Soros family boosts Israel critic Pramila Jayapal with max donations to reelection campaign
Gabe Kaminsky
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Left-wing billionaire George Soros joined his son Alex Soros in steering maximum campaign donations to Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who has recently come under fire from Democrats over her anti-Israel rhetoric, second quarter filings show.
The Soroses contributed $6,600 each on June 29 to the campaign for Jayapal, who said she’s “been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state” at a July 15 progressive event in Chicago held by a group called Netroots Nation. Dozens of House Democrats released a statement on July 17 calling the comments “dangerous and antisemitic” from the congresswoman, who has since tried to walk back her comments and apologize.
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The donations are a further window into how George Soros in particular has bankrolled campaigns and nonprofit organizations that have sought to delegitimize the Jewish state of Israel. In 2020, the Soros-backed Foundation to Promote Open Society granted $250,000 to Alliance for Global Justice, an anti-Israel charity in Arizona the Washington Examiner reported is linked to Palestinian terrorism.
The foundation that same year gave $25,000 to Democracy for the Arab World Now, which recently launched a campaign to pressure the United States government to revoke a visa for a top Israeli official. Still, many left-leaning groups, such as the Anti-Defamation League, have sought to offer that criticism of Soros from Republicans about his political influence amounts to antisemitism since the Hungarian native survived the Nazi-Hungary occupation and is of Jewish descent.
“The Soros family and its massive network of nonprofits have long been some of the biggest funders of anti-Semites and Israel-haters in the world, surpassed only by a few oil kingdoms,” Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, a conservative investigative think tank, told the Washington Examiner. “This gives the lie to claims that it’s anti-Semitic to criticize Soros.”
In attempting to walk back her remarks about Israel, Jayapal alleged she was trying to “defuse a tense situation” at the Chicago event and offered “apologies to those who I have hurt with my words.”
Netroots Nation, the nonprofit group based in Kansas City, Missouri, that held the conference, has received grants over the years from the likes of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and the left-wing group Demand Justice.
Netroots Nation has also taken cash from the Foundation for Middle East Peace, which has equated Israel to an “apartheid” state and in August 2022 condemned Israel’s government for classifying six Palestinian activist hubs as terror organizations, according to financial disclosures and statements reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
Meanwhile, Jayapal’s Democratic colleagues called her Israel remarks “unacceptable” in their joint statement, noting, “We will never allow anti-Zionist voices that embolden antisemitism to undermine and disrupt the strongly bipartisan consensus supporting the U.S.-Israel relationship that has existed for decades.”
“It’s far from surprising that the Soroses would support a radical, anti-Israel bigot like Jayapal,” Hayden Ludwig, policy research director for Restoration of America, a conservative advocacy group, told the Washington Examiner. “We know that their shared ‘Open Society’ ideology loathes Israel and the United States in equal measure.”
“But it should be eye-opening to the ‘Progressives’ who pretend that criticism of Soros is ‘anti-Semitic,'” Ludwig added. “They want to have it both ways, but Americans won’t be fooled.”
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Jayapal’s campaign and a Soros spokesman did not reply to requests for comment.
“As you know, OSF is a 501(c)(3) organization and does not make political contributions,” Jonathan Kaplan, a spokesman for the Open Society Foundations, told the Washington Examiner.