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Dianne Feinstein, long-serving Jewish senator from California, dies at 90
(JTA) — Dianne Feinstein, the long-serving Jewish senator from California who rose to national prominence when she appeared before cameras with her hands stained with the blood of a murdered colleague, has died.
Feinstein, who had recently faced criticism for remaining in the Senate despite clearly failing health, was 90 years old. She died Thursday night, major news organizations are reporting.
Feinstein had served in the Senate for more than three decades as its longest-serving woman.
Feinstein became a national figure in 1978 when she was the president of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco and found the body of fellow supervisor Harvey Milk.
Milk, who was Jewish, was the first openly gay elected official in the city’s history and was assassinated by a former colleague, Dan White. White also killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone.
Feinstein announced the murders while her hands were still stained with Milk’s blood. She soon stepped in to replace Moscone, serving two terms as mayor.
“I remember it, actually, as if it was yesterday,” she recalled in 2008. “And it was one of the hardest moments, if not the hardest moment, of my life. It was a devastating moment. For San Francisco, it was a day of infamy.”
Feinstein’s father was a Jewish physician and her mother was a model who was born to an ethnically Jewish family but raised in the Russian Orthodox church. Feinstein was born on June 22, 1933, in San Francisco, attended a Roman Catholic school and said, when she was running for governor in 1990, that her parents left it up to her to decide which faith suited her.
When she was 20, she picked Judaism, she said, “because I liked its simplicity and directness.” She was twice widowed and once divorced; all three of her husbands were Jewish.
Dianne Feinstein, president of the board of supervisors, holds a press conference following the killing of Mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk, in San Francisco, Nov. 27, 1978. (Bettman Archive/Getty Images)
The trauma of the double murder propelled her to become an outspoken advocate for gun control, a cause she took with her into the Senate, when she won a special election in 1992 to replace Sen. Pete Wilson, a Republican who had defeated Feinstein in the 1990 election for governor.
Dianne Feinstein, running for Senate, speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden, New York City, July 13, 1992. (Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
That election cycle became known as the Year of the Woman. Feinstein and three other newly elected women senators tripled the number of women in the Senate from two to six. One was Barbara Boxer, who, like Feinstein, was a Jewish Democrat from California.
Record numbers of women ran for office, spurred in part by the humiliating treatment Anita Hill got in the Senate the year previous when she testified about the sexual harassment she allegedly endured while employed with Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court nominee.
Hill’s treatment helped galvanize Feinstein’s decision to run for the Senate. During the 2018 hearings for another Supreme Court nominee accused of sexual wrongdoing, Brett Kavanaugh, Feinstein recalled coming across a crowd of people watching the Thomas hearings at a TV in an airport in 1991, a year before her election.
Not a lot had changed, she lamented. “How women are treated in the United States, with this kind of concern, is really wanting a lot of reform,” she said during the Kavanaugh hearings.
With Boxer and Feinstein, California had a two-Jewish women representation in the body until 2017, and the effects of the Year of the Women were long lasting.
“I would be proud to carry on just a portion of their legacy,” Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who has signaled his intention to run for Feinstein’s seat, said in February when Feinstein announced she would not run for another term, regarding Feinstein and Boxer. Referring to a traditional Jewish imperative to repair the world, he added, “I would love to bring that passion for tikkun olam with me to the U.S. Senate.”
Laws long on the liberal wish list were suddenly ripe for passage, among them an assault weapons ban that Feinstein took the lead in passing in 1994. It lapsed after 10 years, and Feinstein since 2004 persistently, and unsuccessfully, sought to reinstate the ban.
Also in 1994, Feinstein joined then-Sen. Joe Biden in passing the Violence Against Women Act. When it lapsed in 2019, Feinstein led the charge to reauthorize it, but faced conservative resistance because the reauthorization bill added protections for LGBTQ partners and sought to close the “boyfriend loophole,” extending restrictions on gun ownership to people who had abused partners to whom they were not married.
It took until 2022 for Feinstein to overcome resistance and reauthorize the Act. It was a compromise: The LGBTQ protections remained in, but the boyfriend loophole was out; Feinstein was unable to overcome gun lobby resistance.
“This is a major advancement for protecting women from domestic violence and sexual assault – a tragedy faced by one in three women in this country,” Feinstein said then in a statement. President Biden, its original author, signed the reauthorization into law.
Feinstein stood apart from her liberal cohort in some respects. Her best known split with liberals was her championing the death penalty until 2018, when she said during her campaign for reelection that its unfair application had finally changed her mind.
