The American Victims of 10/07 — with Jonathan Greenblatt
On October 7th, Hamas slaughtered, brutalized, wounded, and kidnapped numerous U.S. citizens. We think of 10/07 as a singular Israeli experience. But it was not. Americans were attacked too. There are even 8 U.S. citizens still being held hostage today by Hamas.
It’s not clear what the U.S. Government is doing for these American victims and their families. What recourse do our fellow citizens have? Well, here’s one: the Anti-Defamation League has filed a lawsuit on behalf of more than 125 US citizens and their families who were killed or wounded in the kibbutzim in southern Israel and at the Nova music festival. The lawsuit accuses Iran, Syria and North Korea of providing material support to Hamas. The lawsuit lays out publicly available evidence of training, weapons and financial support from Iran; training and financing from Syria; and weapons and tunnel-digging assistance from North Korea. But where can this lawsuit actually go - what could it achieve?
This is the focus of my conversation with Jonathan Greenblatt, who has been the CEO of the ADL since 2015. Prior to joining the ADL, he was a senior official in the Obama White House, and has had a long career in business and the non-profit sector before he joined the Obama administration.
To learn more about the Anti-Defamation League, visit: https://www.adl.org/
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
JG: People ask me, what's today's date? I say it's October the 8th. I mean, today, as your listeners are hearing this conversation, it is still October the 8th. We are still living in a world that has been permanently shifted. In a state of being permanently unmoored by what happened the day before on 10/7. And I say that because for us at ADL, we had to look at each other and say, everything's different now. If we keep doing the same old stuff, Dan, we're never not only going to solve antisemitism, we're not going to effectively save Jewish lives.
DS: It's 11:30 PM on Tuesday, July 9th here in London. It's 6:30 PM on July 9th. in New York City. It's 1:30 AM on Wednesday, July 10th in Israel. On October 7th, Hamas slaughtered, brutalized, wounded, and kidnapped numerous U.S. citizens. We think of October 7th as a singular Israeli experience, but it was not. Americans were attacked too. In fact, there are even eight U.S. citizens still being held hostage today by Hamas. It's not clear what the U.S. government is actually doing for these American victims and their families. What recourse do our fellow citizens have? Well, here's one. The Anti Defamation League has filed a lawsuit on behalf of more than 125 U.S. citizens and their families who were killed or wounded in the kibbutzim in southern Israel and at the Nova Music Festival. The lawsuit accuses the governments of Iran, Syria, and North Korea of providing material support to Hamas. The lawsuit lays out publicly available evidence of training, weapons, and financial support from Iran, training and financing from Syria, and weapons and tunnel digging assistance from North Korea. But where can this lawsuit actually go and what could it achieve? Well, this is the focus of my conversation today with Jonathan Greenblatt, who has been the CEO of the Anti Defamation League since 2015. Prior to joining the ADL, he was a senior official in the Obama White House. And Jonathan has a long career in business and the nonprofit sector that predates his joining the Obama administration. In our conversation, we begin by discussing how the days after October 7th unfolded for Jonathan in the ADL and how he discovered that this new wave of antisemitism in the U.S., especially how it was expressed and how well it was organized in the U. S., was a shock even to him as he saw it from his perspective at the ADL. Jonathan Greenblatt on the American Victims of October 7th. This is Call Me Back.
And I am pleased to welcome to this podcast for the first time, my longtime friend, Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League. Jon, thanks for being here.
JG: Thank you for having me, Dan.
DS: I want to start by asking you a question that I typically ask guests who are on for the first time. But I especially want to ask you this question, because I've seen you a number of times since October 7th, but of all the guests I've had on this podcast since October 7th, you have a unique perch, which is you spend most of your time, professionally, thinking about, observing, trying to make sense of, and fighting back at antisemitism. And with that perch in mind and the rise of antisemitism, I want to ask the question that I ask a lot of folks, which is, where were you on October 7th? And, just as events were unfolding, what were you thinking? Like, how were you processing this as it was literally exploding?
JG: Well, so as you and your listeners undoubtedly remember, October the 7th was a Saturday.
So I had Shabbat dinner with my family on Friday night, and it was sort of an auspicious dinner because my wife and I, and one of my kids were planning to fly out to Israel on the night of October the 7th, after Shabbat.
DS: Wow.
JG: We had the tickets. Our bags were packed. That was the plan. And then, around 3 in the morning, maybe? My phone rang. Which is pretty unusual.
DS: 3 in the morning, the morning of October 7th. So like, the middle of the night, basically. The 6th into the 7th.
