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Israeli leftists in New York chart their own path with calls for a ceasefire
(New York Jewish Week) — A crowd of activists gathered in the bitter cold in Columbus Circle. To the beat of a snare drum, they chanted in Hebrew and English for a ceasefire and the return of Israeli hostages
“Safety is what peace delivers, war never has a winner,” around 100 demonstrators chanted at the rally earlier this month. Some protesters carried signs that read, “Israelis say there is no military solution” and “Not one more drop of blood.”
The protesters, loosely organized as the Anti-Occupation Bloc, are Israeli Jews who came together a year ago to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to overhaul Israel’s judiciary. After the deadly Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 and weeks of bloody fighting, members pivoted to create a distinctly left-wing Israeli response to the war: a deep distrust of Netanyahu, an empathy for those suffering on both sides, a belief in coexistence and the conviction that the West Bank occupation is detrimental to both Israelis and Palestinians.
“We’re arguing that pro-Palestine and pro-Israel is one and the same. [We] Israelis are not benefiting from living in eternal war,” said Tamar Glezerman, an activist with the group.
“I myself have not benefited from that, I’ve only lost,” said Glezerman, a filmmaker whose aunt was killed on Oct. 7 at Kibbutz Be’eri.
The activists say they do not feel aligned with other protest groups in the city, who on one side they consider unsympathetic to Israelis, and on the other, uncaring toward Palestinians.
They advocate for both Israelis and Palestinians in the conflict, even as they work to process the Oct. 7 attack and its aftermath themselves.
The goal of their events is to show “there’s pain on both sides, that we don’t try to compare,” said activist Tzlil Rubinstein. “This is not a competition of who suffers more.”
Left-wing Israelis protest in support of a Gaza ceasefire and the release of Hamas hostages, in midtown Manhattan, Dec. 20, 2023. (Luke Tress)
The group started a year ago, after efforts by Israel’s right-wing and religious ruling coaliton’s plans to weaken Israel’s judiciary set off sustained, massive protests in Israel. The leftist Israelis joined weekly rallies in Washington Square Park, but did not feel completely aligned with other protesters’ pro-Israel patriotism. The early rallies were led by activists from Israel’s left, but were focused on the judicial overhaul and democratic rights, and not on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
“It was just very awkward for us to stand in demonstrations in the center of New York full of Israeli flags, very, very Zionist. It’s just not our politics,” said Maya Herman, a PhD student in sociology at the New School and a co-founder of the Anti-Occupation Bloc.
“It’s not that we’re against the State of Israel, but we don’t associate with that,” she said, arguing that Israel is not a “clear-cut case of liberal democracy” due to the control it asserts over West Bank Palestinians.
Members of the leftist faction decided to organize a protest group of their own. They set up a WhatsApp group called “Israelis in New York – the radical group,” and added 15 acquaintances, Herman said. The group slowly grew as members enlisted friends and met like-minded activists at events, but it remained part of the larger pro-democracy protest movement.
“We never tried to make our own demonstrations. The point was to be part of the mainstream movement and make sure the mainstream thought about the radical left side,” Herman said.
That approach changed ahead of New York City’s annual Celebrate Israel Parade, which in June drew a contingent of prominent Israeli government ministers, including Knesset member Simcha Rothman, a leading force in the judicial overhaul legislation. Rather than march in a parade that included government ministers and right-wing American groups, including pro-settlement organizations, the “radical group” decided to hold their first separate demonstrations, which drew between 100 and 150 participants, Herman said. The activists heckled Rothman and other ministers from the sidelines of the parade with shouts of “Shame” in Hebrew and held a rally near the hotel where Netanyahu was staying for the U.N. General Assembly.
Left-wing Israelis protest against visiting Israeli government ministers during New York’s annual Celebrate Israel Parade, in midtown Manhattan, June 4, 2023. The signs read “shame” in Hebrew. (Luke Tress)
“It was a boost of adrenaline for the group,” said Herman, stressing that the activists still backed the larger pro-democracy protest movement and its organizers. “That moment in June really made the group much bigger and a group that is doing things by itself.”
Around the same time, the activists decided to call themselves the Anti-Occupation Bloc, affiliating with a group of the same name in Israel. As the bloc came together, members became friends outside of demonstrations, sometimes going out for drinks or having picnics around the events.
