Israelis and Palestinians stand together against anti-democratic legislation during a rally in August 2018.
Grant makers and nonprofits long devoted to peacebuilding between Israelis and Palestinians are finding themselves under increasing threat — accused of abetting antisemitism, delegitimizing Israel, and supporting terrorism — as the Israel-Hamas War continues.
But in many ways, they are in a familiar spot. For years, peacebuilders in the Middle East have been isolated, even shunned, pursuing lonely work that grant makers often ignore. The war threatens to deepen that isolation — even as the importance of their work has grown.
We're sorry. Something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site, and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one,
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or cophelp@philanthropy.com
Grant makers and nonprofits long devoted to peacebuilding between Israelis and Palestinians are finding themselves under increasing threat — accused of abetting antisemitism, delegitimizing Israel, and supporting terrorism — as the Israel-Hamas War continues.
But in many ways, they are in a familiar spot. For years, peacebuilders in the Middle East have been isolated, even shunned, pursuing lonely work that grant makers often ignore. The war threatens to deepen that isolation — even as the importance of their work has grown.
Foundation grants to advance peace and security — which include any funding to prevent and resolve conflict and support stable societies — make up less than 1 percent of all philanthropic giving, according to a 2020 report from Candid, a private research organization. Alex Toma, executive director of the Peace and Security Funders Group, says funding is scant because it requires long-term support and rarely provides clear, quantifiable results.
“It is hard to prove a negative,” she says. “How do you prove that you prevented a conflict? That’s impossible.”
Some $43.2 million from philanthropies worldwide flowed to peace and security efforts in Israel from 2012 to 2020, according to data compiled by the Peace and Security Funders Group. During the same period, organizations in the Palestinian territories received considerably less — only $7.6 million.
In the United States, the Open Society Foundations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund are among the grant makers that have provided the largest peacebuilding grants to nonprofits in the region over the past decade.
ADVERTISEMENT
Open Society has been funding groups focused on Palestine and Israel longer, since 1999. Over the past two years, the foundation has given $26.2 million to these organizations, which includes $3.3 million in emergency funds to humanitarian and advocacy groups after the October 7 attacks. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has made about $22 million in grants since 2011 to Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilding efforts.
New Israel Fund
In an event organized by the organization Tag Meir, Jewish people visit victims of Jewish terror or harassment.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of foundation support to advance peace is the New Israel Fund, a U.S. charity that has distributed more than $345 million since 1979 to promote human rights, racial equality, democracy, and other issues. The Nathan Cummings Foundation, Dorot Foundation, and Kathryn Ames Foundation were some of the New Israel Fund’s top donors last year.
Nonprofits that receive philanthropic support to advance peace take a wide array of approaches. Some work to encourage dialogue and cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians. That includes organizations like Combatants for Peace, which was created by former Israeli and Palestinian combatants to promote nonviolence, and Sikkuy, which is run by Jewish and Arab co-directors and promotes social and economic equality. Others, including Israeli groups like Yesh Din and Gisha, advocate for human rights and are responding to violence related to the conflict, such as settler violence in the West Bank.
As the war escalates, these organizations have largely called for a ceasefire and the protection of all civilian life. Grant makers have also mobilized to provide emergency grants to support their work responding to the war.
Ned Lazarus, a professor at George Washington University who has studied peacebuilding efforts, says most programs have two aims. One is to improve relations between Israelis and Palestinians; the other is to resolve structural and political issues, such as the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Lazarus says while those aims “don’t always coexist with each other perfectly,” both are necessary.
ADVERTISEMENT
“You’re not going to have better relationships without obviously changing the political and structural conditions,” he says, “but you’re not going to have support for those changes if you don’t have people who realize that it’s possible to live in peace and that other side are human.”
Decades of Peacebuilding
Aaron Back, a former program officer at the Ford Foundation, became a peace activist in Israel after the First Intifada in 1987. In the years after those Palestinian protests and riots against Israeli occupation, he says, Israeli peace activists formed a wide range of new organizations focused on women’s rights, faith, and other issues, such as B’Tselem, an Israeli nonprofit documenting human-rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza. The establishment of those groups prompted an increase in philanthropic funding for peace activities.
Back says that funding reached a height during the Oslo Accords, a set of agreements in 1993 and 1995 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization that established a peace process and a path to a two-state solution. Those agreements, negotiated by President Bill Clinton, fueled optimism that the Israel-Palestine conflict was on the verge of a resolution.
