This story was originally published at Prism.

Philanthropic funders in the U.S. withdrew at least $8 million over the past 15 months from nonprofit organizations that expressed solidarity with Palestinians during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, according to a new report published by Funding Freedom. The report speculates that the number is likely much higher, while spotlighting financial threats to the pro-Palestine organization ecosystem as well as the harassment these organizations have faced since Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023.

Written by co-founders of the Palestine-focused organization Soheir Asaad and Rebecca Vilkomerson, this is the second report Funding Freedom has published on the difficulties of funding nonprofits that do work around or in Palestine. The first report, published in 2022, already emphasized a complex funding space for organizations that worked with Palestine, reporting on “the often implicit, subtle limits and silencing funders imposed on political speech and organizing,” according to the most recent report.

In the last 15 months, there has been a shift by funders, Vilkomerson said at the launch event for the report on Jan. 29, from “oblique pressure to really explicit cutting of funds, nonrenewals, and threats of cuts to curtail talking about what is happening in Gaza as a genocide or any other kind of sharp critique like that.” The report describes this shift as an “explicit, blunt, and often enduringly harmful way that funders use their economic power to exert control over their grantees,” with the conclusion that “the current tactics overtly aim to take down the entire Palestinian solidarity movement, including its funders.”

Another key shift noted by the report is the targeting of organizations that don’t necessarily work in the Palestine space but made statements expressing solidarity, calling for a ceasefire, or connecting other struggles to Palestine. This has especially been the case for reproductive justice and climate change organizations, which the report argues reflects “liberal philanthropy’s lack of an intersectional framework” that dictates that organizations “stay in their lane” rather than connect climate change or reproductive justice struggles to the genocide of Palestinians.

Both movements have credible reasons to express solidarity with Gaza, as carbon dioxide emissions from Israel’s bombings have had an effect on climate change, and miscarriages have risen by 300% in Gaza during Israel’s most recent attacks on civilians. Reproductive genocide specifically has been recognized by the Palestinian Feminist Collective as a part of Israel’s continued attempts to annihilate Palestinian life. The report reveals that by not following a “holistic, principled political vision across issues,” funding losses disproportionately affect smaller organizations led by people of color that “quickly equate to cutbacks in often vital and otherwise unavailable services.”

“These organizations [are] being punished for speaking out during the genocide, for calling it a genocide,” Vilkomerson said. “In some ways, this is a reflection of how organizations are often expected to stay in their issue lanes. And that really doesn’t allow for the broader set of alliances and commitments that many groups have.”

The report highlights five case studies, two in Palestine and three in the U.S.

In the case of Rising Majority, a broad-based coalition of Black, Indigenous, people of color, and multiracial groups on the political left, the Nathan Cummings Foundation did not renew its $250,000 grant because of “irreconcilable ideological differences.” Meanwhile, the New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) was informed in spring 2024 that a decadeslong donor withdrew a bequest of at least $3 million from his will and rejected a $1.2 million proposal from CCR. CCR staff also spoke to many donors who viewed the organization’s support of Palestinians as antisemitism, the report states. White ally group Stand Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) lost “a number of significant gifts, totaling approximately $100,000 from various individual donors” as well as $275,000 through nonrenewals of foundation funding, with the staff speculating that they have lost future funding streams.

According to Rising Majority, whose staff was interviewed and quoted by the authors of the report, despite the general uplifting of Palestinian liberation on the left, many funders lag in funding this kind of work, thus making it more challenging to build a broad front against authoritarianism.

“We hope this report will be useful to movement organizations and to philanthropy [so they can be] attentive to the ways funding is being withdrawn or cut or used as a punishment … as it also has a serious ripple effect on the strength across the movement’s anti-authoritarian front,” Vilkomerson said. “In the week since the Trump administration began, [it] has become ever more clear how important it is for us to be collectively making sure that an anti-authoritarian front is as strong as possible.”

During the launch event, Asaad, the report’s co-author, argued that this philanthropic ecosystem is inextricable from how humanitarian aid in the territory has historically aided the Israeli occupation of Palestine. “It has created an empty kind of promise of development under colonialism,” Asaad said. “It has created a Palestine completely dependent on aid, and it created a system that decontextualized Palestinian suffering and oppression, transforming it into a depoliticized reality.”

Despite the bleak conclusions of the report, silver-lining funding formations have emerged. After launching a grassroots fundraising campaign, SURJ gained 5,000 new grassroots donors, according to the report. CCR also estimated that the organization gained new supporters because of its solidarity with Palestine, saying that “a segment of their audience had been waiting for a message of solidarity with Palestinians.” Though CCR maintained that it’s difficult to estimate the reasons why some donors stop giving, the organization believes that any small to medium donors it lost to alleged antisemitism were replaced by new donors.

The staff at Rising Majority also reported that they received new donations explicitly because of their strong stance on Palestine.

“From their assessment, overall, the past year strengthened the connections and appreciation between pro-Palestinian groups across multiple issues, which includes those program officers [from donor organizations] who are willing to use the degree of power they have to ensure groups who are speaking out continue to have access to funding,” the report reads.

Addressing funders specifically, the report recommends that foundations preemptively plan for risky donations and “look for creative solutions,” instead of sacrificing smaller and principled movement partners for “internal protection.” The report authors urge foundations to add Palestine to all of their portfolios, weaving support for Palestine in climate justice, gender justice, education, and health portfolios whenever possible. The report also invites donors to organize into a broad front on proposed legislation that would curtail the ability of organizations to operate.

“We’re in a very fragile moment of ceasefire,” Asaad said. “Philanthropy cannot play a role in being complicit in the reconstruction plans, which we have been hearing a lot about by investors, by aspirations of people like Trump, who is already imagining Gaza Beach into a space of profit.”

Movement partners on the ground are “going to be the front line of combating and resisting these plans and continuing to resist for Palestinian liberation,” Asaad said.

Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice

This post was originally published on Next City.