JG: That's right. So again, we do Shabbat, and I don't do anything work wise, but I don't turn off my phone per se. So my phone rang, very unusual at 3 in the morning. So I answered the phone, and it was the head of my Jerusalem office. So she called and she said, ‘Jonathan, I'm in my safe room. There are missiles falling all over Israel. I don't know what's happening. I don't think you should come.’ And I said, ‘Okay, Carol, I appreciate you calling me. Please focus on your family. Don't worry about me and my flight. I'll figure it out.’ So I hung up with Carol. And then I turned on CNN and there was nothing. And I opened up Twitter, my Twitter, and there was at that point nothing. But it became clear that as something happened, you know, we needed to mobilize. So, I was on the phone with my chief of staff, and our organization does what we do. We pivoted. People were immediately sort of at their battle stations, and I was in the office probably by 9:00 AM that day. And it's been a roller coaster ever since.
DS: Okay. So, at some point, I mean, you and I, and many others who follow events in Israel closely, are familiar with fire, counter fire, from Gaza to Israel. This is, you know, late 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, May of ‘21, summer of ‘22, I mean, every couple years. Obviously the summer of 2014, which was the Long War. But there's these volleys that go back and forth, and I hate to say what I'm about to say, but I'm gonna say it, they have all had a familiarity to them. And then there was October 7th, which at some point, I think we all realized was something much different. This just wasn't a military skirmish that was going to end in some temporary ceasefire. This was, I don't know what, a full on massacre that almost like from the Middle Ages or something that approximated Pogroms or the Shoah. It was a war that was like a real war, not just firing a few rockets. It was something else. And again, you're the CEO of the ADL. You study, follow, chronicle acts - major acts of antisemitism. At what point did you, like, when did you think, like, wait a minute, this is different?
JG: So then I was, I would say, probably around 8 or 9 AM, that Dan, I called Carol and said, ‘what is happening?’ And she was hysterical on the phone that her sister and their family were in their safe room in one of the kibbutzim, I think it was Be'eri, holding the door shut. And there were terrorists in the kibbutzim. And the first thing, well, where's the IDF? How could they be in the kibbutzim in the first place? So that sounded confusing to me. And then something else happened. Around, I would say midday - again, now I am in the office. Most of my staff is in the office. Keep in mind that at ADL, we have analysts who monitor extremists. And so they monitor the public web like X or Facebook or Instagram, but they're also monitoring the private web. So we are in discord and Reddit sub subreddits and discord chats and whatnot. Even in Telegram and Signal and whatnot, monitoring what extremist groups are doing. Now when I say extremist groups, I'm talking about right wing extremists, like white supremacists, armed militia types, QAnon enthusiasts. But also, left wing extremists like anti capitalists and neo Marxists and sort of Islamist extremist groups. And I would put into that kind of more morass groups like SJP and the other pro Hamas groups who are now sort of part of the vernacular. We've been tracking them for a long time. And so we were seeing a lot of celebration in those channels, in those private chats on Saturday morning, in ways that were quite stunning. Sort of ebullience, joy. Like really - again, it was such a discombobulating moment, but the thing that really stands out to me was around noon, the Black Lives Matter chapter from Chicago tweeted out publicly the hang glider emojis. And that's when we were like, whoa.
DS: Okay. So Jon, just for listeners who may not remember, can you describe, so A, what the significance of the hand gliders was, and that specific thing with the BLM Chicago chapter posting the image.
JG: So to go back to that day, Hamas terrorists invaded Southern Israel in multiple ways. They drove in in vehicles, basically and drove through weak points in the fence. And that was preceded by drone attacks on IDF monitoring stations along that Southern border. And they also came across the Southern border on hang gliders. And specifically the Nova attack was perpetrated, at least the initial, initial first wave of it by Hamas terrorists who crossed the border on hang gliders carrying automatic weapons who descended upon these concert goers and proceeded to shoot many of them, rape many of them, mutilate many of them and so on. So what's notable about this, Dan, is we were literally trying to make sense of what was happening, and I say happening because it was happening in that moment, and so there were reports of hang gliders being used to invade the country. It wasn't even clear like who and how and what, but in that moment, the BLM chapter in Chicago tweeted out - I don't remember what the words were, but what really struck me was the hang glider emoji. I say that because it was clear this was an act of war. It was clear this was an act of terrorists murdering, butchering civilians. And it was clear that the BLM chapter understood those dynamics and still was lauding the paraglider, the hang glider, and, you know, look, I'll be very honest. We've had problems with Black Lives Matter for a long time. These different BLM chapters, some of them have been horrible and virulently antisemitic, so that in of itself wasn't new, but what was new was this thing happening in the Middle East. This thing happening in Southern Israel, being lauded by a group in the United States that had nothing to do with the Middle East. You know, I mean, there have been apologists for Hamas. There have been apologists for Islamist terror for a long time in certain quarters of this country. But to see this BLM chapter, what's in theory is focused on things like, you know, police reform and economic justice and social equality, lauding what was clearly a terrorist act. It was quite gutting.
DS: And it's not like BLM, not only have they been focused on a narrow set of domestic issues, it's not like they had been involved in other foreign policy issues, and then this was just added to the list. Suddenly, they're involved with all these domestic issues, and Israel.
