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Columbia Gives Big Money to Pro-Israel Groups — But Not to Pro-Palestine Ones

Groups like the ADL and AIPAC’s charity arm received cash from Columbia over the past three years, as the school cracked down on student protests.

As Columbia University ramped up its crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters over the past three years, the Ivy League institution was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to pro-Israel groups, according to a review of tax filings. Recipients of the cash included the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s charity arm, the Israel on Campus Coalition, and others.

Though the university gave in smaller amounts to pro-Israel groups before the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, the spending ramped up in that fiscal year as the genocide in Gaza unfolded and Columbia led the way in a national campus protest movement against it.

“Pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian politics are the official policy of this institution.”

“Pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian politics are the official policy of this institution.”

In contrast to its pro-Israel giving, according to an analysis of documents which track some of the money given by tax-exempt nonprofits, the school gave little or no such funds to pro-Palestine, Arab, or Muslim groups over the same period.

“It confirms our worst suspicions since fall of 2023 that pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian politics are the official policy of this institution,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia and a Jewish member of the university’s faculty, told The Intercept. “You could have surmised that from the institution’s actions and speech, but it appears to also be revealed in its resource allocation.”

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A Columbia spokesperson said the grants went through a university-administered donor-advised fund, an arrangement where a nonprofit organization pools tax-deductible donations and lets the donors request to make specific distributions to other charities.  

“These grants did not come from Columbia’s operating funds and were payments distributed from a donor-advised fund established at Columbia in accordance with IRS rules,” the Columbia spokesperson said. 

Donor-advised funds have become increasingly common ways for contributors to hide their identities when making gifts.

“It’s just so opaque,” Mark De Fusco, an expert on financial transactions in higher educational institutions and former researcher at the Pullias Center for Higher Education, told The Intercept. “So, you can essentially make donations and not be identified.”

“Deeply Invested in the Genocide”

In the fiscal year ending in June 2024, Columbia paid $100,000 to the Israel on Campus Coalition and another $75,000 to AIPAC affiliate American Israel Education Foundation.

In the same period, the Columbia administration summarily suspended the pro-Palestine student groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, quashed the encampments in solidarity with Gaza, and called on the New York City Police Department to........

© The Intercept