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Wealthy Zionists Are Defunding the Left… Or Are They?

ERIC STRIKER • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 4, 2024

“October 8th Jews,” as the New York Times’ Bret Stephens baptized them, have been drafted to take Israel’s war on the Palestinians global as both generic Republican and Democrat voters sour on the Zionist project.

Members of the “New Right” have been enthusiastically reading into this. These conservative figures have interpreted high profile incidents, like the donor revolt against universities deemed insufficiently pro-Israel, as a sign that wealthy Jews are finally done financing the cultural left.

There are circumstantial reasons to believe this. One of the vectors for spreading Gen Z wokeness, Tik Tok, is feeling the gust of the flexing Jewish bicep. It was announced that Lucien Grainge’s Universal Music Group was banning the use of songs from its massive catalogue of pop stars from being accessed on the world’s most popular social media platform. It just so happens that this superficially bad business decision boycotting the music-driven app sensation came after protest from Jewish groups that Tik Tok was allowing anti-Zionist sentiment to flourish among the youth following October 7th.

On the surface, a person operating within a typical universalist or analytical frame could assume that billionaires who spend lavishly to take away Americans’ guns like Michael Bloomberg are having a change of heart when they dispatch 10s of millions to aid a foreign state that hands out military grade assault rifles to random pedestrians. But there is no incongruity or cognitive dissonance here. Just as the Israeli state forbids giving these guns to its minority of non-Jewish citizens on strictly racial grounds, Mr. Bloomberg insists that he and his should have the privilege to possess as many firearms as they want while stripping everybody else of this right.

It is increasingly common knowledge that the American anti-white/DEI/Woke left and its non-profits are funded largely by Jewish asset managers on Wall Street. When billionaires funnel big money to an institution, they feel entitled to set the beneficiary’s agenda, as Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz explained in a piece on the hedge fund Jews waging war on the Ivy Leagues.

In some instances, this money has been clashing with the morals of those employed by leftist organizations. Non-profit workers generally want to uphold their mission statements supporting racial equity and human rights in respects to Israel.

One casualty of this conflict between donors and the grassroots is the Democratic Socialists of America. Following the DSA’s decision to support Gaza without qualifications, an array of wealthy Jewish supporters and elected officials associated with the group resigned in unison. Just three months after the Jewish money walkout, the largest and most politically successful Marxist organization in recent American history is now ghettoized, approaching insolvency, and forced to lay off its staff.

In a separate instance, a pro-open borders NGO called CASA published a statement calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Palestine war. The group’s panicked executive quickly retracted the statement and apologized to the Jewish community when lawmakers in Maryland opened a retaliatory investigation threatening their funding. CASA’s top donors, like The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, announced that they were going to pull a six-figure donation earmarked for them in 2024 while sending more millions to support the virulently anti-immigrant state of Israel instead.

At woke Starbucks, Charles Schultz filed a SLAPP lawsuit against his stores own labor union because one of their Twitter accounts wrote “Solidarity with Palestine!” Artforum, which specializes in battling “whiteness” in art, canned its top editor for the same. In progressive-except-Palestine Hollywood, several actresses known for their loud support of trendy left-wing causes who have dared to remark on Israel’s crimes have been suddenly removed from movie sets and blacklisted. Radical pro-criminal New York public defender organizations aggressively suppressed any inkling of pro-Palestinian sentiment. The list of purged people in the broader world of the DEI/Woke activism, culture, media, university, law and foundation complex is so vast it would be safe to say every corner of the liberal and left-wing world has been visited by the Zionist inquisition.

For this reason, the perception that there is a “vibe shift” on wokeism could be a mirage. Many society-wrecking leftist groups are facing financial and staff problems due to the conflict of interests in the Israel-Palestine war, but this could be a temporary lull as both donors and greedy liberals recalibrate to continue to do what they were doing before except in a way Jewish “philanthropists” find more palatable on Israel.

One Marxist entity that appears to be weathering the storm is The Jacobin, a communist magazine with millions of dollars in assets closely tied to the DSA. The publication is registered as a non-profit and overwhelmingly funded by dark money, including major donations from the Jewish Communal Fund.

The Jacobin has been critical of Israel’s war, however, much of their reporting and commentary has fixated on posing a contradiction between the far-rightness of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and “left-wing” Zionists, all while framing Gaza’s elected government and official army, Hamas, as blood thirsty terrorists. The purpose of this tightrope walk seems to be to pander to their staunchly anti-Zionist readers while also appeasing their donors by welcoming the strain of Jewish racialism that is more critical of capitalism.

A stark example is the publication of a paper by Hayim Katsman, a left-wing Kibbutz Zionist critical of Netanyahu, who the Jacobin claims was “murdered by Hamas” on October 7th.

