Earlier this month, the famed Israeli satirical television show ‘Eretz Nehederet’ (‘A Wonderful Country’) aired a skit about students from Columbia University in New York who unashamedly support Hamas. As is the way with satire, the skit was exaggerated, but it also highlighted the deep disdain felt in Israel when large parts of the extreme fringes of the progressive movement in the United States automatically side with a murderous terrorist organization.

One organization that seems to have crossed a red line and raised a storm of protest in the U.S. is Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish-American organization that did not go out of its way to condemn the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. JVP is most active on large campuses on the East and West coasts of the United States. It gets its funding from several large foundations, it supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel and supports political candidates who espouse anti-Israel positions – and, in some cases, outright antisemitism.

An analysis of JVP’s account on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), as well as the demonstrations its members attend and the interviews they have given since October 7, reveals a position that does not display much understanding or empathy toward Israel’s right to defend itself. Most of the organization’s criticism is leveled against Israel and its military operations in the Gaza Strip. The immediate causes of the war – the massacre committed by Hamas on Black Saturday, the kidnapping of innocent civilians, including children, women and the elderly, the atrocities that were committed, like rape and mutilation – are barely mentioned.

In its first statement, on October 8, JVP described the unfolding of the terror attack and the war but failed to condemn Hamas clearly and categorically. Instead, it immediately went on the offensive: “The Root of violence Is oppression,” was the headline of the statement, which went on to state that, “Israeli apartheid and occupation – and United States complicity in that oppression – are the source of all this violence.” In a subsequent statement, issued on October 11, the organization wrote that it agrees with Palestinian human rights organization that Hamas committed war crimes on October 7, but this message was notably absent from future statements and the demonstrations organized by JVP. The organization’s response and the full statement from October 11 appear at the end of this article.

JVP describes itself as an organization founded on “Jewish values and Jewish tradition” but it is rather hard to see exactly what values it is referring to. Despite the horrific images of the horrific pogroms that Hamas perpetrated in the Israeli communities close to the Gaza border, JVP opted to cite Jewish history only in the context of Israel’s military response in Gaza. Slogans like “Never again means never again – for anyone” and “Stop the Palestinian genocide” appear frequently in the organization’s publications and at rallies that it organizes in conjunction with another group called If Not Now.

According to various media reports, another slogan that is often chanted at rallies JVP activists participate in, is “From the river to the sea,  Palestine will be free".

Prof. Shi Davidai, an Israeli American assistant professor at Columbia University’s business school, says that he often sees JVP activists participating in demonstrations organized by Students for Justice in. Palestine.  “I have a big problem with JVP,” he says. “On the one hand, they’re Jewish, but they participate in pro-Hamas rallies. I have barely seen them criticize Hamas at all. Even if that’s not exactly how they see the situation, they participate in demonstrations organized by SJP, where people chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ In my opinion, it doesn’t matter if you’re holding a swastika in your own hands or whether the people standing next to you are holding one,” he adds metaphorically. “It’s the same thing.”

On November 10, Columbia University announced that it was suspending JVP and SJP as official student groups until the end of the fall semester. According to the statement, both groups “repeatedly violated University policies related to holding campus events” and holding events that included “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” The upshot of the suspension is that the two groups will no longer be able to hold events or receive university funding. The suspension will only be lifted if they commit to complying with university policies. JVP responded to the decision on its website, calling it “an appalling act of censorship and intimidation by the [university] administration.”

“There are also some Jewish lecturers who signed a letter which more or less expressed support for Hamas, calling what Hamas did ‘an appropriate military response’,” says Davidai, who last month slammed Columbia for its failure to condemn the October 7 terror attacks. Those lecturers, he says, are acting as fig leaves for people who are antisemitic. “They say ‘there are Jews with us’,” he adds.

According to Nadav Tamir, the executive director of J Street Israel, JVP has also been highly critical of the organization he heads. J Street, whose members are pro-Israel Jewish Americans who support the two-state solution, published a harsh condemnation of Hamas’ atrocities on October 7, describing them as a crime against humanity and backing Israel’s right to defend itself – even to launch a military operation, while taking humanitarian concerns into account.

“Their rationale is that the tendency of Jews to see themselves as victims has not been true for many years,” he says. “So, their feeling is that they, as Jews, have to assume moral responsibility for Israel. I have not met a single one of them who justified the kind of massacre that Hamas committed but their message focuses on Jewish morality and why we, as Jews, have to act differently. There are a lot of nuances here that are sometimes hard to understand in Israel.” According to Tamir, the prevalent spirit in JVP is support for one democratic state between the river and the sea. “If the Palestinians are a majority – that means there’s no Israel; and if Israel has a majority – then there’s a democratic majority for everyone.”

