Activist Groups behind Violent DNC Protest Have Long History of Defending Terrorism, Receive Funding from Major Corporations

The groups behind the violent anti-Israel protest outside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., this week have a history of advancing antisemitic claims and defending terrorism, and have received funding from Soros-backed non-profits and the philanthropy arms of major American corporations.

Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow organized the demonstration, which saw one protester arrested for punching a police officer. Six officers were injured in the chaos. The pro-Palestinian protesters blocked entrances and exits to the building and demanded a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war as Democratic politicians and officials attended a campaign reception inside. 

Jewish Voice for Peace has been around since 1996 and describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.” 

The Anti-Defamation League has criticized the group for “taking increasingly radical positions and employing questionable tactics in pursuit of its mission to diminish support for Israel.” 

In 2017, JVP expressed support for convicted Palestinian terrorists Rasmea Odeh and Marwan Barghouti. Odeh, who was sentenced to life in prison by an Israeli military court for planting the explosives used in two 1969 Jerusalem bombings, spoke at JVP’s conference that year. The group defended its decision to invite Odeh, who was released from prison as part of a prisoner exchange, calling her “a feminist leader” and “a deeply respected Palestinian organizer.”

In October 2010, ADL named JVP as one of the top ten anti-Israel groups in the U.S. 

“While JVP’s activists try to portray themselves as Jewish critics of Israel, their ideology is nothing but a complete rejection of Israel. In May 2008, for example, members of JVP protested many of the celebrations of Israel’s 60th anniversary that took place around the country, essentially illustrating that they oppose Israel’s very existence,” the ADL explained in a report at the time. 

JVP said in a recent report that it doesn’t rely on “corporations, billionaires, or governments to fund our movement” and that it is 92 percent funded by individual donors.

However, JVP has received $650,000 from Soro’s Open Society Foundations since 2017 to fund its “human rights” work in the Middle East, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Between 2019 and 2021, the group received $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation and $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, according to the pro-Israel group NGO Monitor. 

JVP also received $654,233 from the Schwab Charitable Fund, $260,705 from Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, $175,600 from Morgan Stanley Global Impact, $98,650 from Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, and $75,000 from the Tides Foundation.

There are JVP chapters on 12 college campuses, according to the ADL, “where members often work closely with chapters of the anti-Israel student group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to promote anti-Israel initiatives, messages and events.”

JVP has a sister group, JVP Action, that focuses on electing progressive candidates “from City Councils to the White House.” 

“We’re fighting white nationalism, racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia and lifting up emerging champions who will fight for equality, dignity, and justice for all,” JVP Action’s website says. 

JVP says it pictures a world where “the concrete of the Apartheid wall [is] in pieces on free Palestinian soil.”

“We picture Israeli jails, prisons, and detention centers emptied and dismantled. We picture the return of Palestinian refugees, reuniting with their families and communities. We picture Palestinians — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — living with their inalienable rights respected, building schools and hospitals and planting olive groves with the resources they need,” the group explains on its website.

The group lauded the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks that left roughly 1,200 Israelis dead, calling the tragic events “the latest unprecedented wave of resistance” by Palestinians and saying the source of all this violence” was “Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression.” However, JVP deleted its post after receiving criticism and instead called on lawmakers to examine the “root cause” of the attack, which they believe is Israel. JVP activist Ariel Koren said she believed Hamas’s actions were within “Palestinians’ right to resist.”  

Since the start of the Israel–Hamas war, JVP local chapters have been involved in a series of controversial events. At a rally in Providence cosponsored by JVP Rhode Island, attendees chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, the Yahudi [Jews] have got to go,” and speakers at a Philadelphia rally cosponsored by JVP Philly said, “The Palestinians and all colonized and oppressed people have the right to armed self-defense” and that “the anticolonial armed resistance out of the Gaza Strip was provoked by decades of Israeli State sanctioned violence and to report it otherwise is false and misleading.” 

In San Francisco, speakers at a rally cosponsored by JVP Bay Area said, “The resistance is liberating land that has been occupied for 75 years. The intifada lives and Palestine lives!” 

In April 2022, JVP Detroit said all Israeli civilians must be treated as soldiers. “In the aftermath of any act of resistance carried out by Palestinians, many hasten to condemn the ‘barbaric’ act of killing ‘civilian’ settlers, in complete disregard of the systemic violence that ‘Israel’ commits against Palestinians on a daily basis, and in a blatant attempt to distort the truth that Palestinians are the only civilians to have ever existed in historical Palestine. Zionist settlers are either current or future soldiers in the IOF’s reserves or veterans.”

The other group involved in Wednesday’s protest, IfNotNow, was founded during the 2014 Gaza War by young Jews “angered by the overwhelmingly hawkish response of American Jewish institutions” to the 2014 Gaza War. 

Soros’s Open Society gave $400,000 to IfNotNow in 2019 and 2021, according to the Free Beacon.

The group’s total income in fiscal year 2020–2021 was $396,226. According to NGO monitor, the group received $160,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund between 2017 and 2023 and $45,000 from the Tides Foundation. IfNotNow has also received thousands of dollars from the New Israel Fund’s Progressive Jewish Fund and the Foundation for Middle East Peace. 

The group stages protests and sit-ins at the headquarters of American Jewish communal organizations and runs “small, weekend-long orientation trainings on our movement DNA – our collective strategy, story, and structure.”

It has also run training seminars for summer camp counselors to “develop programming introducing Palestinian narratives and…’the moral costs of occupation.’”

During a series of Passover “liberation Seders” in 2016, members were arrested for trespassing and disorderly conduct. Members in Boston were arrested when they chained themselves inside the Boston AIPAC lobby in 2016.

The group has been involved in numerous controversies, including in May 2017, when members organized a protest against Jerusalem Day and the March of the Flags outside of Damascus Gate, in which several protesters were arrested by Israeli police and in February 2017, when activists were arrested for interrupting the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during confirmation hearings for David Friedman and his nomination as US Ambassador to Israel. In June 2017, members were expelled from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia after creating a “pop-up exhibit about 50 years of Occupation.”

IfNotNow was also behind a June 2018 publicity stunt in which its members crashed a Birthright trip and encouraged participants to instead join a Breaking the Silence tour. IfNotNow members also harassed Birthright participants while they waited to board a flight from Israel to New York, shouting that “Birthright goes against Jewish morals.”

In May 2021, IfNotNow released a list of names of individuals killed in the fighting and urged people to recite the Jewish Mourner’s Prayer. However, more than 40 individuals on the list were Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists, according to NGO Monitor.

It wasn’t the first time the group had offered its condolences for terrorists. In May 2019, after terrorist groups fired more than 600 rockets and mortars toward Israel, IfNotNow called the death of Imad Mohammad Nseir, a member of a rocket launching unit of the Kataeb Humat al-Aqsa organization, “devastating.”

After the October 7 terrorist attacks, IfNotNow said it “cannot and will not say today’s actions by Palestinian militants are unprovoked.” 

“Every day under Israel’s system of apartheid is a provocation. The strangling siege on Gaza is a provocation,” the statement added.

The group claimed the blood of those killed in the attack “is on the hands of the Israeli government, the US government which funds and excuses their recklessness, and every international leader who continues to turn a blind eye to decades of Palestinian oppression, endangering both Palestinian and Israelis.”