WESPAC (Westchester People’s Action Coalition) Foundation

WESPAC (Westchester People’s Action Coalition) Foundation is a progressive nonprofit organization based in White Plains, New York that funds and supports community-based and activist initiatives. While bolstering numerous laudable causes that strive for racial, reproductive and environmental justice, among other efforts, WESPAC also serves as a major node in the funding and administration of campus anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and pro-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) groups, including some that support armed violence or "resistance" against Israel, call for the abolition of Zionism or to ostracize “Zionists” from community spaces, and equate Zionism with racism.

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. 

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. 

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)

For decades, WESPAC and its leadership have engaged in anti-Israel action and explicitly endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. While WESPAC hosts rhetoric on its own website that espouses concerning ideas about Zionism/Jews, the organization notably provides administrative support to other groups with much more significant track records of antisemitism.

Fiscal sponsorships

WESPAC uses its tax-exempt status as an NGO to provide financial support to groups and initiatives that actively denigrate, disparage and attempt to ostracize pro-Israel and Jewish communities, at times using blatant antisemitic language. As a fiscal sponsor, WESPAC receives and administers donations on behalf of groups such as National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) and Within Our Lifetime (WOL) – both of which openly praised the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel – as well as the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), the Institute for Study of Critical Zionism, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, the US Palestinian Community Network, and Adalah NY.

As a fiscal sponsor, WESPAC receives and administers donations on behalf of groups such as the NSJP. This 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.

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

WESPAC Fiscal Sponsorships: 2000-Present

Count of organization/project by focus 

WESPAC will also occasionally sponsor and participate in campus Israel Apartheid Weeks and has donated to San Francisco State University’s AMED, run by Rabab Abdulhadi who is also involved in another organization for which WESPAC facilitates funding.

Details on some of the groups supported by WESPAC can be found below.

Who Funds WESPAC

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.

Reactions to October 7 and inflammatory positions

WESPAC condemned the October 7 Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel, in which some 1,200 were killed and over 250 were taken hostage, but said the assault had “context” and “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,” according to an October 10, 2023 statement posted to its website by Khader.

In a February 2024 interview, Horowitz claimed that Zionism “as a nation-state project has left the sweep and grandeur of Jewish history behind,” and “denigrates the Jewish tragedies by acting in ways that are ‘hateful.’” He also 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 links to “conflating Judaism as a religion and an identity with Zionist political ideology” and “makes everyone unsafe.”

WESPAC has said that 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 April 2021, Khader, WESPAC’s executive director, made the unsubstantiated claim that “Israeli law defines Palestinians as inferior human beings to Jews”.

At a 2016 event, Felice Gelman, a longtime activist with WESPAC,  WESPAC Middle East Justice Committee member, and board member of major contributor to WESPAC, Sparkplug Foundation, claimed that “the idea of Zionism actually is 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.”

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.

Conclusion

While WESPAC is not an exclusively anti-Israel organization and supports some important causes, it is imperative to call attention to the significant number of groups and projects it fiscally sponsors 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. 

A glimpse into the groups WESPAC fiscally sponsors, in their own words:

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.

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 background on WOL can be found here.

The Institute for Study of Critical 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.

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 ISCZ 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 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, 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.

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 settler-colonialism."[sic]

• “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.”