According to Hagar Sides, a social media content strategist who spent five years in the United States where one of her clients was the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta, JVP is especially popular among American Jews who have no connection to Israel. That is, people who have no family in Israel and have never visited the country. “As far as they are concerned, they are simply Jews. Like someone is Mexican or Latino,” she says. “After Donald Trump won the election, they became more extreme,” she says, adding that in recent years the anti-Israel sentiment voiced by JVP has been adopted by other movements within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, such as the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter.

“The thing is that there is now a total loss of values,” she says. “With all the atrocities committed on October 7, there is no logic behind a woman who fights for her sexual identity or for her right to bodily autonomy – to also be saying ‘Free Palestine’.”

JVP defines itself as an anti-Zionist organization and as part of the international Palestinian solidarity movement. It was established in 1996 by students from the University of California, Berkeley, where its headquarters have been ever since.

From BDS to American Aid

JVP defines itself as an anti-Zionist organization and as part of the international Palestinian solidarity movement. It was established in 1996 by students from the University of California, Berkeley, where its headquarters have been ever since. The executive director is Stefanie Fox and, according to its website, JVP is active in more than 30 states across the U.S. Among its founders and past and present activists are prominent intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, playwright Tony Kushner (whose seminal work ‘Angels in America’ was recently stages by Israel’s Cameri Theater) and Prof. Judith Butler, who served for many years on the organization’s academic advisory board. Jewish-Canadian writer Naomi Klein – author of best-selling books “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine” – served on JVP’s board for 15 years and continues to support the organization  - including at demonstrations it organized after the outbreak of the war. Israeli Eran Efrati is one of the most senior officials in JVP, where he works as director of campaigns and partnerships. He was previously active with Breaking the Silence but has had no contact with the organization for several years.

Most of JVP’s activities focus, as mentioned, is related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it stresses American involvement. One of the goals of the organization, according to its website, is to reduce the military aid that Washington provides Israel, arguing that it facilitates the perpetuation of the occupation. The United States recently approved the largest aid package to Israel since 1979, totaling around $14 billion – which is exactly the kind of thing that JVP activists are so opposed to. “We focus on the United States because of the critical role it plays in the Middle East, including the large sums of military aid which fund the Israeli occupation,” the group’s website states.

JVP first came to prominence in the mid-2000s, when it came out in support of the BDS campaign being waged by an international Palestinian organization. In its early days, the BDS movement only sought to boycott products manufactured in Israeli settlements, which some left-wing Zionists also supported. JVP activists also participated in campaigns specifically targeting companies operating in the West Bank. In response, Israel passed the so-called “Boycott Law” in 2011, imposing civil penalties against Israelis who call for a boycott of the settlements.

The BDS campaign, however, expanded over the years and started to target any company doing business with Israel in general. Currently, even multinational companies like McDonalds – whose Israeli franchisee stated explicitly that it would not operate in the occupied territories – is on the BDS hitlist. The same is true of SodaStream, which, under pressure from the BDS movement, relocated its factory from Mishor Adumim, which is on the other side of the Green Line, to Rahat. As far as Israel is concerned, JVP’s support for the BDS campaign was one of the reasons that its activists were denied entry to the country in 2018.

Since then, JVP has backed campaigns against multinationals operating in Israel, irrespective of whether they do so in the occupied territories or within the Green Line. For example, the organization supported a petition started by Ariel Koren, a Google employee who called on the company to annul a $1.2 billion contract it signed to build a server farm in Israel as part of the massive Nimbus project. A similar petition was launched against Amazon, which is part of the project. According to Koren, she was forced to resign from Google for having launched the petition.

Jewish organizations in the United States, especially the Anti-Defamation League, are keeping worried tabs on JVP’s activity. Several years ago, the ADL even added JVP to its list of the top 10 anti-Israel groups operating in the United States. In June 2022, it even argued that a cartoon published by JVP had overtly antisemitic characteristics. The image shows IDF soldiers apparently drinking the blood of their Palestinian victims, who are laying on the ground all around. The ADL said that the image “plays into the classic antisemitic blood libel trope.”

