives or simply out of fear, it might provide a more nuanced understanding of how the Holocaust was carried out, but it would hardly disprove it."

A Coalition Divided

After its 1993 defeat at New Orleans, the coalition of progressive librarians that originally worked to pass the resolution condemning Israeli censorship was divided. On one side stood those who believed there was little else that could be done within the ALA. On the other side stood Williams, frustrated by the refusal of his colleagues to agree that the ADL and other pro-Israel activists had succeeded in defining the parameters of acceptable speech within an organization premised on the defense of intellectual freedom.

SRRT members Mark Rosenzweig, Elaine Harger and Stephen Stillwell believed Williams did not understand the conservative nature of an organization such as the ALA—a conservatism, they said, that has nothing to do with the pro-Israel lobby. While they talked about starting over to build cooperation with other groups, Williams attributed the New Orleans resolution to the "consensus terrorism" of "hard-line Zionists."

In December 1993 Sanford Berman circulated a letter stating the case for disbanding the Israeli Censorship and Palestinian Libraries Task Force and reassembling it outside of the ALA without Williams. That letter, presented during the closed hearing in Miami, blamed "confrontational language" used by Williams for the success of opponents of the ALA condemnation of Israel in mobilizing "hundreds of Jewish librarians...from New York City and elsewhere to pack the annual membership meeting" in 1993.

Berman's letter enumerated other complaints against Williams and argued that since the PLO-Israel peace accords, there no longer was a need for the same level of attention on the issue within the community of progressive librarians. Berman charged that Williams' presence in SRRT damaged its credibility within the ALA.

The dispute within the SRRT became even more personal on May 25, 1994, when Williams angrily accused Mark Rosenzweig, who had lost his job two years earlier after he organized a panel discussion on Palestinian culture at the New York Public Library, of "treachery" and "completely caving in to the Zionist lobby."

In the weeks following Williams' verbal attack on him, Rosenzweig and two other librarians, Al Kagen and Sanford Berman, drafted a resolution titled, "Resolution on the Censure of David Williams and the Abolition of the SRRT Task Force on Israeli Censorship and Palestinian Libraries." That resolution, bluntly accusing Williams of making "anti-Semitic statements," was used as the basis for the two passed in Miami, abolishing the ICPLTF and banning Williams from holding a leadership position in SRRT for three years.

The complaints by the three librarians against Williams fell into two categories. He was accused of abusive language and tactics in advancing his views, making coalition-building impossible. He also was accused of continually referring to the presence of a powerful Zionist lobby and taking a highly critical view of Zionism rather than limiting the debate to a defense of Palestinian rights.

Whatever the merits of those complaints and of Williams' views, it is certain that without him the issue of Palestinian intellectual freedom would never have reached the ALA agenda, much less become the subject of an ALA resolution in 1992. In his zeal to defend the ALA condemnation of Israeli censorship, there seems little doubt that Williams alienated potential allies, and thus perhaps inadvertently helped pave the way for the unprecedented revocation of the resolution in 1993.

Unfortunately, this leaves the prestigious 56,000-member organization standing four-square in favor of Israeli censorship of information about the Palestinians, their history and their culture. Whether this embarrassing situation is reversed, or allowed to continue, now becomes the responsibility of those "progressive" librarians who decided in 1994 that they could best serve their goals without David Williams.

At stake is the right of American librarians and of librarians anywhere to present all sides of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute without fear of McCarthyite retribution from those who would suppress all but their own views. In 1993, under strong and confusing outside pressure, America's librarians renounced that right. The reality of 1994, it appears, is that they have given up the fight to regain it.

Notes:

¹ Robert I. Friedman, "The Jewish Thought Police: How the Anti-Defamation League Censors Books, Intimidates Librarians, and Spies on Citizens," Village Voice, 27 July 1993.

² Jeffrey Blankfort, "Anatomy of A Takeover: The Long Arm of Israeli Censorship Reaches Out to Silence the American Library Association," Middle East Labor Bulletin (fall 1993): 21-24.

³ Blankfort was one of the individuals who first investigated and reported on the ADL spy operation.

Adam L. Chandler is a graduate student in the school of Library and Information Science at Louisiana State University. He presently is working on a master's thesis about the ALA's resolution on Israeli censorship and human rights violations.