JG: Yeah, I mean, look, in 2016, the Movement for Black Lives, which is sort of an amalgam of multiple BLM related organizations, they released a platform. It was in August of 2016 ahead of the election. And in that very large document, there was one section on foreign policy. And really Dan, the only foreign policy issue that was mentioned was Israel. And of course it said, ‘Israel is committing genocide. It's an apartheid state.’ So we called them out - whatever, eight some odd years ago, but they sort of learned from that. I mean, they were not actively engaged as far as we knew in much anti Israel activity, even if there was strains of it that were persistent. But to see them, on that morning, pushing this out… it was very sobering, and it made us realize this is not just a war over there, this is going to be a war over here as well.
DS: So, I'm with you with all of that, and I was observing a lot of what you're describing, but I still, in those early days, and this is my naivete. I still believed in those early days that given the barbarism and the just naked ghoulishness of the whole nature of the attack as it was being reported, I just naively assumed that the outrage of the world would be directed at those massacring Jews. And very quickly, I was shocked to see, not only was I shocked by the initial invasion and the massacre, but I was doubly shocked that the outrage of many around the world was being directed at Jews for objecting to being massacred. As I've spent more and more time having time to think about it, and study the history of anti semitism - like I said, it shouldn't be shocking. Because often the vilification of Jews follows massive violence against Jews. If you look at the history of antisemitism, it's not like there's this eruption of sympathy for Jews during periods of antisemitism in almost every century. There's the violence against Jews and it is followed by, in the interest of just simplifying it, you know, ‘they had it coming. They're responsible for this horror that's been unleashed on them.’ And then the case begins to be built on why, yes, it may have been awful. Yes. It may have been terrible. What was done, the nature of the attacks may have been unfathomable, but it's always the ‘yes, but,’ and the ‘but’ is somehow - as the Secretary General of the UN recently said, ‘the attacks of October 7th didn't happen in a vacuum.’ And the implication is, the Jews or Israel had some responsibility for what led to this, and then therefore, once you go down that path, it's like open season. And I was stunned by that, like the speed with which that happened. Again, I'm not the head of the ADL, you are. When were you processing that? When did you realize that this is a full on new wave of oldest hatred? As you said, not just in Israel, but all over the world.
JG: Well, I'll tell you a story, but before I do that, I'll just acknowledge - you know, I've been saying here at ADL for a long time, since I took this job, that anti Zionism is anti Semitism. I say it because it is. So, just to be crystal clear. Anti Zionism is a form of anti Semitism. It's a kind of delegitimization of Zionism, which I would characterize Zionism, Dan, not as a political project. Zionism is a Jewish value. Zionism is as essential to our tradition, as fundamental to our faith, as central to our identity as tikkun olam or anything else. There's a reason why every synagogue has an ark pointed toward Jerusalem. There's a reason why every siddur, on every page, in every synagogue, on the planet Earth - you can't turn the page without seeing words like Yerushalayim and Yisrael and Zion. Because, again, the notion of returning from exile is so essential to our peoplehood. All that being said, I've had many people tell me, ‘no, you don't understand, anti Zionism, it's complicated, it's nuanced.’ It isn't. Anti Zionism is a kind of effort to delegitimize our national aspiration, which needs to be seen, Dan, in the broader context of an age-old effort to delegitimize the Jewish people. Delegitimize our religion. ‘Judaism isn't a real faith.’ You know, ‘we missed the boat on Christianity or Islam.’ Delegitimize our ethnicity. ‘Jews aren't a real race, or they are a subhuman race.’ Delegitimize the Jewish state. ‘Israel isn't a real country.’ I mean, we need to understand this in the broad sweep of history. Anti Zionism is a villainous weapon that's being used against us right now. But it is simply a manifestation of a very long effort that's been going on for thousands of years to, again, dehumanize and to delegitimize our people. With that being said, I think when you render Zionists as evil, as fascists, as Nazis, as this, as that, you objectify them, then that's how these kinds of things happen. Because the Jewish elderly mother, the Jewish child, the Jewish infant, the Jewish baby fetus in the womb of the mother isn't human. They're a Zionist. And the Nazis did this with great efficiency in the 30s and 40s, and Hamas with far less efficiency did it, you know, in 2023. Again, if you remove the humanity from Zionists, you can do very inhumane things to them. So I just want to lay that out. But then, when did I know, when did we know? I'll tell you a story. So we were mobilized that weekend on October the 7th, on October the 8th. And on Sunday, October the 8th, I got a call from the head of our center on extremism. You know, ADL has a center and we have dozens and dozens of analysts who are tracking, as I was alluding to before, you know, different extremist groups, different movements, etc. And he said, ‘Hey, I want you to come down to my office to see something.’ So I walked down to his office again. And he was here on a Sunday afternoon. And he proceeded to say, ‘you need to see what one of our people, you know, it's just shared with them in an SJP chat room, and in a students for justice in Palestine chat room.’ On October the eighth, some person in the chat room, an SJP national person, shared an organizing toolkit, along with discussion guides, plural, along with talking points, for the act of heroic resistance that had happened the day before. So literally, I mean, we were still trying to make sense of who is alive, what just happened, how did it happen, where was the IDF? We were trying to understand, make sense of the moment. And SJP had already prepared materials, and there were consequential things in those materials. And that was why he said, ‘you really need to see this.’ Because for example, in SJP materials before October the 7th, they often refer to Israel as Israel, which makes sense because that's the name of the country. In the materials that they generated and circulated on October the 8th, Israel was only referred to as, quote, ‘the Zionist entity’. You know, look, Dan, you're an expert in this. You've been tracking this issue far deeper than most. And I know many in your audience also are very familiar, but to the person who's not familiar, they might not realize that that in and of itself is a significant departure. So the Zionist entity is straight out of - not just the Hamas kind of charter, like the Iranian playbook, like the ‘Zionist entity’, his language, archaic language that again, only Islamists use now to refer to Israel. Saudi, UAE, post Abraham accords. I mean, people don't use this language anymore. So that was a bit of a tell. And on top of that, the materials talked about the Kibbutzim that they attacked. Again, we were still trying to sort out what had happened, and yet they referred to the Kibbutzim as something like ‘armed settler enclaves’, or some crazy, like, construction that was entirely inappropriate to contextualize towns within the Green Line that they attacked. Not that I would ever justify that anywhere, but it's the kind of language that typically, like again, Hamas or PFLP would use to refer to settlements in like the deepest of the West Bank, not, you know, Kfar Azza. I mean, it was extraordinary. And so those two things really were indicators to us that something was different here, how they were able to pull this together. Again, I mean, less than 48 hours after the attack had begun was stunning and shocking, but the language they used suggested a degree of intensification. And by the way, the language about apartheid, the, I think the language about genocide, it was all in there. And so what I think what we knew in that moment, Dan, was something was different and I immediately went to law enforcement officials with this that week, that week. And by the way, the other thing that happened on that Sunday, as you might recall, is Ismail Haniyeh, you know, from his like, you know, mansion in Qatar and Doha.
DS: He's the head of the, sort of one of the heads of the international wing of Hamas.
JG: He talked about a global day of jihad that he had, he was calling for that Thursday.
DS: Yeah.
JG: Which would have been like the 12th, maybe.
DS: Yeah. 11th or 12th. Yeah.
JG: So immediately on the basis of these materials and on the basis of that call out, I was, on the phone with the highest level law enforcement officials in the United States. And my offices, our 25 offices around the country begin immediately liaising with local law enforcement officials to say, ‘this is different. This is more than alarming. This is like a five alarm fire and we need to mobilize right now.’
DS: Okay. So something else that was different, three big topics are one, the denialism. Which is the number of average people, the number of students and student leaders on college campuses, the number of political, high profile political leaders, the number of people in the media, and we can go on and on, who want to deny basic facts that have been reported, validated, well sourced, well documented, in some cases documented by Hamas through their GoPro camera footage. There's an effort to deny what had happened on October 7th. A. B, another new phenomenon was the number of American citizens that had been slaughtered or taken hostage or both in this attack. And the involvement of, while the press coverage would lead you to believe this was just a kind of, Hamas was this sort of ragtag militia of resistance, sovereign governments were likely somehow involved. And those are three issues that you are tackling in many fora, but especially through a lawsuit that you filed with others. And I want to spend some time talking about that. So the first basic question is, what is this lawsuit? And then I want to get into how it came about, but can you just describe what is this thing?
JG: So we filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington, DC. ADL filed it with Kroll and Mooring LLP, which is a global law firm, and it's a federal lawsuit against the Islamic Republic of Iran, Syria, and North Korea on behalf of over a hundred plaintiffs, all of whom are Americans, who were impacted on October the 7th. So we filed this case, Dan, because we want to substantiate with clear and convincing evidence about the role that Iran has played and the others providing material support to Hamas, enabling them to commit these atrocities in the first place.
DS: Okay. So as a technical point, and then I want to get into how this thing came about, just for everyone to level set here. So suing a foreign government, a sovereign government, for the harm and destruction and deaths that American citizens were subjected to. How does that work? Like, do you really think Iran is going to go to court, defend itself, and if it loses, compensate these victims? Like, just explain how this kind of litigation works.
JG: Wouldn't that be so amazing?
DS: Yeah, it would but -
JG: I would love nothing more than to be in the court like Law and Order, you know, with Khamenei at the defendants table. I just love that.
DS: Bashar Assad sitting there, you know.
JG: That's like Law and Order.
DS: We can fantasize.