John Lyndon, executive director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, an organization that represents 170 organizations promoting peace between Palestinians and Israelis, says charitable funding in the early 1990s was “a pretty compelling investment because you feel as if, number one, it can be instrumental in achieving something really important and, number two, you’re close to it already.”
RealQ Media
The Alliance for Middle East Peace represents 170 organizations promoting peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
ADVERTISEMENT
Grants at the time fueled efforts aimed at breaking down barriers and encouraging communication. Several organizations that still exist were founded during that time, such as Seeds of Peace, which brings together youths from areas of conflict to attend camp, and Parents Circle- Families Forum, which supports Israelis and Palestinians who have lost loved ones in the conflict.
“That’s a very nonthreatening framework for philanthropists who are often very worried about exposure,” Back says.
After the Oslo peace process fell apart by 2000, Lyndon says, a “hopeless environment” emerged that lasted decades. Peace negotiations largely stagnated amid recurring violence.
Yet many peacebuilding groups persisted and even launched in the past 23 years, Lazarus says. About 60 percent of the Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding organizations he identified in a 2017 report began after 2001. This was in part due to the Second Intifada, which led to the deaths of 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis from 2000 to 2005, and political developments that followed.
“The peacebuilding field does not disappear,” he says. “It takes a hit at the beginning of the Second Intifada, but then many organizations spring up in response to how bad things have gotten.”
The Open Society Foundations made its first grants largely focused on human rights starting in 1999 over concerns about the conflict’s impact on Palestinians and Israelis and people in the Middle East in general. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund — which had been funding peacebuilding in the Western Balkans since 2001 — began to support Israeli and Palestinian groups in 2011 amid a broader shift toward grant making in the region.
ADVERTISEMENT
Another major U.S. foundation working on Middle East peacebuilding has been the Ford Foundation, which has given more than $70 million to Israeli organizations since 1948. Starting in 2003, it steered $40 million in grants through the New Israel Fund to Israeli organizations that promote equal rights for Arab Israelis, democracy-building programs, and Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. That lasted up until 2011, when Ford ended its grant making in Israel.
Daniel Sokatch became CEO of the New Israel Fund as the partnership came to an end. In hindsight, he says, Ford’s decision to stop funding was “regrettable.”
“I’m sure they had excellent reasons,” he says. “But my hope is that people would re-evaluate now and say, ‘You know what? This stuff is spiraling out of control, and we need to invest in those people who are trying to stop the spiral.’”
(The Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations are financial supporters of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
Ford’s past grant making to Israeli and Palestinian groups provoked backlash. In 2003, the foundation came under fire for funding Palestinian organizations that equated Israeli policies with apartheid during a 2001 United Nations World Conference against Racism in South Africa. In response to the controversy, the foundation updated its guidelines, requiring grantees to agree that they “will not promote or engage in violence, terrorism, bigotry, or the destruction of any state.”
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas War, Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, announced it was giving an undisclosed amount to humanitarian relief in Gaza and the Middle East and called on philanthropy to act with “urgency and agility” in responding to the war.
ADVERTISEMENT
“We are proud to provide grants to both Jewish- and Palestinian-led efforts — because the long road to relief, to rebuilding, to reconciliation of any kind begins with both peoples,” he said in a statement on October 22.
Ford isn’t the only grant maker that has ceased funding for Israeli and Palestinian peace groups since 2011. The Skoll Global Threats Fund, a $100 million philanthropic effort launched by former eBay president Jeff Skoll in 2009, identified conflict in the Middle East as one of the five most urgent global issues but gave up its grant making within four years.
It provided $5.5 million in total to organizations aiming “to bridge the political divide” and to “build bipartisan support for a constructive U.S. role in promoting peace,” according to a report released by the fund. Grantees included EcoPeace Middle East, which supports Jordanians, Palestinians, and Israelis working on environmental sustainability, and the J Street Education Fund, the educational arm of the pro-peace lobbying group J Street.
But by 2013, it ceased funding for its Middle East program after determining “it was unlikely to be able to have any measurable impact in the near term,” according to the report.
Frustration and Reputations at Risk
Throughout history, peacebuilding efforts in the Middle East have often been marked by controversy and disappointment.
ADVERTISEMENT
Charles Keidan, executive editor of Alliance Magazine, who previously oversaw Israel-Palestine conflict resolution efforts as director of the Pears Foundation, says philanthropy has been reluctant to fund peacebuilding work for two reasons.
