Overview

WESPAC Foundation – a longtime fiscal sponsor of anti-Israel organizations in the US, such as National Students for Justice in Palestine and Palestinian Youth Movement – faces mounting scrutiny for its role in enabling antisemitism.  It has been named as a defendant in multiple lawsuits and garnered Congressional attention, accused of failing to exercise proper oversight over sponsored projects. (For more information, see NGO Monitor’s July 2025 report, “The Legal and Financial Repercussions of WESPAC’s Sponsorship of Anti-Israel NGOs.”)

WESPAC’s IRS Form 990 covering fiscal year September 2023–August 2024, providing highly technical financial information, illustrates the organization’s central role in the orchestrated anti-Israel demonization campaigns that were launched in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the Oct 7th Hamas attacks. WESPAC received $2 million more in the filing period, compared to the prior fiscal cycle, and channeled $1 million to a leading NGO behind campus encampments and other aspects of antisemitic violence, intimidation and disruptions. WESPAC also spent $115,000 in legal fees – in previous years there were no such expenses; the 990 does not indicate whether these expenses were for lawsuits against WESPAC, support for detainees involved in the violent disruptions, or both. 

WESPAC’s filing definitively demonstrates that the post-Oct 7th anti-Israel protest movement was not a spontaneous, volunteer grassroots phenomenon, as often claimed. Rather, substantial financial flows underwrote demonstrations, travel, mobilization, and perhaps salaries and benefits. More broadly, it exemplifies the exploitation of nonprofit resources to support antisemitic rhetoric, extremist networks, and hostile environments for Jewish communities.

Key Findings

The September 2023 – August 2024 990 points to several critical dimensions:

1. Central role in protest organization: WESPAC financed and sustained anti-Israel mass disruptions, including the November 4, 2023 National March on Washington, DC.
2. Orchestrated, not grassroots: A dramatic growth in resources devoted to travel, conferences, events, and perhaps salaries indicates an organized national campaign rather than local activism.
3. New revelations: For the first time, WESPAC’s 990 names fiscally sponsored projects, highlighting its support for NGOs engaged in antisemitic rhetoric and terror-affiliated groups.
4. Mounting legal risks: Lawsuits have weakened WESPAC’s fiscal sponsorship model, driving projects to relocate to other hosts.

Monumental Disclosure: Amounts Provided to NGOs Revealed

For the first time, WESPAC’s 990 names fiscally sponsored projects, providing unknown details. In similar documents from previous years, support for the activities of fiscally sponsored projects were, apparently, listed under vague budget lines such as “office expenses.”

Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)

According to the 990 (page 34), WESPAC transferred $1 million to a framework listed as “Honor the Earth” and designated for PYM, a leading U.S. anti-Israel activist group with documented ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror group. 

Previously, details of WESPAC support for PYM were not provided. However, following multiple lawsuits naming both PYM and WESPAC, in June 2024, PYM began soliciting donations via Honor the Earth, an “Indigenous-led organization fighting to dismantle settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism.” PYM organizer Nadya Tannous serves as deputy director of Honor the Earth, and PYM lead organizer Lenna Zahran Nasr serves as a board member. (Honor the Earth does not provide details on the donors and amounts disbursed for PYM activities.) It is possible that additional funds from WESPAC were disbursed directly to or on behalf of PYM before the shift to Honor the Earth. 

PYM has worked closely with PFLP-linked Samidoun – designated by the US government in October 2024 as “a sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization” – including on protests and disturbances. In 2019, a French court, citing a 2015 report from the French General Directorate for Internal Security, claimed that PYM is “affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.”

Additionally, PYM’s Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship honors the late PFLP leader.

After the events of Oct. 7th, PYM used funding directed through WESPAC to organize demonstrations, rallies, and student encampments across the United States and Canada, accusing Israel of “genocide.” On April 23, 2024, the PFLP terror group issued a statement expressing support for U.S. student groups like PYM and in support of American students: “We in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, along with all our people, the honorable of our nation and the world, confirm our steadfast support for the struggle of the students youth movements, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) at universities such as Columbia, Rutgers, Yale, Stanford, among others. We call for enhancing the unity of students and their struggle to divest American universities from the zionist entity and cut all forms of relations with it.”

In May 2024 – still under WESPAC fiscal sponsorship – PYM was one of the key conveners of the People’s Conference for Palestine. The conference featured speakers affiliated with the PFLP. As part of the promotion of the event, PYM shared an endorsement video by Salah Salah, one of the founding members of the PFLP. In the video, Salah “call[ed] on the members of the Palestinian and Arab communities and friends and supporters of our cause to participate in the People’s Conference…[It is a racist vitriol that offers a new model to Nazism… Participation in this People’s Conference is crucial on a large scale and on the highest level to set a plan that offers further coordination and an agreement on a strategy for unified action.” At the event, Mohammed Nabulsi, a leading organizer in PYM, gave the opening remarks, calling to “liberate every inch of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” and to “craft a path forward that truly brings the Zionist state and its military and its imperialist backers to their knees.” Nabulsi also led “participants in chants calling for intifada and praising Hezbollah and Houthi maritime terrorism.”