“It’s people who actually are Israelis in their identity, that they can hate it or love it, but that’s part of who they are,” Herman said. “I think that was something that was really missing — Israelis thinking left politics with other Israelis.”
Members of the group are generally politically active, but vary widely in their political views, age and the length of time they have been in New York. The core principles are non-violence and a focus on equal rights for all Israelis and Palestinians, even if opinions differ about how to achieve those aims, said Rubinstein. The group is informal, loosely organized and does not have a charter or official talking points. Rubinstein said the group’s members support Knesset parties ranging from the Arab-led factions to the center-left Labor.
The New York Anti-Occupation Bloc continued to coalesce ahead of Netanyahu’s visit to New York in September for the General Assembly and a meeting with President Joe Biden. The activists’ WhatsApp group grew to around 190 members during those events, and around 30 protesters turned out for some rallies, the last demonstrations before the Oct. 7 attack.
Left-wing Israelis protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to New York for the U.N. General Assembly, in midtown Manhattan, Sept. 19, 2023. (Luke Tress)
The enormous horror of the Hamas onslaught rocked the group along with the rest of the Jewish world. Some members of the bloc have friends or family members who were murdered or kidnapped; others became isolated from friends in New York who couldn’t or wouldn’t appreciate their pain. Herman was horrified by the images of destroyed communities in southern Israel that reminded her of the kibbutz in central Israel where she grew up. The activists had believed the occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza would lead to a disaster, but never envisioned the tragic dimensions of Oct. 7.
Protest activities halted, but the WhatsApp group buzzed with hundreds of messages a day, and kept drawing new members. Many of the activists were distraught and having a hard time getting through the day. “It’s a collective grief even if you’re not in Israel,” Herman said. The group became an emotional space where the activists could commiserate, start to process their shock and grief, and grapple with fundamental questions.
“We got to these really crazy moments of retrospective thinking,” Herman said. “Does it even matter to be political, to be activists, to do demonstrations? Can we change the reality?”
“It was a really deep existential crisis that is still bubbling beneath,” she said.
The war immediately put an end to the judicial overhaul legislation in Israel, and the protests against the process. The mainstream Israeli protest groups in Israel and the U.S. shifted their focus to supporting victims of the Hamas attacks, displaced Israelis, grieving families and the war effort, as the government floundered in its initial response.
As the shock of the attack wore off and the Anti-Occupation Bloc activists started to get back on their feet, they struggled to find a place among the array of protest groups taking to the streets around New York. Other Israeli protesters in the U.S. dedicated themselves to freeing the more than 200 Israelis held hostage by Hamas. The captives are also a priority for the Anti-Occupation Bloc, but the group wanted to push for a ceasefire. That ostensibly aligned them with far-left Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, but members of the Anti-Occupation Block felt these other leftist groups were unsympathetic to Israelis immediately after Oct. 7.
“We were just invisible to a lot of these groups when it all started on Oct. 7. A lot of these groups didn’t even mention what happened to Israelis,” Rubinstein said.
Herman said many leftist groups “immediately went to their regular spiel of Nakba [“disaster,” the Palestinian term for the founding of Israel] and occupation.”
“We were like, ‘We agree on all of those concepts and all of those historical facts,’ but we also think Oct. 7 was a different moment,” Herman said. “You have to understand what happened there was an insane terrorist attack on civilian society.”
Left-wing activists led by American Jewish rabbis rally in support of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on the first night of Hanukkah in Columbus Circle, New York City, Dec. 7, 2023. (Luke Tress)
“To attack women, children, and to mutilate and use sexual violence? What happened there is legitimized political resistance? Not according to us,” she said. “It was a conversation that we never had in the past.”
The Israeli activists also conceptualize the conflict differently than the American Jewish left, where contentious divides yawn between Zionist and anti-Zionist positions and other rhetorical fault lines. The framework is alien to most Israelis, who “don’t necessarily think in these concepts,” Rubinstein said.
“At this point, I don’t even know what people mean here when they say ‘Zionism,’” Glezerman said. The terms and rhetorical battles are “much more relevant to identity politics here and it’s not really a discourse that we need to take a part in,” she said. The activists do not use any flags at their protests.
Non-Israeli groups on both sides also seemed disconnected from the actual situation on the ground in Israel and Gaza, and did not include Israeli voices, the activists said.