JG: Law and Order Iran edition. I'll talk to Dick Wolf about that. No, so look, in 1976, Congress passed the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which holds sovereign countries immune from litigation, with the exception of state sponsors of terror. So it gave Americans the ability and held those state sponsors of terror liable for judgments against Americans who are harmed in terror related activity caused by, supported by, those countries. And there is a fund, the US victims of state sponsored terrorism fund, that is funded, enabled, if you will, by assets, frozen assets of those state sponsors of terror. So no taxpayer dollars involved. But Kim Jong Un and Bashar Assad and Khamenei and his kind of, you know, mafia in Tehran, they have assets that are frozen and held here in the West. And those dollars, those resources, can be accessed to the extent that in an American court of law, the state sponsor of terror is filed suit against and they are found guilty. And so that's how this works. And it's not the first time it's happened. In fact, Kroll, the law firm that we're working with, has successfully won a number of judgments against countries who've been involved in terror related activities, including Iran in the past.
DS: The compensation is obviously important given what these people have been through.
JG: Yes.
DS: At the same point, the unlikelihood of these foreign governments cooperating is a reality, but the court process has the effect of establishing certain facts that you want to establish.
JG: Exactly.
DS: So can you tell me now, take us back to when you guys came up with this, wait a minute, we need to find a vehicle to establish basic facts. There are basic facts that are eluding, that are escaping the public conversation and the recording of the record, if you will, of what happened. on October 7th. At what point did someone, did this whole thing come about for this purpose? To establish the facts and, and document this chronology, this narrative, this series of events?
JG: Look. We again, as I was alluding to earlier, we track extremist groups. We have seen the Islamic Republic of Iran. I've certainly seen it since I've been in this job, how their export, if you will, of anti Semitism and hate is, I would argue it's more significant than their oil exports. It's more significant than the rugs. Anti Semitism is their number one export. They are the largest state sponsor of terror in the world. And we've seen these links in the past, but we felt it was crucial that we don't live in some sort of post fact world that we use the courts to create a record, a fact base that substantiates the role that Iran has played in providing material support to Hamas that allowed them to reach this point and commit these horrible acts. So, admittedly, Dan, we have been leaning into litigation much more aggressively since 10/7. And, I would just say, on 10/7, you know, people ask me what's today's date. I say it's October the 8th. I mean, today, as your listeners are hearing this conversation, it is still October the 8th. We are still living in a world that has been permanently shifted, in a state of being permanently unmoored by what happened the day before on 10/7. And I say that because for us at ADL, we had to look at each other and say, everything's different now. If we keep doing the same old stuff, Dan, we're never not only going to solve anti Semitism, we're not going to effectively save Jewish lives. I feel like we're at a hinge of history. And it's incumbent upon us to be more, not just aggressive, more creative, more imaginative, take risks to respond to this moment. And so we have aggressively been leaning into litigation. We have filed lawsuits in courts against universities on a Title VI basis. By the way, against a few K-2 school districts, again, for how they've failed to appropriately address antisemitism, therefore violating the civil rights of their Jewish and Israeli students and families, we've been more aggressive about filing lawsuits against other extremist groups. And this seemed like an important point. I mean, the courts, I'd say, the courts historically have been our nation's backstop for justice and truth. The courts have played a role to mediate fact from fiction. So we have an aggressive legal team at ADL. I really credit our director of national litigation for having the idea, and we've done this in the past, you know, years ago, ADL and the SPLC successfully sued a group called the White Aryan Resistance for their role in murdering an Ethiopian immigrant. And we bankrupted what was the time, maybe the most prominent white supremacist group in the country. So we've been doing more of this. And, you know, James on the team thought, hey, this might be a play we can run that would have real, real consequence. And when he brought it to me, it was a no brainer. Because again, it is not a mystery, but what we saw in the moments after, as it was happening, Dan, as you've mentioned here, a kind of denialism settling in, denialism, ‘Oh, they, no women were raped.’ I mean, give me a break. Or ‘people weren’t really killed’ or ‘babies weren't really burned’ and so on and so forth. And it just became very obvious to us that this war is just a kinetic war happening on the battlefield. This is also sort of an information war and getting the information right, setting the record straight would be important for the history books.
DS: Okay, so I want to break each of these topics down that you address in the litigation. So I'm not going to do it in the order that you do it, but we'll hit all of them. One, American citizens. So describe that, the scale of it, a few examples maybe of American citizens that were victims. Just some details so people can understand what you're actually talking about here.
JG: So we have over a hundred plaintiffs. These are either American citizens themselves who were wounded or hurt, or the families of American victims who were killed. Profiles would be like an American who was living on the kibbutz, who had emigrated to Israel decades earlier.
DS: Who retained their U.S. citizenship.
JG: Who retained their U.S. citizenship.
DS: Still vote in the U.S., probably pay taxes in the U.S., still probably have family in the U.S., they're very tied to the U.S.
