WESPAC (Westchester People’s Action Coalition) Foundation: What You Need to Know

The WESPAC (Westchester People’s Action Coalition) Foundation is a progressive nonprofit organization that, for decades, has engaged in anti-Israel activity by serving as a major node in the funding and administration of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and pro-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) groups.

WESPAC has hosted rhetoric on its website that espouses disturbing and inflammatory ideas about Zionism and Jews, though it more notably provides administrative support to groups that hold significant track records of antisemitism, openly embrace armed violence or "resistance" against Israel, and explicitly vilify “Zionists” and Zionism, equating it with racism, and calling for its abolition. Vilification of Zionism and Zionists may be seen as a rhetorical attack on most Jews globally who feel connected to Israel or who view a positive relationship with Israel and/or Zionism as an inherent part of their Jewish identities.

The foundation also funds and supports community-based and activist initiatives striving for racial, reproductive and environmental justice, among other efforts. 

Background

WESPAC was founded in 1974 by civil rights activists Connie Hogarth and Charles Scheiner with roots in the anti-war movement (first Vietnam, then the Cold War) and a stated mission to advocate for progressive social change in Westchester County, New York, and beyond. 

Based in White Plains, New York, the organization is led by longtime executive director Nada Khader, who took over the position in 2001, and WESPAC board president Howard Horowitz, who is also a member of the Westchester chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).

WESPAC has long been active in organizing pro-Palestinian protests and campaigns, with events throughout the 1980s that included trips to Palestinian areas, and panels and lecture gatherings with hosted speakers such as Palestinian diplomat Riyad H. Mansour, then the deputy permanent observer of the Palestine Observer Mission to the United Nations, and Palestinian-American professor Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, the founding director and chairperson of San Francisco State university's Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) department, among others.

A screenshot from a radio interview on October 17, 2023 with WESPAC Executive-Director Nada Khader (top left), and WESPAC Chairman of the Board Howard Horowitz. (YouTube)

Today, WESPAC aims to “give a human face to those who would otherwise be unrecognized victims of war, injustice and environmental degradation” and links the Israeli-Palestinian conflict directly with issues of concern such as criminal justice reform and police accountability, immigrant protection, safe housing, food and climate justice and solidarity with indigenous peoples in the U.S. Board chair Howard Horowitz says the foundation “provides outreach and community to individual groups and leaders in civic and religious organizations in Greater Westchester” that work on these issues, which he argues are “core to the Jewish community here in Westchester.”

He has rejected challenges to WESPAC’s tax-exempt status as a charity amid accusations it helps fund anti-Israel and anti-Zionist groups that advocate for the end of the State of Israel and promote terror propaganda on university campuses, claiming that “antisemitism is being weaponized against our efforts” and is “an attempt to accuse us of what is a ‘blood libel of antisemitism.’”

Attacks on WESPAC’s activities are a “direct attempt to break the link of solidarity from the racial, economic justice movements here in the U.S. that we connect to the situation in Israel-Palestine,” Horowitz has said.

Reactions to October 7 and Inflammatory Positions

WESPAC initially condemned the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel, though it says the terror massacre, in which some 1,200 were killed and over 250 were taken hostage, had “context.” An October 10, 2023 statement, posted to WESPAC’s website by Khader, said the assault “follows months and years and decades of constant violence, pogroms, expulsions and other manifestations of apartheid inflicted on Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem.”

WESPAC said it supports “without reservation all nonviolent resistance to apartheid” and “refuse[s] to be labeled as anti-Semitic for opposing Israel’s apartheid policies of supremacy and separation.”

In a February 2024 interview, Horowitz accused Israel of being ’intent on annihilation” in its response to the Oct.7 attacks and condemned the “willful weaponization of anti-Semitism” which he linked to “conflating Judaism as a religion and an identity with Zionist political ideology” and “makes everyone unsafe.” In the same interview, he baselessly claimed that Zionism “as a nation-state project has left the sweep and grandeur of Jewish history behind,” and that it “denigrates the Jewish tragedies by acting in ways that are ‘hateful.’”