Omitted in this eulogy of the “good Zionist” martyr is the context in which Katsman lived and died. Katsman is an American Jew who, after getting his Ph.D in international studies at the University of Washington, moved to an illegal settlement near Gaza that was established as a civilian-military frontier outpost built in 1978 with the specific intent of killing Arabs. For this reason, Katsman likely died in the crossfire during a shootout between the IDF and Hamas that occurred in his Kibbutz/Settlement on October 7th, with growing mounds of evidence pointing to the Israeli military itself as culpable for the dead Jewish civilians. The Jacobin does not comment on the ludicrous contradiction of celebrating an American born adult choosing to move to land recently stolen from local Arabs in a militarized Israeli settlement being promoted as an enlightened Israel-Palestine peace activist.

It remains to be seen if this politicking will work for The Jacobin. Their coverage has been pressured into being more critical of Israel than the magazine’s editors have previously been comfortable with, which could put their yearly injection of Jewish Communal Fund cash for 2024 in jeopardy anyway.

By and large, most groups supporting anti-white and DEI causes quickly learned their lesson after the initial post-October 7th wave of firings of vocally pro-Palestine workers and activists. Organizations operating in this sphere are more reliant than ever on big donations from billionaires due to the rapid shrinking of the American middle class, which has subsequently caused a collapse in overall grassroots charitable giving.

The deafening silence of America’s self-described humanitarian and racial equity watchdogs on the genocide in Gaza has become a catalyst for antagonism between leaders and young, lower-level true-believers.

In an article published in late October in Devex, the author describes what she has been hearing from the NGO sphere on the matter,

“Philanthropy leaders tell Devex they are being very careful in how they discuss the heavily politicized war out of concern for how it might affect their relationships with colleagues, funding partners, or their careers.

Many people within the sector who historically have been vocal about equity and human rights are horrified by what is happening in Gaza but aren’t speaking publicly because they worry they will be labeled antisemitic if they criticize Israel’s airstrikes, one U.S.-based philanthropy leader told Devex.

Meanwhile, Jewish philanthropy leaders say their community feels abandoned and their trauma not taken seriously, as some liberal groups loudly line up behind Palestinians and their rights.”

An opinion piece in Non-Profit Quarterly complained that despite NGO activists privately supporting a ceasefire in Palestine, the majority have adamantly refused to use their money and influence to support the cause. It also added that Muslim-led “racial justice” outfits are largely avoided by donors and foundations. The cop out from these cowardly pro-immigration, anti-police, non-white racial advocacy parties is to become strategically myopic, suddenly claiming that they don’t want to focus on issues beyond their suddenly narrow missions. One of the only important leftist institutions that has held a full-throated anti-Zionist line is The Intercept, which is also exceptional in that it is the project of Arab businessman Pierre Omidyar.

In NonProfit AF, the furious author adds more fuel to the fire,

“Grassroots donors are pouring in, but the philanthropy community is basically absent. With very few exceptions, major funders are absent. The foundations sitting on billions are doing mostly nothing. Those that are doing something are making gifts of a few hundred thousand at best. Not nothing, but also nowhere near what they’re capable of. [Regarding] Funders 4 Ceasefire: what seemed like a noble effort at first is apparently a feel-good statement with no actual money behind the words. Only a small handful of foundation signers (out of ~150) seem to be funding anything remotely related to Palestine or related advocacy.”

There is no sign that groups supporting the rights and humanitarian needs of Palestinians are unpopular with the general public. People from all walks of life who are outraged at the systematic murder of women and children in Palestine are flooding aid and protest organizations with record amounts of small donations.

But even here, Palestine activists cannot avoid the foxes guarding the hens. It was recently reported in the Jewish Telegraph Agency that virtually all of the money donated to pro-Palestinian demonstrations and advocacy in the United States is managed by a single Orthodox Jew who is an Israeli citizen, Howard Horowitz. Horowitz’s support for Palestinians is couched in attacks on the legitimacy of Gaza’s leadership and the fundamental right of Palestinians to resist occupation by militant means.

Rather than America “turning the corner” on wokeness, what we are seeing could instead be an illusion. The brief reprieve from the left-wing social onslaught against normal people may be more to do with the fact that the organized Jewish community in the US has quickly produced an astonishing $638 million dollars to directly support the Israeli war effort out of their pockets, leading a Jerusalem Post opinion writer to rhetorically ask, “Is there enough left to go around?”

Perhaps key to the question of whether this will take the winds out of wokeness’ sails is what effect this experience will have on the zeal and energy of rank-and-file social justice warriors after realizing their generals are more barbaric, amoral, and unapologetically genocidal than the “Nazis” and MAGAs they have been trained to attack and hate. A person sound of mind would realize that they are being cynically and maliciously used to undermine the collective white West, just as Zionists do to Arab Palestine. Will this earth-shattering hypocrisy disenchant the Gen Z left?

February 4, 2024 - Posted by aletho | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism