The Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) has spent millions of dollars in 2025 supporting an array of anti-Israel groups, several of which have ties to terrorism abroad and extremist activists in the United States, a Washington Free Beacon review of the organization’s grantees shows.
The RBF in April of this year awarded a $135,000 grant to 7amleh, the “Arab Center for Social Media Advancement,” under the umbrella of “Peacebuilding.” The organization describes itself as an advocate “for Palestinian digital rights,” creating a “safe, fair and free digital space for Palestinians.”
Its leadership, rather than a list of notable peace activists, consists of several people who have promoted violence and one with ties to terror.
Ahmed Qadi, 7amleh’s “monitoring and documentation coordinator,” also served as an officer at Al-Haq, a group the Israeli government has designated a terrorist organization. The State Department sanctioned Al-Haq in September over the organization’s engagement in “efforts by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent.”
Mohammad Badarneh, a project coordinator for 7amleh, responded to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel with approval.
“The only valuable and important duty for a person living under occupation is the extent of his resistance to this occupation — by all means and methods,” he posted on Facebook after the attack, according to NGO Monitor.
On Oct. 4, 2015, 7amleh board member Ahmad Darawsha shared an image of Palestinian terrorist Fadi Alon, shot dead by Israeli forces after stabbing a 15-year-old boy. Writing in Arabic, Darawsha said, “You are so beautiful alive above ground, and you are so beautiful alive underground. What shame is brought on us, whether alive or dead.”
7amleh was too extreme for the left-wing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), who pulled out of an event with the group in 2024 after her office received a large number of messages about “individuals associated with the event.”
The RBF awarded a $100,000 grant to Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide in July, with the label “Democratic Practice–United States.” That designation, according to the fund’s website, goes to groups that “advance a vital and fully inclusive democracy in the United States.”
Project South has worked with groups like the terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations and Students for Justice in Palestine. It has defended the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, describing its conviction for providing millions of dollars in financial support to Hamas as “egregious” and “overbroad.” And it has fought against state-level efforts to combat anti-Semitism, describing those campaigns as “repressive” and “Targeting Support for Palestine.”
Project South’s senior strategist, Stephanie Guilloud, took to the pages of the extreme anti-Israel outlet Mondoweiss to write that Columbia University encampment leader Mahmoud Khalil was a “political prisoner in today’s rise of authoritarian control,” and warned in another piece, “The war on Gaza is being used to advance fascism and white supremacy in the US.”
Project South began accusing Israel of “genocide” on Oct. 19, 2023, in a statement calling on its followers to “RESIST.”
The RBF awarded grants to several organizations that aided various Gaza flotillas, which sought to illegally supply aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza during the war.
One such group, Choose Love, received $300,000 for its “refugee leadership.” Choose Love has supported the flotilla to the extent that one of its participants, Alexander Hogg, recorded a video thanking the organization.
The group was also a “charity partner” for the “Together for Palestine” music festival, which brought together sanctioned U.N. official Francesca Albanese, disgraced former MSNBC personality Mehdi Hasan, and former Palestine Liberation Organization official Diana Buttu.
Adalah, the “Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel,” also provided financial backing for a Gaza flotilla. It received $135,000 from the RBF in June 2025. The group has become famous in Israel for representing Israeli students accused of supporting Hamas and the family of imprisoned terrorist Walid Daka. When Israel moved to eliminate benefits for parents of Palestinian minors convicted of terrorism, Adalah condemned the policy change as “collective punishment” driven by “racist motives.”
In August 2019, Adalah invited Abdel Razeq Farraj to speak to Arab-Israeli children at its summer camp. Farraj, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group, spent six years in an Israeli prison for his involvement in terrorism, according to NGO Monitor.
The RBF gave $250,000 to the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) in January of this year. The nonprofit group describes its mission as “sustaining the anti-occupation/pro-peace sector” and “combatting the weaponization of the Israel-Palestinian issue & false accusations of antisemitism.”
The FMEP held briefings for members of Congress in the spring of 2024. Among the experts it brought to the briefings was Mkhaimar Abusada, an academic who sits on the boards of two organizations that were founded by and frequently partner with Palestinian terrorists, one of which was sanctioned by the State Department earlier this year.
Abusada, now a visiting professor at Northwestern University hired as part of the school’s agreement with anti-Israel encampment organizers, wrote last year of meeting the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in 2018. Before moving to the United States, he taught at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City, where the Israel Defense Forces found explosives and Hamas tunnels.
The fund, one of the famous family’s many charitable arms, is no stranger to extremism. Many of the pro-Hamas protesters who attempted to derail New York City’s Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree lighting soon after Oct. 7, 2023—including one with a poster bearing a swastika—were members of RBF-backed organizations.
Among the leaders of the fund are several members of the Rockefeller family, including John D. Rockefeller’s great-great grandson Justin. Anti-Israel pundit Peter Beinart is also listed as a trustee of the institution on its website. While its previous giving to extremist organizations has been reported, the fund has granted millions of dollars this calendar year alone to a bevy of radical groups.
Neither the RBF nor the grantees responded to Free Beacon requests for comment.
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