Her enthusiasm for law and order was triggered when a far left group, the New World Liberation Front, detonated a bomb planted in a flower box outside her home in 1976, when she was a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, part of a terrorist campaign targeting city leaders.
As outraged as she was at the easy access to guns that brought about the murder of Milk and Moscone, she was also furious that White got away with a manslaughter conviction by claiming he had been depressed. The tactic became known as the “Twinkie defense,” as a defense psychiatrist testified that junk food had contributed to White’s depression.
“Yes, I support the death penalty,” she said in 1990 when she was running for California governor, earning boos at a Democratic convention. “It is an issue that cannot be fudged or hedged.” She won the primary but lost to Wilson.
The episode displayed her political chops: She used footage of the boos in political ads in the general election for governor, reinforcing her image as a moderate and helping to propel her to the Senate in 1992. She managed to preserve the seat in 1994, her first full term election, a year that was otherwise disastrous for Democrats.
In 2004, she feuded with Kamala Harris, then the San Francisco District Attorney and now the vice president, when she learned at the funeral of a slain police officer that Harris opposed the death penalty for his killer. Feinstein said then she would not have endorsed Harris for the district attorney job had she known of her opposition to the death penalty. (The feud didn’t last; Feinstein and Boxer endorsed Harris in her 2016 Senate run to replace Boxer, key nods that helped propel Harris to victory.)
Feinstein was for years a centrist on Israel, allied with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, although she was a sharp critic of the country’s treatment of non-Orthodox Jews. In 1986, as mayor, she expanded commercial ties with San Francisco’s sister city, Haifa. It was her revulsion with deadly weapons that nudged her toward questioning Israel: She was appalled at Israel’s use of cluster bombs in its 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“What gives rise, in part, to my bill are recent developments in Lebanon over alleged use of cluster bombs by Israel,” she said in 2007, introducing legislation to restrict the sale of the weapons.
Remarkably, Feinstein chose to promote her proposed cluster bomb ban that year at the Arab American Institute, an organization frequently at odds with the mainstream pro-Israel community. “We will get this job done,” she said at the time to applause.
Within a few years she was departing from pro-Israel orthodoxy in other areas: She opposed proposed Iran sanctions in 2014 because she feared the underlying legislation would draw the United States into a war on Israel’s behalf.
“Let me acknowledge Israel’s real, well-founded concerns that a nuclear-armed Iran would threaten its very existence,” she said then on the Senate floor. “While I recognize and share Israel’s concern, we cannot let Israel determine when and where the U.S. goes to war.”
More recently, she championed renewed aid to the Palestinians, slashed to almost nothing by Trump and Republicans in Congress hostile to a Palestinian leadership they depict as bloodthirsty.
“Denying funding for clean water, health care and schools in the West Bank and Gaza won’t make us safer,” she said in 2019. “Instead it only emboldens extremist groups like Hamas and pushes peace further out of reach.”
Feinstein, who was the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee from 2009 to 2017, also differed from her colleagues — particularly Ron Wyden, the Jewish Democrat from Oregon — in defending the intelligence community even after a welter of leaks toward the end of the 2000s revealed its abuses.
She defended the intelligence agencies’ collection of American citizens’ metadata, the wealth of information that can track where a person is with whom they communicate and for how long, among other details. “It’s called protecting America,” Feinstein said in 2013, claiming the practice was routine.
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, speaks as Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, looks on during a confirmation hearing for Michael Casey and U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Timothy Haugh before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, July 12, 2023. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
As her party moved left, however, so did she; In 2014, as committee chairwoman, Feinstein declassified a report on the CIA’s use of torture after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, over the objections of President Barack Obama. In 2017, she said her decision in 2002 to be one of just five Senate Democrats to authorize the Iraq War would haunt her, in part because she bought into the false claims the intelligence community was peddling.
“It is the decision I regret most and I have to live with it,” she told author Gail Sheehy.
One factor nudging her to the left was the election in 2016 of Donald Trump as president. Her deep experience in matters of intelligence helped spur her outrage with the new president as she uncovered evidence ahead of the election that Russia was interfering.
“Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election,” she and Adam Schiff, a House California Jewish Democrat who is now running to replace her in the Senate, said in a headline-making statement just weeks before election day.
“At the least, this effort is intended to sow doubt about the security of our election and may well be intended to influence the outcomes of the election,” the statement said. “We can see no other rationale for the behavior of the Russians.”
Republican obfuscation about Russia’s interference helped push her over the edge, a close friend, Orville Schell, told Sheehy in 2017. “Trump injects an entirely new level of outrage,” he said. “Dianne is like the canary in the mine shaft. The last bastion of bridge building in the Senate may be giving up.”