Previously, Khader made an unsubstantiated claim in April 2021 that “Israeli law defines Palestinians as inferior human beings to Jews.” In 2010, Khader, as a part of the Palestine Solidarity Caucus, attempted to shepherd through a standalone resolution denouncing the US federal government for labeling Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations, according to multiple reports at the time.

At a 2016 event, Felice Gelman, a longtime activist with WESPAC, member of the WESPAC Middle East Justice Committee, and board member of the Sparkplug Foundation, a major contributor to WESPAC, claimed that Zionism was “actually [...] a Christian idea, and it goes back into the revival, the Protestant, revivals of the 1860s and 70s when the preachers started talking about the fact that the Zion had to be redeemed, so it's, it wasn't even Herzl's idea...It was a Christian idea.” 

Fiscal Sponsorships

As a fiscal sponsor, WESPAC uses its tax-exempt status as an NGO to receive and administer donations on behalf of groups such as National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), which has openly praised the October 7 attack, and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM),  whose organizers have venerated the so-called Palestinian “Resistance” — a euphemistic reference to the various terrorist groups responsible for violent attacks against Israel, and have called to “fight until victory.”

This fiscal arrangement allows sponsored non-profits to receive tax-deductible funds without having to file their own tax documents. WESPAC does not and is not required to make public the details of its fiscal sponsorships.

Other groups supported by WESPAC, such as Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, Palestine Freedom Project, and Learning for the Empowerment and Advancement of Palestinians (LEAP), are also anti-Israel, but do not necessarily cross into inflammatory or antisemitic rhetoric on a regular basis. 

However, based on publicly available information since 2000, most of WESPAC’s current or former fiscal sponsorships are of anti-Israel projects and groups.  

WESPAC fiscally sponsored groups, projects, and grants, 2000- Present

Fiscally sponsored groups, projects, and grants by focus

Since October 7, WESPAC and the groups it funds have come under increased scrutiny from Congress and nonprofit watchdogs for their role in planning the protests and various disruptive activity in the immediate wake of the terror attack. In mid-January 2025, WESPAC stated in a fundraising email that it had been named in four lawsuits, claiming that “the well-funded forces of darkness are now waging legal warfare against us.”

Additionally, in February 2025, its insurer, the Alliance of Nonprofits for Insurance Risk Retention Group, filed a lawsuit asserting that it is not responsible for covering WESPAC’s legal defense costs in one of these cases. This lawsuit alleges that WESPAC played a key role in organizing a pro-Palestinian protest in April 2024 that reportedly blocked traffic near Chicago O’Hare International Airport. It further claims that WESPAC entered into a fiscal sponsorship agreement with NSJP in July 2023 without notifying the insurer or paying additional fees for the agreement.

WESPAC has also sponsored and participated in campus Israel Apartheid Weeks and has donated to San Francisco State University’s AMED program, led by Abdulhadi, who is also a member of NSJP’s Advisory Board. Following the events of October 7 and the subsequent backlash against some of its fiscally sponsored groups, WESPAC appears to have withdrawn support from certain organizations. The Palestinian Feminist Collective, previously sponsored by WESPAC, is now fiscally sponsored by Al Awda, an extreme anti-Zionist organization with a long history of espousing antisemitic, anti-Zionist, and pro-terror rhetoric.

It is unclear who, if anyone, currently sponsors USPCN, which was also previously under WESPAC’s fiscal sponsorship.

Additionally, several Donorbox fundraising pages controlled by WESPAC have been taken down. These include a page raising funds for Abdulhadi’s legal defense at San Francisco State University, which remained active until at least October 2024, and a donation page for her Teaching Palestine program, which was still online as of August 2024. Meanwhile, Al Awda continues to accept donations for Abdulhadi’s legal defense, and its donation page remains active.