“When American Jews are calling, ‘Not in our name,’ Israelis stand on the side and say, ‘Who says it’s in your name?’” Herman said. “The State of Israel now is really trying to protect its citizens. It’s probably not doing a good job of it, as always, but that’s the realpolitik.”
As for the pro-Palestinian protests that draw thousands to the streets of New York on a regular basis, the Israeli leftists reject them for condoning violence and atrocities against Israelis. The protest group leading most of the events, Within Our Lifetime, endorsed the Oct. 7 attacks and marches with banners that read, “By any means necessary.” Some anti-Zionist Jewish groups have joined or endorsed the events, such as student groups from the City University of New York. The Anti-Occupation Bloc activists are overwhelmingly opposed to joining the protests, despite their shared support for Palestinians.
“Do you think it’s ok to kill all those people in the name of national liberation?” Herman said. “This is your vision for the future? Do you even have a vision for the future?”
Pro-Palestinian protesters near Bryant Park following a high school student walkout in New York City, Nov. 9, 2023. Many Israeli leftists reject the large pro-Palestinian groups for condoning violence and atrocities against Israelis. (Luke Tress)
“You have so many things to say, all those words, like Israeli colonialism and settler violence and this and that, but no stakes in the game,” she said.
At the Columbus Circle rally, several hecklers in keffiyehs, the traditional Palestinian garment, shouted “Free Palestine” at the protesters, apparently identifying them as Israeli or pro-Israel supporters of the government. The Israeli demonstrators voiced their assent and responded with chants of “Ceasefire now.” The hecklers then switched to shouting “From the river to the sea” and “F–k Israel.”
The Anti-Occupation Bloc decided to hold another rally in early December at the Brooklyn Museum. The somber event was billed as a vigil for a ceasefire and release of hostages. The organizers said their demands also included humanitarian aid for Gaza, protection for West Bank Palestinians facing retribution from Jewish settlers and support for Arab citizens of Israel and activists on the ground. Glezerman said the different groups on all sides had omitted “parts of the narrative,” and that the Anti-Occupation Bloc was a “third alternative.”
The activists also said they have an opportunity to amplify the message in New York, where their leftist views are more widely accepted than in Israel, which has shifted toward the right in recent years and even more so since Oct. 7. Last month, Israeli police blocked a ceasefire rally in Tel Aviv, but later allowed the event after court intervention. Police in Israel have also detained social media commentators for backing the Palestinians, saying their posts could incite terrorism.
The leftists’ views, especially in calling for a ceasefire, remain unpopular both in Israel and among U.S. Jews. A poll released earlier this month found that 72% of American Jews approved of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks. Support for leftist parties in the Knesset has cratered in recent years, and has remained low since the war, according to recent polls. The dovish Meretz party did not win enough votes to secure Knesset representation in the last election. The bloc is also a small part of the tens of thousands of Israelis in New York, with around 270 members in its WhatsApp group today.
Israelis and supporters, outside the United Nations, rally in support of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, Oct. 24, 2023. Many Israelis abroad rally around the hostages, but consider calls for a ceasefire premature. (Luke Tress)
Avital Shimshowitz, 54, an activist with the mainstream Israeli protest movement in New York, said she knows the Anti-Occupation Bloc protesters, and is “with the bloc in my heart.” But while she is also against the occupation, Shimshowitz has refrained from joining the group’s events because she believes they place too much blame on Israel for the current hostilities. She noted that the Anti-Occupation Bloc’s invitations for their events call for a ceasefire, the release of hostages and Netanyahu’s resignation, but don’t make demands on the Palestinian side.
“There’s no mention of Hamas, there’s no mention of any terror group, and for me, the terror group took our hostages and is also holding Palestinians hostage in Gaza,” said Shimshowitz, who protested against Netanyahu as part of the pro-democracy group UnXeptable and the Anti-Occupation Bloc before Oct. 7, and is also active in the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. “It points at Israel as the only player that can end this.”
Shimshowitz joined the Anti-Occupation Bloc for a protest in August after a settler killed a Palestinian and during the Celebrate Israel Parade, “but right now I don’t think that their message aligns with what needs to be done,” she said.
Beyond the immediate war, the Anti-Occupation Bloc activists are looking past a potential ceasefire toward a long-term solution to the conflict, even if the way forward is not yet clear. The repeated rounds of violence in recent decades were evidence, they said, that Israel’s approach was not working and new leadership was needed.
