Several student groups that have organized protest “camps” at major US universities have received money from activist billionaire George Soros, the New York Post reported on Friday.
Protests that began earlier this month at Columbia University in New York City have since spread to 40 universities and colleges in the US and Canada, including Harvard, Yale and UC Berkeley. The Columbia protest was organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Within Our Lifetime.
All three have received funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations through a network of nonprofits, the Post claimed, citing its own research. Other major donors to the student groups were identified as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and former Wall Street banker Felice Gelman.
None of the groups responded to the Post’s requests for comment.
The outlet also named three “fellows” of the Soros-funded US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), paid several thousand dollars to organize campaigns on campus. Two of them are former interns for congressional Democrats.
Activists have demanded that universities “divest” from companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as well as Lockheed Martin, that have contracts with the Israeli government. They also want the US government to stop giving any more money to Israel, citing its “genocide” of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Leader of the pro-Israel group Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, blamed the protests on “campus proxies” of Iran in an interview with MSNBC this week.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that “anti-Semitic mobs have taken over leading universities” in the US and were calling for “the annihilation of Israel.” He compared the protesters to German Nazis in the 1930s and said their actions had to be “condemned and condemned unequivocally.”
Israel sent troops into Gaza after a series of deadly raids by Hamas on October 7 last year, killing an estimated 1,200 Israelis. Netanyahu has vowed to completely destroy the Gaza-based Palestinian group. So far, over 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli military operation and another 80,000 wounded. Much of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed as well.