On one issue LGBTQ rights, Feinstein always tracked to the left of her party; in the 1990s she was one of just 14 Democrats to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. She became a leader of a years-long effort to repeal the Act, which was successful in 2022.
In 2020, as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Feinstein drew outrage from fellow Democrats for her friendly questioning of Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court nominee Republicans rushed through to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal Jewish icon who had died just before an election that returned Democrats to the Senate majority. It didn’t help that she hugged the committee chairman, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, after the hearing.
That along with signs that Feinstein’s mental acuity was diminishing led her to step down as the top Democrat on the key committee. Reporting described her as engaged during meetings and telephone calls, and then, hours and even minutes later, not remembering the exchanges. In early 2023, she announced that she would not run again for election in 2024.
Feinstein is survived by her daughter, Katherine Anne Feinstein, a former judge, and a granddaughter.
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The post Dianne Feinstein, long-serving Jewish senator from California, dies at 90 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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US House Passes ICC Sanctions Bill Following Netanyahu Arrest Warrant
US House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks to members of the media at the Capitol building, April 20, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
The US House of Representatives on Thursday passed legislation that would sanction members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) over its issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
The Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act (HR 23) calls for the warrants against the Israeli officials to be “condemned in the strongest possible terms,” labeling them as “illegitimate and baseless” actions that “create a damaging precedent that threatens the United States, Israel, and all United States partners who have not submitted to the ICC’s jurisdiction.”
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
Beyond condemning the arrest warrants, the bill would also impose sanctions on any officials with the ICC, or entities supporting the court, who seek to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute “any protected person of the United States and its allies.”
The bill easily passed by a margin of 243-140. House Republicans overwhelmingly backed the bill, with 198 voting in favor, zero voting against, one voting “present,” and 20 abstaining from voting. House Democrats were more divided on the bill, with 45 voting in favor, 140 voting against, and 30 abstaining from voting.
The proposed sanctions would target individuals “directly engaged in or otherwise aided any effort by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute a protected person.” In addition, the legislation would freeze assets and ban visas of sanctioned individuals and allow the sitting president to waive individual sanctions if the waiver is considered critical to US national security interests.
US Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), a stalwart ally of Israel and co-sponsor of the bill, condemned the ICC on the floor of the House of Representatives.
“Israel is the tip of the spear in bringing the fight to an enemy that currently holds and has killed our fellow Americans,” said Mast, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, referring to Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), another co-sponsor of the bill, lambasted the ICC for taking an “unprecedented action” against Israel, arguing that the court’s actions are undermining the Jewish state’s ability to defend itself against Hamas terrorism.
Roy decried the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant as a “politicized witch hunt” and claimed that the ICC “doesn’t have any jurisdiction” over the defensive military operations of the Jewish state.
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) issued a statement endorsing the bill.
“The ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants against the leadership of Israel represents the weaponization of international law at its most egregious,” Torres said. “The ICC has set a precedent for criminalizing self-defense: any country daring to defend itself against an enemy that exploits civilians as human shields will face persecution posing as prosecution.”
Immediately after the vote, pro-Israel organizations issued statements applauding the House for advancing legislation to sanction the ICC.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, praised the passage of HR 23.
“AIPAC commends the House for adopting the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act, which imposes sanctions on foreign persons aiding the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) morally bankrupt and legally baseless attack against Israel,” AIPAC said in a statement.
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) also celebrated the passage of the legislation, lauding Republican leadership in helping advance the bill through the House of Representatives.
“We thank [House Speaker Mike Johnson] and the [House Republican] majority for their leadership and prioritizing this critical legislation in week one of the 119th Congress,” the RJC wrote on X/Twitter.
In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.
The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, initially made his surprise demand for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on the same day in May that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation infuriated US and British leaders, according to Reuters, which reported that the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Following the official issuing of arrest warrants in November, a slew of US lawmakers vowed to seek retribution against the ICC after President-elect Donald Trump takes office later this month.
Incoming US Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has also threatened to push legislation imposing sanctions on the ICC if it does not halt its efforts to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli officials.