WESPAC Funding Sources

WESPAC receives grants and has facilitated the reception of funds for fiscally backed groups from foundations and trusts such as the Sparkplug Foundation, the Elias Foundation, Cultures of Resistance, Bafrayung Fund, Tides Center and the Violet Jabara Charitable Trust, all of which have in the past or continue to fund other anti-Israel organizations. In the fiscal year ending in December 2022, WESPAC received over $140,000 in contributions from some of these organizations, some of which were specifically earmarked for NSJP and PYM.

It has also received grants from the Yonkers City Government, though it appears those grants were oriented towards projects designed to improve the local Yonkers and Westchester community. 

In the fiscal year ending in August 2023, WESPAC reported revenue of over $2.3 million, $1.9 million of which was from financial contributions to the organization. The revenue in the 2023 fiscal year marked an increase of over 100% from the fiscal year ending in August 2022 with reported revenue of $1.07 million, and an increase of some 270% from the fiscal year ending in August 2021, when WESPAC reported revenue of roughly $636,000. 

The organization reported net assets of $1.6 million in the 2023 fiscal year.

Conclusion

While WESPAC is not an exclusively anti-Israel organization and supports many important causes, it is imperative to call attention to the significant number of groups and projects it fiscally sponsors or previously fiscally sponsored which have repeatedly propagated antisemitism or called for violence against Israel. 

Through WESPAC’s administrative support of these groups, they help ensure that inflammatory and, at times, antisemitic language remains an issue in a notable segment of left-wing spaces. 

WESPAC’s current and former fiscal sponsors:

National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP)

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a network of pro-Palestinian student groups across North America, with over 200 chapters, which disseminate anti-Israel propaganda often laced with inflammatory and, at times, combative and antisemitic rhetoric. NSJP is a leading campus organizer of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israel, and specialize in using confrontational tactics such as disrupting student-run pro-Israel events and constructing mock “apartheid walls” and distributing fake “eviction notices” to dramatize what they consider Israeli abuses of Palestinians. As proponents of “anti-normalization,” the group opposes diverging views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and rejects dialogue with Israeli and pro-Israel entities and supporters.

In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, National Students for Justice in Palestine praised the attack and posted a “Day of Resistance” toolkit with language supporting violence and demonizing and denigrating Zionists:

• “Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity, taking with it the façade of an impenetrable settler colony and reminding each of us that total return and liberation to Palestine is near.”
• “Settlers are not 'civilians' in the sense of international law, because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.”
• “Liberation is not an abstract concept. It is not a moment circumscribed to a revolutionary past as it is often characterized. Rather, liberating colonized land is a real process that requires confrontation by any means necessary.”

Additionally, numerous SJP chapters released inflammatory statements in support of Palestinians seizing control of Israeli territory, including some that explicitly endorse the use of violence and attacks on civilians.

• George Washington University SJP: “We reject the distinction between ‘civilian’ and ‘militant.’ We reject the distinction between ‘settler’ and ‘soldier.’ "A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches.”
• CUNY Law SJP: “If you support Palestine, understand that necessitates supporting our right to defend ourselves and liberate our homeland by any means necessary.”

Within Our Lifetime

Within Our Lifetime-United for Palestine (WOL) is a New York-based, radically anti-Israel organization founded in 2015 that routinely expresses support for violence against Israel, including on October 7, and calls for the abolition of Zionism. It is unclear how or if WOL currently accepts donations; the Donorbox page that indicates it was fiscally sponsored by WESPAC was last archived on Wayback in May 2023, and its donation page appears to be no longer operational as of March 2025.

Since October 7, 2023, WOL and its co-founder and leader Nerdeen Kiswani have continued to share extreme anti-Zionist and antisemitic positions on social media and at anti-Israel protests as well as in webinars and reports.  Some of the most heinous antisemitic rhetoric and incidents seen in New York City since October 7 have been perpetrated by WOL supporters and members, including vociferously demanding the expulsion of Zionists from New York society.