National March on Washington, DC

 According to the 990, WESPAC granted $62,000 to the Progress Unity Fund for activity related to the “National March on Washington, DC.” Progress Unity Fund’s 2023 990 shows it distributed $232,244 in conjunction with the ANSWER Coalition and other “progressive” organizations for “mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people in a mass action in Washington, D.C., that promoted a permanent ceasefire to end the war that took thousands of civilian lives in Gaza.” (The ANSWER Coalition is itself a fiscally sponsored project of the Progress Unity Fund.)

The November 2023, “National March on Washington: Free Palestine,” was endorsed by multiple NGOs including PYM, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), CODEPINK, Jewish Voice for Peace, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), and WESPAC itself. This and similar events, featured antisemitic rhetoric and contributed to a hostile environment for Jewish communities on campuses and in public spaces.

Palestinian Feminist Collective

 WESPAC’s 990 also shows that WESPAC granted $83,404 to Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition for Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC). Like PYM, PFC was fiscally sponsored by WESPAC until some point in 2024. 

In December 2023, PFC – still under WESPAC fiscal sponsorship – signed an NGO statement titled, “‘Sexual assault’ as propaganda to facilitate Genocide in Gaza,” denying that Hamas perpetrated sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attacks and after. According to the NGOs, “Within their narration to justify the genocide, the US administration adopted, via recitations of its president, the allegations promoted by the Israeli occupation’s propaganda machine regarding the occurrence of ‘sexual assaults’ against Israeli female hostages in the Gaza Strip. No credible evidence or reports from independent international investigative bodies in this regard was provided. Such conduct in endorsing unfounded allegations without due diligence serves as a deliberate distortion of the struggle of the Palestinian people for liberation and their legitimate resistance against an occupying colonial entity.”

In August 2024, PFC was part of the NGO coalition that sought to disrupt the Democratic National Convention, demanding that Democrats adopt anti-Israel policies. The central demand of the NGO coalition was to “End U.S. Aid to Israel…. We must stop our government from arming and supporting this genocide.”

(WESPAC also funneled funds to two other organizations, Freedom Food Alliance and Hudson Valley Community Coalition, although apparently not for activities related to Israel.) 

Income Surge after Oct. 7

WESPAC’s financial document reveals a dramatic expansion of income and expenses following October 7. Expenses nearly doubled, from $1.7 million in the prior year to $3.7 million in 2023–2024, reflecting WESPAC’s role as a central clearinghouse for largely anonymous anti-Israel funding during a period of heightened activism.

Of particular note, WESPAC reports allocating  $536,000 for “conferences, conventions, and meetings,” $96,000 for “event expenses,” and $105,000 for “travel” – all of which point to extensive planning and coordination of protests and activist gatherings across the U.S. 

WESPAC also reported spending $115,000 in legal fees, compared to zero the previous year. Some of these costs are likely related to lawsuits filed against WESPAC in mid-2024. 

There is also a line item of $275,000 in “Administrative Fees” that did not exist in prior 990s. No details are provided on the nature of those “fees.” 

Leadership Shifts

For the first time since 2008, the WESPAC 990 form was signed by Executive Director Nada Khader, rather than Board President Howard Horowitz, who signed in the intervening years.

This development may be significant: it suggests that WESPAC moved from being a relatively passive fiscal sponsor to a more active operation requiring greater staff involvement (Khader has been executive director, receiving a salary, for years).

In October 2023, in the aftermath of the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, Khader published a statement claiming, “The attack from Gaza has a context. It follows months and years of constant violence, pogroms, expulsions and other manifestations of apartheid inflicted on Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem. We do not condone attacks on civilians or violence of any kind. We do recognize its root causes in oppression, injustice and apartheid. We support without reservation all nonviolent resistance to apartheid and we refuse to be labeled as anti-Semitic for opposing Israel’s apartheid policies of supremacy and separation” (emphasis added).

Conclusion

WESPAC’s 2023-2024 financial disclosure is important for revelations about WESPAC’s role as a financial hub for groups orchestrating anti-Israel disruptions – after years of concealed details. These provide new leads for understanding the organization of and planning for the disruptions and violence on campuses and beyond after Oct 7th. The large-scale investments in mobilization and legal defense demonstrate that the mass actions following October 7 were neither organic nor spontaneous but heavily resourced and strategically coordinated.

Given these findings, there is a pressing need for further investigation into WESPAC’s financial practices and its income sources, as well as those of the broader U.S. NGO network that organized and funded political campaigns under the guise of charitable activity.