The post US House Passes ICC Sanctions Bill Following Netanyahu Arrest Warrant first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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California College Sued for Punishing Jewish Professor Over Conversation on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Photo: Edward H. Blake via Wikimedia Commons
A Jewish professor is suing the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco for allegedly violating her rights by punishing her because she disagreed with students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to court documents shared with The Algemeiner by the Deborah Project, a legal nonprofit which defends the civil rights of Jewish educators, Professor Karen Fiss’s tribulations began on Oct. 23, 2023, when she exchanged remarks with several members of the terrorist-linked Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group who summoned her to an anti-Zionist display and asked that she support the campaign for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Fiss scanned their materials — which included a sign that proclaimed the anti-Israel genocidal slogan “From the river to the sea,” artwork, and quick response (QR) codes promoting their cause — and initiated a dialogue with the students, asking what the slogan meant and what news sources they read. Offended by Fiss’s signaling she was not an anti-Zionist, one of the students tore down the “from the river to the sea sign” and began arguing that reports of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 were fabricated.
The conversation reached the fateful moment which precipitated Fiss’s lawsuit when one of the students, Maryiam Alwael, asserted that her knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was superior because she was a native of Kuwait, to which Fiss responded by asking the student if she was aware of the Kuwaiti government’s expulsion of 300,000 Palestinians in 1991. Fiss then argued for a more nuanced narrative of the Middle Eastern conflict, noting that not all Middle Easterners are anti-Israel and many oppose Hamas and disapprove of Iran’s backing of it. She ended by counseling the young women to avoid ideological echo chambers. Alwael said she liked her own views.
While both sides made sharp points, the conversation remained civil, according to court documents. However, the students interpreted Fiss’s comments as an attack on their identities and filed a complaint which accused her of being “harassing and discriminatory.” With little due process, Fiss was ultimately found guilty of the allegation and forced to submit to a series of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” trainings — a form of political rehabilitation in which subjects are forced to denounce key values of Western civilization such as the meritocracy and the sovereignty of the individual.
In explaining its guilty verdict, the college accused Fiss of being culturally insensitive and imposing her “power” on the women, who are ethnic minorities of color. Fiss, it said, “began explaining the history of Alwael’s country to her,” and “caused the students to reasonably believe” that Fiss was “using [her] positional power as a professor to get the outcome [she] sought, which was for the students to agree with [her] point of view.”
The college reached these findings but declined to apply the same logic to an earlier complaint Fiss had filed about the Critical Ethnic Studies program’s issuing a statement — “DECOLONIZATION IS NOT A DINNER PARTY,” it said — which justified Hamas’s violence and implied that Jews are not indigenous to their own homeland. This is because, the Deborah Project says, CCA rules are in place to protect left-wing anti-Zionism and punish Jews who oppose it.
“Because Dr. Fiss’s beliefs do not align with the creed mandated and enforced by the college, she has suffered repeated and severe adverse treatment by CCA, which has dramatically impeded her ability to function as a scholar,” the Deborah Project said in its complaint. “As part of its policy of enforcing ideological conformity about Israel, CCA has threatened Dr. Fiss with dismissal for two reasons: (1) her refusal to comply with student demands to contact her congressional representatives to pressure Israel — a sovereign nation — to cease its military response to an ongoing threat; and (2) for respectfully challenging this monopolization of discourse and reaffirming the principles of open dialogue and open debate within CCA.”
According to Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the Deborah Project, the college ignored Fiss’s concerns about widespread support for Hamas’s atrocities in Israel last Oct. 7, arguing they were simply expressions of free speech.
“Karen Fiss, a fully-tenured professor at CCA was told that her pain, intimidation, and horror upon learning that a huge number of not only students at CCA but her fellow faculty members, the department chairs, and members of the administration not only justified, but supported the wanton rape, torture, and murder of her co-religionists on Oct. 7 was not problematic as far as CCA was concerned because those positions were protected by free speech,” Lowenthal Marcus told The Algemeiner.
She added that CCA “accorded no such academic freedom to Dr. Fiss, who was disciplined for a single conversation that all parties agree was civil.”
“For this actual exercise of academic freedom,” Lowenthal Marcus concluded, “CCA found that Dr. Fiss’s speech constituted harassment of the Kuwaiti student. It was also found to be bullying, on the theory that Dr. Fiss was found to have used her position as a faculty member to pressure the students to adopt Dr. Fiss’s view — when it is undisputed that, throughout the conversation, the students did not even know Dr. Fiss was a professor. For this, Dr. Fiss’s file was permanently marked, and she was warned that if such a thing were to occur again, Fiss would suffer additional punishment, up to and including termination.