Our full backgrounder on WOL can be found here.

The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism

The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) was launched in the fall of 2023 at a bi-coastal conference by an experienced group of anti-Israel activists, including AMED’s Dr. Abdulhadi, Emmaia Gelman and C. Heike Schotten. WESPAC accepted donations on behalf of the inaugural conference in October 2023; ISCZ is now its own incorporated nonprofit with its own donors.

ICSZ ’s stated aim is to “delink...the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies” and “reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project. " Such an attempt to detach between Jewish Studies and Zionism is an affront to the mainstream Jewish community, as it fails to recognize that the vast majority of Jews view Zionism (the movement for self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people) as an integral part of their Jewish identities and connection to Israel. This singles out Jews since no other group has their claim to self-determination detached from their national, religious and cultural identity for the express purpose of pathologizing it.

In its FAQs, the ICSZ attempts to falsely link Zionism to a multitude of the world’s ills, including “homonationalism,” surveillance technology deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border, the destruction of Indigenous agriculture in Guatemala, and the fostering of post-9/11 interventionist human rights politics with regard to North Korea.

Playing into historic tropes about Jews and money, ICSZ has alleged that “wealthy donors” in support of Israel have an outsized influence on college campuses: “University administrations are often influenced by wealthy donors as well as the rhetoric produced within Israel Studies departments. By contrast, scholars studying the politics and impacts of Zionist institutions– especially those who center Palestine – are subjected to silencing, retaliation, and other repressive measures, adversely impacting their safety and livelihoods.”

According to the institute, “studying Zionism through such a comprehensive lens means, for instance, looking at the role of Zionist institutions in arenas beyond Palestine as well as the range of Jewish communities, organizations, and institutions where it is not as readily transparent.”

Palestinian Youth Movement

The Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) is an anti-Zionist activist organization with chapters across the U.S. and Canada that has expressed support for terrorism against Israel and frequently engages in inflammatory rhetoric about Zionism, including calls to stigmatize and ban Zionists from community spaces.

In the weeks after October 7, PYM released a “Reading Guide” minimizing terrorism and attempting to “contextualize” the unprecedented Hamas assault.  The document includes passages such as:

• “What the mainstream English-language media refers to as the ‘Gaza-Israel’ war is in reality the struggle of a colonized people for liberation. This struggle did not begin on October 7th, when Palestinians tore down the cement walls caging them in the Gaza Strip. ّIn reality it began over 100 years ago.”
• “The steadfast Palestinian people of Gaza—who have been living under a suffocating and brutal 16-yearlong blockade—are correcting the path of history, and showing the world that, indeed, all the walls will fall.”

At several Washington, D.C. rallies sponsored by PYM since October 7, a banner was seen reading “Zionism is fascism, Colonizers out DC.”

October 8, 2023: At another PYM-sponsored rally in Anaheim, California, a sign was spotted reading “Congress is Israeli occupied territory,” playing into the historic antisemitic trope that Jews have outsized control or power. 

An image from an October 8, 2023 anti-Israel rally in California sponsored by PYM. (Screenshot/Instagram)

PYM has wholeheartedly endorsed the Mapping Project, widely condemned throughout the Jewish community, as being antisemitic.

The project essentially names and attempts to shame and blame Jewish communal organizations in Massachusetts for many of the world's problems and specifically calls out Zionism as a "harm," thus implicating the vast majority of the Jewish community that identifies in some way with the state of Israel. 

At a 2017 PYM-convened roundtable, a speaker vilified “Ashkenazic Zionism,” a reference to Jews of Central and Eastern European ancestry: “We know, you know about the ways in which Ashkenazic Zionism has always been a white supremacist separatist movement… we can have a conversation about some of the reach and the tentacles of Zionism you know in context, in Palestine.”

Such rhetoric offensively compares Jews to their antisemitic oppressors in Europe and to antisemitic white supremacist groups today.