“We can’t continue doing this over and over again and expect something to change,” said Rubinstein, adding that most of the activists saw their future back in Israel. “We have to go back to the negotiating table to push for a solution, to be creative.”
The activists said that all sides need to accept that both Israelis and Palestinians are remaining on the land and will need to coexist. They also hope to enlist more American Jews in their movement, Herman said.
“I believe in a better future and it has to come with us demanding it,” she said.
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The post Israeli leftists in New York chart their own path with calls for a ceasefire appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’
Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living on April 24, 2025. Photo: Chen Schimmel
Oswiecim, Poland — Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz, the infamous former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, for the first time on Thursday, joining Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the annual March of the Living.
The march from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau — the Nazis’ largest death camp where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II — took place on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day and included 80 Holocaust survivors, many of whom were also death march survivors, to mark 80 years since the liberation of the camps.
March of the Living president Phyllis Greenberg Heideman addressed the survivors, who were seated next to the gate bearing the notorious inscription, “Work sets you free.”
“It’s a strange thing to say, but we welcome you to Auschwitz,” she said. “You are the true heroes. We will treasure your legacy forever.”
Almog Meir Jan and his mother Orit. Almog was rescued by the IDF on June 5 during the Arnon Mission. Photo: Chen Schimmel
Standing outside the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz I, recently released hostage Eli Sharabi said, “The Holocaust was unlike anything else — we will never forget and never forgive.”
“But our presence here is the triumph of the Jewish spirit. The Jewish people sanctify life, not death. I endured horrors in enemy captivity, but I chose life. That gives me hope to get up each morning and begin rebuilding,” he added.
Sharabi, whose wife and daughters were murdered during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, was released in February after nearly 500 days in captivity. His emaciated appearance as he was paraded through Gaza on his release led to comparisons with concentration camp survivors.
Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran broke down after seeing Sharabi. The two embraced for several minutes. “Seeing him in real life, in this place, just made it all suddenly seem very close. This is no longer something that happened 80 years ago; it’s continuing until this day,” Shukran told The Algemeiner.
Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran embracing former hostage Eli Sharabi. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
In remarks to reporters prior to the march, Herzog called the return of the hostages a “universal human imperative.”
“With a broken heart, I remind us all that although after the Holocaust we vowed, ‘Never again,’ today, even as we stand here, the souls of dozens of Jews again ‘yearn within a cage,’ ‘thirsting for water and for freedom,’ as 59 of our brothers and sisters are held by terrorist murderers in Gaza, in a horrific crime against humanity,” Herzog said, referring to the hostages kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion who remain in captivity.
His Polish counterpart, President Andrzej Duda, said the march was “a dramatic call of ‘never again.’ No more hatred, no more discrimination, no more antisemitism.”
He called for “all wars in the Middle East to end,” and for a two-state solution, which he said was the “most rational solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] that gives hope for achieving stable and lasting peace.”
The two leaders signed the visitors’ book and laid a wreath at Auschwitz’s Black Wall, where the Nazis executed prisoners.
At the march’s opening ceremony, the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, lit one of six candles — representing the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis — and addressed rising antisemitism in the world.
“Jews all over the world fear walking streets with a kippah and it’s unacceptable. College students are being attacked verbally and physically,” he told The Algemeiner.
He praised US President Donald Trump for “combating this scourge.”
“There’s a new sheriff in town. It’s my hope the rest of the world can look to him to see how to support and defend the Jewish community against these vile attacks,” he said.
Matt Brooks, chief executive officer of the Republican Jewish Coalition, with Malcolm Hoenlein, vice chairman emeritus of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
In Block 5, where thousands of victims’ eyeglasses are displayed behind glass, Laly Dery told a delegation of Israeli teenagers from the national civil service about her son, Sgt. First Class (res.) Saadia, who fell in battle in Gaza in June.
“Just like my son, who served the country with every fiber of his being, you have earned the enormous privilege of serving the state of Israel,” Dery said.
Derai’s words resonated with Sara Bisan, the only member of the national service delegation not wearing an Israeli flag. Instead, Bisan wore the distinctive multi-colored flag of the Druze community to which she belongs.
“I feel her pain, and it hurts,” Bisan said, reflecting on the death of her own friend from the northern Druze village of Kfar Yarka, who was also killed in Gaza.