Now, with her reputation blighted by scandal and the college threatening revoke her tenure, Fiss is fighting for both her right to exist as a proud Jew at work as well as her right to free speech. She is suing CCA for discriminating against her for being Jewish, a violation of Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and breach of contract, offenses which caused her “substantial damages” and other trauma.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Jewish Voice for Peace’s ‘Extremist’ Anti-Israel Agenda, Terror Group Ties Highlighted in Report
Anti-Israel protesters take part in a demonstration hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America, IfNotNow Movement, and Jewish Voice for Peace that turned violent in Washington, DC, Nov. 15, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
A pro-Israel nonprofit has published a new bombshell booklet detailing the inner workings and funding of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a controversial and prominent anti-Zionist group that has helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza.
StandWithUs (SWU), an organization which promotes a mission of “supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism,” released the report examining how the far-left JVP — which defended the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel last Oct. 7 — “promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories” and even partners with terrorist organizations to achieve its “primary goal” of “dismantling the State of Israel.”
According to the report, JVP weaponizes the plight of Palestinians to advance an “extremist” agenda which promotes the destruction of Israel and whitewashes terrorism, receiving money from organizations that have ties to Middle Eastern countries such as Iran.
“JVP and its allies slander and dehumanize Israelis as privileged, powerful, and racist white European colonizers,” the report says. “They promote dangerous conspiracy theories tying Israelis to injustices against various communities” around the world.
The booklet points out that JVP pushes a misleading history of Jewish presence in the Middle East, ignoring that Jews “faced systemic discrimination at best and brutal violence at worst under Muslim and Arab rule, until almost all of them fled or were expelled in the 20th century.” SWU also notes that JVP has routinely labeled Jews as “racist” for expressing fear about the prospect of living as minorities in Israel.
“JVP simply refuses to acknowledge that most Jews genuinely see efforts to eliminate the world’s only Jewish state as a form of hate,” the report reads.
In addition, the report alleges that JVP advances “antisemitic conspiracy theories,” such as the notion that American police are trained by Israeli forces. This narrative suggests that Israel exacerbates alleged police brutality in the United States through training law enforcement to brutalize black people. Prominent anti-Israel pundits such as Marc Lamont Hill and Linda Sarsour have cited this misleading information in various public statements.
StandWithUs also alleges that JVP harbors deep connections and support for international terrorist groups, highlighting JVP’s record of support for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization with the stated goal of dismantling Israel and replacing it with a Palestinian state.
“JVP has campaigned in support of PFLP terrorists, hosted PFLP members at events, and partnered with groups that openly support PFLP and other terrorist organizations,” the report reads.
In addition, the report states that JVP has collaborated with anti-Israel entities such as Samidoun, which identifies itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network, to hold rallies. Samidoun described Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in Israel as “a brave and heroic operation.” The United States and Canada each imposed sanctions on Samidoun in October, labeling the organization a “sham charity” and accusing it of fundraising for terrorist groups such as PFLP. The US Treasury Department said that PFLP “uses Samidoun to maintain fundraising operations in both Europe and North America.”
“Organizations like Samidoun masquerade as charitable actors that claim to provide humanitarian support to those in need, yet in reality divert funds for much-needed assistance to support terrorist groups,” Bradley Smith, the US Treasury Department’s acting under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement at the time.
The SWU report also says that JVP has ties to “extremist” anti-Israel groups such as Within Our Lifetime (WOL) and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). Leadership for these groups have repeatedly expressed support for violence against Israel and terrorist groups. JVP has worked alongside these groups to hold anti-Israel demonstrations and marches.
According to the new report, JVP has received substantial financial assistance from organizations tied to Lebanon and Iran. For example, the Maximum Difference Foundation, which has been accused of maintaining ties with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an internationally designated terrorist organization, donated $65,000 to JVP.
JVP has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which according to SWU has funded other anti-Israel organizations, including Palestinian organizations linked with the PFLP.
The report additionally noted that JVP received $200,000 from The Quitiplas Foundation, which has allegedly donated to other organizations connected to Samidoun.
“JVP’s harmful rhetoric and alliances make it clear they are not a voice for peace,” StandWithUs CEO Roz Rothstein said in a statement accompanying the report’s release. “This organization fuels hate and shields extremists from accountability while doing nothing to bring about peaceful coexistence.”
“To help fight rising antisemitism, the public, media, and leaders across our society must finally recognize JVP’s dangerous agenda and reject it,” she said.
The Algemeiner has previously reported that JVP argued in a recently resurfaced 2021 booklet that Jews should not write Hebrew liturgy because hearing the language would be “deeply traumatizing” to Palestinians.
In June, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) filed a complaint with the US Federal Election Commission accusing JVP’s political fundraising arm of misrepresenting its spending and receiving unlawful donations from corporate entities, citing “discrepancies” in the organization’s income and expense reports.
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