Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond the Walls — “Blowing the whistle on ADL spying for Israel in bed with apartheid South Africa against U.S. civil society” with Jeffrey Blankfort

Send us Fan Mail January 2026. We navigate a landscape where advocacy, social media, and surveillance blur into a digital haze. To face the mounting crisis, we must trace the analog patterns that first forged the cage. In July 2021, I spoke over the phone with Jeffrey Blankfort—a Jewish-American journalist whose memory as a veteran Palestinian solidarity activist is a breach in the static. Blankfort deconstructs the Anti-Defamation League—the ADL—looking past the shield of civil rights to find a critical node in a transnational espionage network. We return to his landmark exposure of an illegal surveillance web; a clandestine bridge built between the Israel lobby and apartheid South Africa to monitor the American pulse. In this era of state and non-state convergence, this 2021 archive serves as a sobering lens. To understand the future, we must study the shadow it has already cast. Beyond the walls of the narrative... here is Jeffrey Blankfort. ---------------------- In beginning to critically deconstruct the key role of the Anti Defamation League in the Israel Lobby, producer Jeremy Rothe-Kushel speaks with Jewish American Journalist & Pro-Palestinian activist Jeffrey Blankfort, about his work to expose the ADL and its collaborators for colluding with apartheid Israel and South Africa on espionage against civil society in the United States. https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/12/adl-spies/ https://www.foodnotbombs.net/adl_examiner.html https://www.wrmea.org/the-israel-lobby-is-it-good-for-the-us-is-it-good-for-israel-the-adl-covert-action-censure-and-courting-law-enforcement.html https://www.israellobby.org/ADL-CA/ https://www.irmep.org/ADLespionage.asp —— http://www.palestinechronicle.com/jeffrey-blankfort-breaking-the-silence-on-the-israel-lobby/ “Are there Israeli lobby gatekeepers and damage control squads on the left?” https://www.natsummit.org/transcripts/jeffrey_blankfort.htm “Jeffrey Blankfort: Chomsky Misfires on U.S.-Israel Relations” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T33IdUl1S8 —– https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Jeffrey_Blankfort http://www.jeffblankfortphotography.com/contact.htm Jeff Blankfort is a radio producer, photographer & journalist of Jewish-American background, who has been a pro-Palestinian human rights activist since 1970. He was formerly the editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin and co-founder of the Labor Committee of the Middle East. He was also a founding member of the November 29 Coalition on Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Committee. He won a settlement from the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in February 2002 for its vast illegal spying against him, as well as hundreds of other progressive social, political, labor and environmental organizations and thousands of individuals (including anti-Apartheid groups/activists). Blankfort‘s articles have appeared in CounterPunch, Dissident Voice & Mondoweiss, among many others.