“But our people, the Druze and the Jews, share a lot, including a love of Israel. I also feel that serving the state of Israel is a privilege,” she added.
Sara Bisan. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
Twelve thousand participants marched the 1.7 miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau for the main ceremony, which was cut short this year due to heavy rain.
As thunder echoed overhead, released hostage Agam Berger played the theme from “Schindler’s List” on a 150-year-old violin rescued during the Holocaust. Daniel Weiss, a survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri whose father was murdered on Oct. 7 and whose mother was abducted and later killed in Gaza, performed a musical rendition of the psalm Shir Lamaalot alongside her.
“The Lord will guard you from all evil; He will guard your soul,” Weiss sang, his voice quavering.
The post ‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert
Eyal Golan. Photo: Screenshot
France’s leading far-left party has called for the cancellation of Israeli pop star Eyal Golan’s upcoming concert in Paris, describing him as “a true mouthpiece for supporters of genocide” in Gaza.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the La France Insoumise party (LFI — “France Unbowed”), led by leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, urged the National Assembly — the lower house of the French Parliament — to ban Golan’s upcoming concert, claiming that he “should not come to sing the praises of genocide in Paris.”
“We call for a broad mobilization to prevent this event from taking place,” LFI lawmakers wrote in the statement, referring to Golan’s concert scheduled for May 20. “We ask the prefect to ban it immediately.”
“No one should come to Paris to sing hymns to the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the statement continued.
According to the party, the 54-year-old singer called for “the extermination of the Palestinian people” in a social media post the day after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which he wrote, “Leave no soul alive.”
LFI also said that Golan “repeated the statement a week later, before receiving support from far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir,” who serves as Israel’s national security minister.
In their statement, LFI lawmakers claimed that Golan’s concert, expected to gather more than 4,500 people, “constitutes a real voice for genocide supporters.”
“France cannot tolerate such an unnecessary insult to the thousands of Gaza victims and their loved ones,” the statement read.
In response to these accusations, Liam Productions, the event organizer, denounced the push to cancel Golan’s concert as antisemitic and expressed their eagerness to meet the Jewish community in France, promising a “unifying and special evening.”
“On Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we remember the consequences of staying silent in the face of hate, far-left parties in France seek to boycott an Israeli artist simply because he is Israeli,” the statement read.
“This is not freedom of expression — it is antisemitism disguised as morality. The people of Israel will not be silent, will not apologize, and will not stop singing.”
Mélenchon and his party have a long history of pushing anti-Israel policies and, according to Jewish leaders, of making antisemitic comments — such as suggesting that Jews killed Jesus, echoing a false claim that was used to justify antisemitic violence and discrimination throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.
The French diplomat has been criticized by French Jews as a threat to their community, as well as to those who support Israel.
Mélenchon has previously described the French Jewish community as “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest.” He has also urged the French government to recognize a “Palestinian state.”
In the wake of the Hamas onslaught on Israel, Mélenchon and his party issued a statement calling the attacks “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” in response to the ongoing Israeli “occupation.”
Last year, Mélenchon openly expressed support for Hezbollah on social media, as the Iran-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon continued to clash with Israel.
“Mass killing in Lebanon by Netanyahu’s invading army,” Melenchon wrote in a post on X, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The toll is getting worse by the hour. Full support for the national resistance of the Lebanese.”
France has experienced a disturbing surge in antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7 atrocities, with 1,570 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded last year.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews.
“LFI has given antisemitism a political endorsement,” CRIF president Yonathan Arfi told the French publication Le Point last year. “We observe this toxic porosity between criticism of Israel and the ostracization of French Jews. The Palestinian cause becomes a license to hate.”
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent in France, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
The post French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education
US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon shakes hands with Annette Albright next to US President Donald Trump during an event to sign executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, April 23, 2025. Photo: Leah Millis via Reuters Connect.
US President Donald Trump has signed a seismic executive order to strengthen federal law which colleges and universities have long circumvented to avoid reporting donations they receive from illiberal foreign governments and individuals.
“Protecting American educational, cultural, and national security interests requires transparency regarding foreign funds flowing to American higher education and research institutions,” Trump said in the order, which was signed in the Oval Office in the presence of the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on Wednesday. “It is the policy of my administration to end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions, protect the marketplace of ideas from propaganda sponsored by foreign governments, and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.”