One is that the Israel-Palestine conflict seems intractable. The other is that funding for peacebuilding is fraught with risk to one’s livelihood and reputation. Keidan, who is Jewish, says he was perceived as “abandoning [his] own side” and branded an “Arab lover” during his time at Pears.
Peacebuilding and human-rights nonprofits, as well as grant makers supporting them, have been lambasted for allegedly crossing the line into antisemitism or supporting the dismantling of Israel. For example, the pro-Israel watchdog NGO Monitor has criticized Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International for promoting “artificial and manufactured definitions of apartheid” that “delegitimize and demonize Israel.”
Critics have also assailed the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for supporting nonprofits such as Jewish Voice for Peace, which has been leading some of the higher-profile protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza. The Anti-Defamation League denounced the fund’s grants to Jewish Voice for Peace and the Adalah Justice Project, a Palestinian advocacy organization, in a 2021 report on anti-Israel activities on college campuses in the United States.
“While funding many laudable causes, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund continues to fund [Jewish Voice for Peace], despite the anti-Israel group’s pattern of concerning and at times outrageous rhetoric and action,” the report states. "[The Rockefeller Brothers Fund] funds other anti-Zionist groups that engage in similar rhetoric.”
Rockefeller Brothers Fund defended its grantees. Sarah Edkins Lien, director of communications, says, “Several of our partners take policy positions that are critical of the government of Israel, but each works to shift the logic from one of conflict, terrorism, and occupation to one of constructive peacebuilding.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, which has funded Israeli and Palestinian civil-society groups since 1979, says her organization doesn’t respond to those criticisms.
“If the argument is that any member of civil society, any activist, any organization that stands up in a meaningful way — and this is for Israeli and Palestinian organizations and in the U.S. — try to challenge Israeli policies that deprive Palestinians of basic rights or deprive Israelis of the right to challenge their government,” Friedman says, “if your answer is all of that is exactly the same as terrorism or is a form of antisemitism, there’s nothing I’m going to say that’s going to satisfy you.”
Leena Barakat, a Palestinian-American who is CEO of the Women Donors Network, says philanthropies need to be consistent in their values and understand that calling for respect for international law and human rights isn’t complicated.
“There is nothing complex about humanitarian crisis in this moment, of targeting innocent civilians, of doing collective punishment.”
Whether they focus on promoting discussion and cooperation among opposing sides or human rights and political issues, nonprofits have often faced opposition in Israel and the Palestinian territories. In 2020, for example, Hamas imprisoned three Palestinian peace activists in Gaza for “weakening revolutionary spirit” by joining a Zoom call encouraging coexistence with Israelis. In August, the Parents Circle-Families Forum, which supports grieving Israelis and Palestinians, was barred from Israeli schools for comparing grief for deceased Israel Defense Forces soldiers with grief for people “harmed in defensive IDF activities.”
The Palestinian human-rights group Al-Haq was one of six Palestinian organizations labeled as a terrorist group by Israel’s defense minister in 2021. The European Commission paused funding to it following those allegations but resumed support in 2022 after finding no suspicion of irregularities or fraud.
ADVERTISEMENT
Tahseen Elayyan, a legal adviser with Al-Haq, which has received grants from the Open Society Foundations and the Foundation for Middle East Peace, says the measure was meant to deplete the group’s financial resources and that, since the Israel-Hamas War began in October, other Palestinian groups are continuing to see faltering support.
“Some organizations have already received letters or messages from the donors telling them that they would freeze their funding support,” Elayyan says. “I don’t know if this will apply to Al-Haq or not. But let’s wait and see.”
Grant makers have mobilized in the past two months to support organizations on the ground. But there is uncertainty about how the escalating violence will affect those seeking peace. Lyndon of the Alliance for Middle East Peace says he hopes the war is a wake-up call.
“We had two decades where conflict management was the overriding paradigm — certainly in Israel, this idea that the conflict is there to be managed, not resolved, and that this was sustainable,” Lyndon says. “All the while, the situation was worsening. I think what happened on October 7 and in the two months that followed has really woken up people to the fact that this is a failed strategy. This cannot be managed. It must be resolved.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
Kay Dervishi is a staff writer for the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She previously worked as an associate editor at City & StateNew York magazine covering local and state politics. She also previously reported on New York’s nonprofit sector for City & State’s sister publication, NYN Media, where she also wrote a daily newsletter for nonprofits. She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science from the University of Richmond.