An article published last month by the ADL’s Center on Extremism detailing which groups were demonstrating against Israel against the backdrop of its war on Hamas argued that JVP’s ideology could lead to an increase in antisemitism and that occasionally, as in the case of the abovementioned cartoon, the group resorts to antisemitic tropes. The article also mentioned a comment in January 2023 by an unnamed senior member of JVP, who said that “the U.S. government itself is occupied by Zionist forces.” This, the ADL said, “plays into tropes about Zionists and power.”

According to Hagar Sides, a social media content strategist who spent five years in the United States where one of her clients was the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta, JVP is especially popular among American Jews who have no connection to Israel.

A $4 Million Annual Budget

JVP is an organization that relies on donations and it has an annual budget of around $4 million. One of the largest donors to the group is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Since 2019, the famed philanthropic foundation has donated $490,000 to JVP in three installments. The most recent of them, totaling $150,000, was handed over in June this year. Ironically, the money was given to JVP as part of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Peacebuilding initiative, the goals of which include helping to lower tensions in global conflict zones.

Most of the donations to JVP over the years have come from foundations that operate as funnels for transferring money (donor advisory funds). The donors themselves are American citizens or organizations who give money to these foundations primarily for technical reasons: the foundations deal with the clearing and transfer of funds and they issue permits allowing the donor to avoid paying capital gains tax. In many cases, these foundations also have donors and philanthropic activity of their own. This means that, based on reports to the U.S. authorities, it is impossible to know the source of the donation.

One such example is the Tides Foundation, which is funded in part by Peter Buffett, the son of billionaire Warren Buffett. In 2018 and 2019, the Tides Foundation donated $175,000 to JVP. It is not known how much of that, if any, came from donations and how much came from the foundation itself. Among the other such foundations that have given money to JVP are those managed by investment bank Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab and the Vanguard Public Foundation.

One direct donation that JVP received – not via a foundation – came from TIAA (formerly known as TIAA-CREF), which is one of the largest pension funds in the United States. Since 2018, it has been donating $300,000 a year to JVP. Before that, TIAA was the target of one of JVP’s campaigns, over its investment in companies like Caterpillar, Motorola and Elbit, which, according to a video published by JVP activists in 2010, “help to prop up the occupation of Palestine.”

Another foundation which transfers money to JVP is the Jewish Communal Fund, the largest of its kind in the Jewish-American world. Over the past decade, a total of $100,000 has been given to JVP via the Jewish Communal Fund, most of which came between 2015 and 2019. This is a rather odd decision for the JCF, given that it also works with the largest Jewish organizations in the United States, such as the UJA-Federation of New York, which say that they are dedicated to protecting the security and welfare of Jewish communities.

Shomrim asked the Jewish Communal Fund to explain how this fits in with JVP and its ideology but received no response.

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Political Lobbying and Congressional Endorsements

In recent years, JVP has also become more involved in American politics. Like other civil-society organizations and lobby groups, it is trying to promote politicians and activists who identify with its positions. To this end, it set up an organization called JVP Action, which is its Political Action Committee. In other words, one of its goals is to get donations to political candidates – donations for which there are no tax concessions. This is how billionaire George Soros managed to donate $150,000 in 2021 through an organization called the Open Society Institute.

Sources close to JVP say that the organization decided several years ago to throw its support behind Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, three Democratic members of Congress who belong to a group of progressive lawmakers known as The Squad, which represents a rising force on the left fringes of the Democratic Party. JVP also endorsed Mike Siegel, a Jewish pro-Palestinian activist who eventually lost his election.

Last week, Tlaib was the subject of an extremely rare rebuke from Congress for what her colleagues described as her “support for the eradication of Israel,” after she used the slogan “From the river to the sea” on several occasions. The censure was passed with the support of 22 members of Tlaib’s own party. Although the move is largely declarative and has no operational significance, it grabbed headlines in Israel and the United States.

In 2022, JVP published an official list of the 20 politicians it endorses. Of them, 19 were running for a seat in Congress and one for a seat in a state senate. Four members of The Squad were also on the list. The recipient of the largest donation from JVP Action ($2,225) ahead of the midterm elections that year, was Brittany Ramos DeBarros from New York. Although DeBarros was defeated in her election, she has spent her time since October 7 publishing social media posts echoing JVP’s position on the war.

According to Tamir, JVP’s influence is concentrated mainly among members of The Squad and less among the centrist stream within the Democratic Party, but, in the same breath, he stresses that the organization is extremely powerful within radical groups on American campuses. “JVP is more influential among members of the younger generation,” he says. “They are definitely more attentive to JVP’s messaging.”