The executive order noted that during Trump’s first term in office, the Education Department launched investigations of 19 higher education institutions suspected of concealing foreign donations and any undue influence the immense sums may have gained the country from which they originated — inquiries that led to the disclosure of $6.5 billion worth of unreported gifts. The Biden administration, he said, “undid” that work, “hindering public access to information on foreign gifts and contracts.”
The remainder of the order enumerates enforcement duties delegated to McMahon, which include reversing Biden-era policies which countenanced lax observance of the law — Section 117 of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 — updating the public on the department’s findings, and impounding federal funds appropriated to institutions that continue to shroud their foreign donations behind a veil of secrecy and corporate spin.
“Unfortunately, in the last four years, the Biden administration undermined the structures the president built to do this critical work, allowing nations like China and Qatar to funnel billions of dollars to US universities with little to no oversight,” McMahon said in a statement. “This financial infiltration enabled foreign governments to steal taxpayer-funded intellectual property and reshape how our elite campuses teach about Israel and the Middle East.”
Foreign money in higher education is an issue to which scholars and nonprofit groups have called attention for years, arguing that it is an instrument of hostile powers that aim to distort US foreign policy by exposing students to propaganda or other ideas which undermine faith in liberal values such as free markets, limited government, and freedom of the press. Some of it is used to rehabilitate the reputations of authoritarian governments, a tactic which, experts argue, effectively converts the openness of American society into a force of its own self-subversion.
For example, according to the 2017 National Association of Scholars (NAS) report “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for years planted “Confucius Institutes” at universities across the US, teaching students that Taiwan is Chinese territory while censoring darker moments in the regime’s history, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre that killed thousands of Chinese citizens. The institutes, the report added, came with substantial financial benefits, such as extra funds for the University at Buffalo’s Asian studies department and “opera costumes and materials in the lobby of Binghamton University.”
At other times, the Confucius Institutes were allegedly used as bases from which to conduct espionage and theft of American research and intellectual property.
NAS president Peter Wood told The Algemeiner on Thursday that Trump’s executive order is the right move, but that higher education will “resist” complying with it.
“What is at stake here is not just compliance with a good accounting principle. What is really at stake is the contempt with which many college and university presidents regard America’s national interest,” Wood said. “Allowing our universities to become beholden to the Chinese Community Party endangers Americans. The National Association of Scholars has helped to track the theft of intellectual property, the duplicity of American researchers, and the diversion research programs all under the influence of Chinese funding. China is far from the only source of such subversive funding, but it is by far the largest source.”
He added, “President Trump’s forceful executive order will go a long way towards curing this problem. We can be under no illusion, however, that America’s colleges and universities will cheerfully comply. They have a long record of ignoring lawful requirements for such disclosure and they are now more eager than ever to demonstrate their defiance of America’s laws. In light of other executive orders against [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and other forms of academic malfeasance, dozens of prominent research universities are openly declaring that they intend to resist.”
NAS has recorded copious data on foreign funding of higher education, notably in the Foreign Donor Database it created in 2024 that led to the uncovering of vast sums the Qatari government had pumped into American universities — Cornell University received over $322 million, for example, from the Qatar National Research Fund between 2015 and 2018 — to promote pro-Hamas propaganda.
Alex Joffe, anthropologist and editor of BDS Monitor for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), told The Algemeiner that Qatar has “given billions to universities, including to share their Middle East studies program which then in turn develop and disseminate K-12 curriculums which are dramatically anti-Israel, antisemitic, and pro-Islamist.”
The donation of billions of unreported dollars to US institutions of higher education is strongly correlated with an erosion of liberal democratic norms and increased antisemitism on college campuses, according to a 2023 report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) titled, “The Corruption of the American Mind.”
From 2015-2020, the report noted, schools that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than schools that did not accept such donations. The largest donor it named is Qatar, which former US President Joe Biden described in 2022 as a “major non-NATO ally.” From 2014-2019, Qatar gave American universities a striking $2.7 billion in undocumented funds.
Additionally, students attending universities that received foreign funding witnessed antisemitism “significantly more often” than those attending schools that did not.
“A lack of transparency in funding reporting occurred in tandem with antidemocratic norms and antisemitism across American institutions of higher education,” the report said. “A massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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