S.T. Salah, 12/2/26
This audit examines how elite philanthropy, wealthy individuals, family foundations, and corporate sponsors has been used to build and protect pro-Israel infrastructures in universities, museums, and public culture, and to punish or deter speech that centres Palestinian rights. It identifies specific donors, organisations, and institutions, and shows how their money has been used to shape what can and cannot be said about Palestine, especially after 1967 and during the Gaza genocide.
From 1948 onward, diaspora fundraising structures functioned as political infrastructure, not charity. Established channels such as the Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) and allied fundraising bodies mobilised donor money for land and state-building projects that directly intersected with dispossession and permanent demographic engineering after 1948, while Palestinian refugees were pushed into long-term dependency on relief. JNF’s own institutional history describes its land-acquisition mission and its reliance on global fundraising, embedding philanthropic money into territorial outcomes rather than neutral relief.
By the 1950s, financial instruments were also built to internationalise state support. Israel Bonds, launched in 1951 via the Development Corporation for Israel, institutionalised a diaspora investment pipeline framed as development but functionally tied to underwriting state capacity during years when refugee return and restitution were denied. The point for this audit is mechanism: philanthropy and quasi-philanthropy were structured early as durable, transnational support systems for a state project, while Palestinian narrative and legal claims were treated as a reputational threat to be managed.
From the late 1960s onward, US and European donors increasingly treated support for Israel as a core part of their philanthropic identity. By the 1990s, this was institutionalised into a dense ecosystem of foundations, campus coalitions, trips, think tanks, and legal NGOs whose explicit mandate was to strengthen attachment to Israel and counter Palestinian narratives. The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies are a central pillar of this system. On their own site they describe a strategic portfolio for Israel education and engagement and campus ecosystem investment, including support for organisations such as Hillel and the Israel on Campus Coalition, designed to expand pro-Israel programming capacity inside universities. AEN, fiscally sponsored through allied campus infrastructure, defines its mission around mobilising faculty and administrators to counter what it frames as delegitimisation of Zionism and Israel. In practice, this means a donor-funded network inside universities that treats sharp criticism of Zionism and the Israeli state as a problem to be managed, not an academic position to be debated.
The Adelson family’s philanthropy illustrates how this works on the level of political socialisation. Through the Adelson Family Foundation they have been described across multiple investigations and organisational materials as a dominant funder of Birthright Israel, donating at very large scale to expand free trips designed to foster emotional attachment to Israel among young Jewish adults. Hillel and allied organisations describe how such funding enabled campus-facing Israel programming through fellows and sponsored activities across dozens of universities. This is not neutral cultural exchange. It is state-aligned narrative delivery under the banner of philanthropy, aimed at future professional and political strata.
The Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation is explicit about political intent. Its published materials frame its grantmaking around combating what it defines as anti-Israel activity on campuses and list grantees that include organisations engaged in naming, shaming, and litigation strategies against Palestine advocacy, including the Lawfare Project and StopAntisemitism-linked campaigning. This is philanthropy used not to broaden debate but to police the boundary of permissible speech, with complaints, pressure campaigns, and legal threats functioning as the enforcement layer.
Alongside positive programming came a project to redefine antisemitism in ways that serve state interests. Israel-aligned advocacy groups, often supported by the same donors, promoted a new antisemitism framework that shifts institutional focus from hatred of Jews as Jews to robust criticism of Israel and Zionism. They successfully pushed the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, with examples that include certain Israel-focused speech, into universities, city councils, and cultural bodies, then used it operationally through complaints, investigations, and funding pressure. The mechanism is not abstract: donor-funded networks provide the template language, train administrators, fund “campus climate” apparatus, and then trigger enforcement against staff and students who name apartheid, settler colonialism, or genocide, even while those terms appear in reports by major human rights organisations and UN mechanisms.
The capture becomes most visible when donors move from funding to punishment. After 7 October 2023, the Gaza genocide triggered the largest wave of campus Palestine solidarity in US history. It also triggered open donor revolt. At Harvard, major donors publicly escalated pressure, and the Wexner Foundation ended its relationship with Harvard Kennedy School in October 2023, explicitly linking the break to Harvard’s response. This is a textbook donor sanction: withdrawal of institutional money to force political discipline. The donor pressure environment was widely reported as a central factor in governance instability during 2023–2024, making clear that Palestine is treated as a trigger issue where donors intervene directly in university administration and public positioning.
At other elite universities the pattern was similar. Columbia University faced sustained donor and political pressure during Gaza protests, and US university administrations repeatedly cited donor relations and reputational risk while deciding on policing, suspensions, and expulsions. The audit point is mechanism: philanthropic dependency converts universities into compliance institutions, where administrators pre-emptively narrow speech to protect funding, then present the outcome as neutral governance.