US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)

The USPCN is a coalition of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian Americans who promote a one-state solution and are actively opposed to the existence of a Jewish state. Founded in 2006 to “revitalize grassroots organizing in Palestinian and Arab communities in the U.S.,” the organization has numerous chapters around the United States, including Chicago, Detroit, the Bay Area, and Cleveland.

WESPAC was no longer listed as USPCN's fiscal sponsor on their site over the summer of 2024 and the group began accepting donations solely via Venmo. Paper checks can be mailed to a Wisconsin address.

USPCN has praised and offered a platform to individuals such as Rasmea Odeh, a former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who was convicted in Israel for her involvement in the murder of two Israeli students in a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969.

On October 7, the organization released a statement justifying the attacks, which it labeled “self-defense operations” that were “in response to over 100 years of zionist [sic] settler-colonialism."

• “The unified Palestinian Resistance – consisting of all the different Palestinian political and resistance factions – is responding right now to decades of apartheid Israel’s brutality and violations of Palestinian national and human rights. The Resistance is firing rockets at military targets and engaging Israeli soldiers in armed combat just outside the besieged Gaza Strip and in surrounding illegal Israeli settlements,” the statement read.
• “These self-defense operations – called Al-Aqsa Flood by the Resistance – have been launched in response to over 100 years of zionist settler-colonialism; 56 years of illegal military occupation; and at least two years of unrelenting terrorism from Israeli settlers, attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque and Palestinian churches in Jerusalem, and repeated settler and military invasions of Palestinian cities, villages, and refugee camps across 1948 Palestine, Jerusalem, and the West Bank, especially in Jenin Refugee Camp and Nablus.”

In 2023, USPCN spearheaded a boycott campaign against Jewish-owned food company Sadaf, accusing it of being a “Zionist profiteer” with “sneaky ways.” It also denigrated Mizrahim (Jews of Middle East and North African descent), accusing them of having “forge[d] a false indigenous identity, as a ‘Middle Eastern heritage’ to promote such things as ‘israeli’ falafel or hummus.”

At an October 18, 2023 USPCN rally in Chicago, a sign was spotted with paraglider imagery reading “We will redeem you, oh Palestine.” (Hamas terrorists used paragliders to invade Israel on October 7.) At the same rally, another prominent sign was seen reading "Zionism is racism" with an image of blood and dollar bills in the shape of a snake. The “s”s in Zionism and racism are also dollar bill signs. 

In a May 2022 Nakba Day thread, USPCN announced they mobilized hundreds of protesters to “disrupt business in the reputably zionist [sic] neighborhood of west LA.” West LA is home to numerous Jewish communities, notably Brentwood, North Beverly Hills, and Westwood.  

In 2022, they continued to endorse full anti-normalization, protesting Israeli singer and performer Netta Barzilai’s appearance at the Chicago Pride March for the sole reason that she is “Zionist.”

International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN)

International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), a coalition formed in the fall of 2008, which seeks to facilitate global anti-Israel activity on the part of anti-Zionist Jews. Since its inception, IJAN chapters around the U.S. have co-sponsored and endorsed numerous anti-Israel demonstrations and have advanced boycott efforts against Israel. It is opposed to Zionism and perpetrates the notion that Israel is an inherently oppressive state.

In a number of tweets and resources on their website, they claim Zionism is racism.

In May 2024, IJAN co-founder Sara Kershnar spoke at the "People's Conference for Palestine" in Detroit, MI, and went on at length about her organization’s goal to “dismantle Zionism,” stating in no uncertain terms her support for “armed resistance." Kershnar further opined that efforts must be made "to keep decentering the conversation of Jewish safety” and that “Zionism is really the most antisemitic movement.” She further alleged that “for the Zionists, for the U.S. and its allies, it has never had anything to do with Jewish safety, has never had anything to do with valuing Jewish life” and expressed her hope that “Israel is going to fall.”