JG: I can think of one family. The mom was living on a kibbutz in Southern Israel, her son, who's an adult in his forties living in California was on the phone with his mom. He, he would call her every Shabbat. Remember this was the last day of Sukkot. So it's sort of festive while he was on the phone with his mother, terrorists burst into the kibbutz. His mother heard gunfire and screaming. He heard it while speaking to her on the phone. She started screaming because terrorists broke into her home, Dan, and then the phone went dead because she was shot and killed. While she had been on the phone with her son. Her son, his name is Nahar, he's one of our plaintiffs. So I think about Nahar being on the phone with his mom, listening to her, essentially while her life fell apart without any warning. While she literally has the experience of terrorists bursting into her home and killing her in cold blood. It's hard to imagine a more horrific experience than hearing your mother go through that.
DS: How many Americans?
JG: Over a hundred.
DS: Wow.
JG: So, more may actually join. I'll tell you when we started this, we only had a few. And then through word of mouth, more and more and more started reaching out to us and saying we want to be a part of this, not because they're looking for - again nothing will ever compensate them for what happened, but because they want justice for their sons, their daughters, for their mothers, for their fathers. I mean, the stories are just so horrible and hard to hear.
DS: Okay. So now I want to ask you about the role of sovereign governments. Again, people tend to think of Hamas as this grassroots, ragtag group of fighters or militants, as the press often refers to them. And you argue that it is a much bigger, more organized proxy for sovereign governments who were implicated. So can you just briefly go through the sovereigns and their roles?
JG: So there are three sovereign countries against whom we filed suit. Number one is the Islamic Republic of Iran. And I think to your point about Hamas, we need to understand Hamas, which is an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, it's essentially the Muslim Brotherhood chapter, you know, in the Palestinian territories and the Muslim Brotherhood is a Sunni extremist movement that believes in this notion of political Islam. Where it's a theocratic idea that if you will, the mosque and the state should be as one and the mosque should be sovereign over the apparatus of government and you should institute Sharia law. I mean, we've seen how well that's worked in, you know, the Islam, ISIS, caliphate in Syria and whatnot, but while they are a Sunni extremist movement, they are now, at this point, entirely a project of the Islamic Republic of Iran. So, the Iranian government has provided extensive material support to Hamas in terms of training, in terms of weapons, in terms of supplies, in terms of financing. I mean, for decades, Iran, we know, has been a sworn enemy of the United States and Israel. And we know, because they've been quite public about how they've committed, you know, to try to destroy, quote, ‘the great Satan and the little Satan’, again, America and Israel. And they've provided this material support. So there is an extensive body of evidence that we've accumulated. It is overwhelming, and I am excited to have the opportunity to present all of it in a court of law and to make clear, for the record, for history, about the relationship between this terror junta in Iran and the terror organization of Hamas. But I will just say, Dan, to your point, Hamas likes to posit itself as a resistance movement, likes to posit itself as some kind of ragtag bag of rebels. They're nothing like that. They are a project. A proxy specifically - that carries out the interests of the Iranian government. And I don't know that it was always like that. Like I think Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who founded it, had his own, again, he was a Sunni cleric. He had his own ambitions, but as they've been entirely shunned by the Sunni world, you know, they've with open arms been embraced by, elevated by, and empowered by Iran. They could not have carried out the attack on the 7th without Iran's support and sponsorship. Iran knew and intended that Hamas would use its support and its resources to carry out attacks such as what happened on October the 7th.
DS: And Jon, what's Syria's role in all of this?
JG: The reason why we included Syria in the lawsuit that we filed, I mean, first of all, you know, prior to 10/7 Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who talked about it, stated publicly that Hamas’ long range rocket arsenal came from abroad. He's on the record saying it came from Iran, Syria and others. So he had said that, but there are decades of Syria openly providing financial, logistical, military support and providing resources, including specifically before 10/7 to Hamas. We know that they materially facilitated Hamas preparation and execution for the attack. And the day of the attack, the Assad regime praised it. They issued a statement actually using the name, the code name of the terrorist operation. They called it quote, ‘Operation Al Aqsa flood’. And they said something like ‘Syria raises its head high in honor of the martyrs of the Palestinian revolution and the heroes who planned and achieved the Al Aqsa flood operation. And we affirm our standing by the Palestinian people and their fighting forces against terrorism, the Zionist methodology.’ So Syria explicitly praised it, but more significantly, they had provided material support, like rockets, like logistics, like training, et cetera, for a long time, even before 10/7 happened.
DS: North Korea, explain North Korea's role.
JG: A couple things. So number one, North Korea has long been providing arms, training, and other forms of assistance to Palestinian terror organizations. By the way, I should say to Iranian proxy organizations, because they also support Hezbollah as well as Hamas. We know that North Korea provided many of the capabilities that Hamas have used over the years to carry out attacks, including 10/7. We know that North Korea has helped Hamas to build the tunnel network that it used to carry out the attack, that it has continued to use to hold onto the hostages, let alone to store material, let alone to esconce the Hamas leadership. We know that the Hamas terrorists who committed the attack used hundreds, if not more, of North Korean supplied weapons. There's an open record of this. I mean, many such weapons were found on or left behind by the terrorists in Israel, and they were bearing unique North Korean military markings, demonstrating where they were sourced from. Hamas has never tried to conceal this weaponry. So, although I will tell you, Dan, I don't think it has been proven explicitly publicly. And we know that Kim Jong Un and the North Korean leadership shun attention. But the reality is they have worked for years in close coordination with Hamas. And through this lawsuit, we will establish that again for the historical record. So training, tunnels and weapons, training tunnels and weapons. That's the North Korean contribution to 10/7.
DS: So at first when I would see all these protests against Israel, against Jews, after October 7th, in the U.S., in Canada, in the U.K., in Australia, all over the place. I thought to myself, ok, these idiots, they just don't know who Hamas’ allies are in the world. You are going to establish who their allies are, and their backers, and their sponsors, and all the rest. But what I'm seeing now is, among a lot of the protests, is, No, they're openly embracing Yahya Sinwar, they're holding photos of him, in support of him. They're praising Hamas. They are praising the Houthis. They are praising Hezbollah. So on the one hand, I think it's important to establish who was behind October 7th, who was involved with October 7th. On the other hand, just again, perch at ADL tracking the vitriol around Israel and the Jewish people. Are you surprised about that? This open embrace of these undeniable, seemingly undeniable to me, terrorists?
JG: Well, you know, I would say that these groups, like SJP comes to mind, like Jewish Voices for Peace, which is a prominent anti Zionist group, comes to mind. Within Our Lifetime, the New York based groups come to mind. Palestine Action comes to mind. Salmadun comes to mind. Some of the more prominent players in this movement have always been contemptible, have always fetishized terrorists, have always kind of celebrated massacres, and they've never been very concerned with facts. I mean, they fictionalize Israeli ‘war crimes’, quote, unquote, they slander Israelis and Jews. And again, the whole anti Zionist ethos is one of dehumanizing the other side. So I am not surprised to see that they are devoid of any moral compass. I am not surprised to see that they will align with tyrannical repressive regimes. The only thing I think I am surprised by is how so many in the progressive movement have, like, closed ranks behind them. The one that really has been mentioned many times in the past is ‘Queers for Palestine’, right? So look, like I'm someone who believes in the necessity of some kind of two state solution. And I know it's out of vogue to say it these days, but I think Israelis will never have long term security and safety unless Palestinians have some kind of dignity and equality in a state or some type of polity of their own. I deeply believe this. I think these things have to happen together. That being said, ‘Queers for Palestine’. Groups like that, that fetishize and again, celebrate what happened on 10/7 or who lionize Haniyeh and Hamas. Again, this is an organization that throws gay people off of buildings. This is a repressive, Islamic, extremist, theocratic, fascist organization that would murder these people. There's a reason why there's no ‘Queers for Palestine’ chapter in Gaza city. Like that's not an accident. There is a Queers for Palestine in Tel Aviv, which is an open pluralistic society, but there are no civil rights in Gaza. So who are we kidding here? That has surprised me, Dan, how so many on the progressive left fell silent on 10/7, were unable to use the same kind of moral models that allow them to say, ‘believe the women’ or to demand the return of our girls when they were kidnapped by Boko Haram. Like, where were these people when Israeli women and Israeli girls were kidnapped and raped and mutilated? That has been a bit surprising, depressing may be a better word for it. And I think, you know, look, I think these people, by every measure, are on the wrong side of history. They'll have to at some point, you know, they'll have to be measured in front of their maker. But for now, I think it's our job to make sure we help people understand how they got it wrong and to try to help them get it right.
DS: Before we wrap, where do you see this lawsuit going? What happens next? Can you give us a little bit of a roadmap?
JG: So we filed. It will take a couple weeks and then there'll be a hearing in D.C., a preliminary hearing, I believe. And then things will go quiet for months. The case will get assigned to a judge and then that judge will, quote, ‘hear the case.’ Now it is certainly possible that, again, law and order style, maybe Khamenei will show up in court. But I doubt that. Based on the way that Iran has responded to previous lawsuits like this, I don't think we will see any defendants. We will still have to make our case before the judge. We will still have to present compelling and convincing evidence before this federal judge. And the federal judge will look at the compendium of what we produce and consider the facts and then hopefully find in our favor. Then there'd be a next process of determining what recompense would be for the victims and that whole process will probably take a couple of years. I'm guessing they'll take 24 plus months, but I think at the end of it again, because we're playing the long game here. The record will show the role of Iran, Syria, North Korea, and perpetrating this crime. The record will show that Hamas is a project of the Islamic Republic. And the record will show that they were responsible for the bloodiest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. And at the end of the day, if these families, if these individuals themselves get some recompense and some justice, I think they will and the world will be better for it.