Blacklist operations take philanthropy-driven narrative control to a punitive, personalised level. Canary Mission compiles dossiers on students, academics, and activists and publishes them online, branding targets as antisemites or terrorist sympathisers for involvement in pro-Palestine organising. StopAntisemitism-style campaigns operate similarly by targeting individuals and pressuring employers. These projects do not merely “criticise”. They create long-tail professional harm through searchable reputational tagging, employer intimidation, and institutional risk escalation, producing predictable self-censorship. The audit finding is not that donors alone run these operations, but that donor ecosystems fund, legitimise, and amplify them, while universities and employers treat the resulting smear output as actionable “risk information.”
In the arts and museum sector, donor capture operates through sponsorships and trustee roles that come with unspoken red lines. The Zabludowicz Art Trust and its co-founded Outset Contemporary Art Fund, linked to Poju and Anita Zabludowicz, have long been major funders and partners of London’s Tate galleries. In late 2024, large numbers of artists and art workers signed open letters urging Tate to cut ties with these bodies, arguing that donor relationships were functioning as artwashing and reputational shielding during Gaza’s destruction. Whether an institution accepts that characterisation is not the audit question. The audit question is leverage: major institutions became structurally dependent on sponsors whose political associations made full Palestinian truth-telling institutionally costly.
The broader UK arts world has seen similar conflicts. In 2024, Baillie Gifford faced sustained public pressure and withdrawals connected to sponsorship and investment concerns, leading multiple festivals to sever relationships. The practical lesson is simple: donors can shape cultural programming by attaching money to reputational conditions, and institutions frequently respond by avoiding “high-risk” Palestine speech rather than protecting it.
Germany provides a concentrated example of donor-state-cultural convergence. Since 2019, the Bundestag’s BDS resolution has operated as an institutional permission slip for venue denial and funding withdrawal, and German cultural bodies repeatedly cancelled events and talks involving artists and scholars who expressed support for Palestinian rights, citing antisemitism allegations and funding risk. This is not philanthropy alone, but philanthropy strengthens it by financing the complaint infrastructure and by signalling that funding will follow “safe” compliance, while dissent risks institutional punishment.
After 7 October 2023, the repression layer intensified across borders through policing and administrative powers. Entry denials, event cancellations, and investigation threats targeted speakers and witnesses whose value was evidentiary. Al Jazeera’s 2017 investigation into the UK Lobby recorded an Israeli embassy official discussing plans to “take down” a UK minister viewed as critical of settlements, followed by official fallout, showing that diplomatic-political influence and narrative enforcement operate in tandem with the wider ecosystem that donors help underwrite.
All of this sits on top of subtler forms of capture inside universities and cultural bodies. Philanthropic money builds Israel Studies chairs, sponsors dialogue centres, and funds trips and fellowships tied to frameworks that depoliticise occupation and erase the language of settler colonialism and apartheid. Foundations are often willing to support Palestinian or Arab projects when framed as coexistence or conflict management; when scholars or artists insist on naming perpetrators, mechanisms, and legal categories, access to grants, venues, and publication becomes materially harder.
Digital platforms became an enforcement multiplier during 2023–2026 because Gaza evidence was produced under siege while foreign journalists faced access restrictions. Human Rights Watch documented patterns of suppression on Meta platforms affecting Palestinian content, and major reporting summarised the scale and repeatability of these censorship patterns during the war. The audit mechanism is evidentiary: suppress the documentation stream, then claim the record is insufficient.
For Palestinians and their allies, the harms are concrete. Students and academics risk blacklisting, career damage, and immigration consequences when they speak plainly about Israeli crimes because donor-funded watchdogs and lawfare groups build dossiers and pressure institutions to punish them. Universities warp academic freedom around donor sensitivities, disciplining and cancelling Palestine solidarity while accepting philanthropically funded infrastructures whose explicit aim is to counter criticism of Israel. Museums and festivals that depend on donors tied to Israel’s military and economic project become reluctant to platform Palestinian narratives or to acknowledge apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide for fear of losing funding and facing hostile media campaigns.
This audit does not claim that all Jewish or Israeli-related philanthropy is malign, nor that Palestinians are never funded. It shows something more specific: across 1948–2026, an overlapping network of donors, foundations, and sponsor-driven cultural governance repeatedly converted money into narrative boundaries. Where Palestinian rights advocacy threatened the legitimacy of dispossession, occupation, apartheid, or genocidal conduct, philanthropic leverage was used to shape curricula, punish speakers, police institutions, and manufacture professional risk. The actors are named, the mechanisms are operational, and the consequences are measurable. Under the cover of generosity and support for education and culture, philanthropy has repeatedly functioned as a weapon of narrative control, protecting a regime of occupation, apartheid, and genocide from the full force of honest description.