DS: We said earlier, at a minimum, we begin to establish some basic facts in terms of, this is a large scale attack against Jews, largest, as you said, in a single day since the Holocaust, and a large scale attack against Americans, and that Americans are being held hostage.
JG: So one of the things that I also find so striking and so clarifying is that so many of these protests over the last eight months, I saw this myself at UCLA, I was on the ground at UCLA.
Where I used to teach at the business school for one of the big protests. And I saw what I'll call the pro Hamas side, if you will. And I saw them and I was standing there. I mean, it was all intermingled. There was a young woman standing and stepping on an American flag and rubbing the American flag with her feet into the ground. And I basically took the flag away from her, and it's now hanging in my office here in New York. But I share that story because at so many of these protests, we see people not just burning Israeli flags, but burning American flags. Not just desecrating synagogues, but desecrating national monuments in this country.
DS: Monuments of American historical figures, American heroes, right?
JG: Yeah. Yeah. And at ADL, we either have the good fortune or the misfortune of tracking these people over a long period of time. And I can tell you the anti capitalist, neo Marxist kind of anti Western strain that's so suffused in these movements. They're not just the enemies of Israel, although they are, they're not just anti Semitic, although they are, they're deeply anti democratic, they're deeply anti capitalist, they're deeply anti American. And you don't have to take my word for it. Just read what they say. I mean, you know, most of these protesters, they don't consider the ground we're standing on to be America, they refer to this place as ‘Turtle Island’, which is an indigenous name, I believe, by I'm not sure exactly who… I mean, but it's funny, we had this protest in front of the synagogue in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. And the pretext that they used was, ‘well, you know, there was a real estate event of some kind having in the synagogue. That's why it was a legitimate target.’ Okay. Number one, even though the Islamic Republic is an Islamist extremist government that murders Jews and Americans with impunity, it would never be appropriate under any circumstances, any way, shape, or form, to ever go protest them in front of a mosque while people are walking into the building for services. I would be the first person to condemn that. The mosque is a house of worship. And even if I might not like the sermon being said inside, these people have the right freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. And so to see these people protesting in front of a facility, protesting isn’t even a fair word. When we use the word protest, Dan, I think it invokes images of John Lewis, you know, bravely marching across the bridge. We think about, you know, four kids in Greensboro integrating a lunch counter. Look, these are people concealing their identities, bearing weapons, who go there with the intent of menacing and terrorizing Jewish people. So these are not, protester is the wrong word. But I was, where I was going with all this is that no one would think, ‘Oh, America is on stolen land. Therefore, it's okay to go protest in front of the REMACS office. Right? Therefore, it's okay to go stage a demonstration and club people over the head in front of the Caldwell Banker office.’ The pretext and the excuses that these people use to justify the ugliest, most hateful activity is really mind boggling. And it continues to really, really concern me. I worry, Dan, that we will see a mass casualty event. Because the dehumanization, the relentless, the unending dehumanization of Zionists, right, or settlers, however they want to characterize us as Jewish people, it's so dangerous. It's combustible.
DS: Right. Well, I agree. When politicians throw around terms like genocide and apartheid about Israel, the implication is, when American politicians throw around that language, when their supporters hear that language, they say, ‘well, if this person in my city is supporting Israel, then they are a supporter of genocide and apartheid. So anything's justified. Anything's justified.’ And that is the dangerous path we are on and that we are witnessing.
JG: Dan, you have exactly hit the nail on the head. So this is when an elected official like Rashida Tlaib makes these spurious, false, demonstrably false claims. She is a member of Congress and people put faith in her. So when you say over and over and over and over and over that people are committing genocide, your constituents say, well, maybe I have to do something about that. Maybe I have to stop genocide, and so therefore I have free license to, again, go bludgeon a Jewish man at a protest in Los Angeles over the head and kill him, or go shoot a Jewish dentist in San Diego, as happened, a Jewish dentist in San Diego, as happened last December. Or again, maul people in front of a synagogue in the predominantly orthodox neighborhood in LA. I mean, it's really, I think it's quite terrifying.
DS: Jonathan Greenblatt from the ADL. We'll leave it there. Sadly, I think we'll have a lot more to talk about in the months ahead. So I hope you'll join us, until then, thank you for this tutorial on this litigation you are filing or have filed and we will be following it closely and we'll look forward to updates. Thank you for all you're doing.
JG: Look Dan. I hope you'll call me back because I'm a fan of the show, I listen to it regularly, and it's really been just a delight to talk to you today.
DS: Fear not, we will rope you back in. Until then, stay safe and keep up the fight.
JG: Thank you.
DS: That's our show for today to keep up with the work of Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL you can find him at JGreenblatt ADL and also at ADL on X and on Instagram you can find him at JGreenblatt ADL And also at ADL_national. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.