profoundAF

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Parallelogram

Symmetries between the anti-Israel movement in the West and the anti-government movement in Israel

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”
— George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

On the surface, two protest movements look completely unrelated.

In Tel Aviv, thousands fill Kaplan Street weekly, blocking traffic and demanding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s resignation. They wave Israeli flags. They speak of saving democracy from within.

In American cities, anti-Zionist demonstrators march through Jewish neighborhoods chanting for intifada and waving Hezbollah flags. They gather outside synagogues during community events, block highways, and run mass rallies coordinated nationwide.

The participants would seem to share nothing in common. The Israeli protesters are mostly secular left-of-center citizens who believe they’re defending Israel’s democracy from authoritarianism. The American protesters are mostly left-of-center young people who believe they’re defending oppressed people. They march under different flags, chant different slogans, and do not see each other as allies.

Yet unbeknownst to them, they are funded, organized, and amplified by the same network.

Different puppets, but same string.

I’ll prove this with evidence from NGO annual reports, IRS 990 filings, US House Judiciary Committee findings, published foundation grant databases, and the work of Jennica Pounds who has publicly indexed 913,000 nonprofits and 1.3 million grants, to prove this claim. The pattern is hiding in public view — visible if you trace the money, invisible if you don’t.

This piece traces the money.

For the broader pattern of how US-based NGOs and government agencies have historically funded political destabilization operations around the world, see Aiding and Abetting.

What follows here narrows the lens to one specific symmetry that has come into much sharper focus in the year since: the same network that funds the anti-Israel movement across the West also funds the anti-government movement inside Israel.

Two protest movements. One funding apparatus. Two battlefields in the same war.

A parallelogram.

Why this matters now#

In May 2026 (one week before the writing of this piece), the Netanyahu government coalition filed a bill to dissolve the Knesset, making elections likely in September.

The same protest infrastructure that has been operational since January 2023 — three years of weekly demonstrations, professionally-produced ad campaigns, mass mobilizations, IDF reservist refusal organizing — is reactivating right now for the coming election. The same NGOs are running the same playbook. The same foundations are sending the same checks.

The protests in Israel that you’ll see in your timeline over the next four months are not what they appear to be on the surface. They are mostly organic in their participation but engineered in their infrastructure.

Both can be true. They are.

The Israeli Battlefield#

The Kaplan Street protest movement began in January 2023, organized by Standing Together, an NGO primarily funded by the New Israel Fund (NIF). NIF’s 2025 annual budget was $28.5 million. NIF’s donor base grew from roughly 14,000 to over 21,000 donors after October 7 — a surge of new money flowing into anti-government infrastructure during the war.

NIF has distributed over $300 million to more than 900 organizations across two decades. The major donors funneling money into NIF include the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and the Tides Center. These are the world’s most powerful anti-Israel organizations that we know of.

NIF’s grantee list reads as a roster of activist organizations driving anti-government, anti-Zionist, and anti-IDF activity. To list some:

  • Adalah — promoter of anti-Israel UN resolutions and ICC investigations.
  • Mada al-Carmel — supporter of the BDS movement and advocate for ending Israel’s identification as a Jewish state.
  • Human Rights Defenders Fund — promoter of the apartheid framing.
  • Mousawwa Center — advocating to change the Israeli flag, national anthem, and repeal the Law of Return.
  • Yesh Din — legal defense of terrorist organizations and denial of the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
  • Association for Civil Rights in Israel — co-funded by Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations for international anti-Israel advocacy.
  • Movement for Quality Government in Israel — funded by US State Department for a “Civic Activism Training” program in Jerusalem schools to train kids on protesting, whistleblowing, and civic activism.

Blue and White Future#

A second organization driving the movement is Blue and White Future (BWF). BWF runs the headquarters for the coalition of activist groups rallying the population against the Netanyahu government — physical office space, paid staff, PR coordination, the operational machine behind the protests.

BWF has raised over $40 million. According to House Judiciary findings, the money was funnelled from USAID through Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors to Jewish Communal Fund to Middle East Peace Dialogue Network — a trace made visible in US spending data and IRS 990 records. The corresponding Israeli-side records, filed by Blue and White Future with the Israeli Registrar of Nonprofits and analyzed in 2025 by Israel Hayom, confirm that PEF Israel Endowment Funds and Middle East Peace Dialogue Network were the largest foreign-sourced donors to BWF.

With this money, they’ve hired a high-end PR firm to run nationwide ad campaigns demonizing the prime minister on billboards, banners, YouTube ads, and social media.

But the headline number revealed by the July 17, 2025 House Judiciary Committee memorandum is staggering: PEF Israel Endowment Funds provided over $884 million to groups involved in anti-democracy protests in Israel. The Jewish Communal Fund, another US intermediary, provided over $42.8 million directly to the anti-Netanyahu protest headquarters and the protests’ two main funders.

Note: Don’t let the names of these organizations fool you into thinking their objectives are pro-Jewish or pro-Israel — that’s their trick.

Under the Biden administration, more than $900 million flowed into the Israeli anti-government movement.

“The Biden-Harris Administration funneled U.S. taxpayer money to certain Israeli entities with the effect of attempting to undermine Israel’s democratically elected government… In 2023, Israel experienced widespread protests over the government’s plan to reform the country’s judicial system… Media reports later revealed that these protests were funded in part by U.S. grant money that had been funneled through various American and Israeli non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to groups directing the protests.”
— United States House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committee, March 26, 2025

These are findings of the United States Congress, based on 380 documents obtained through formal investigation, naming specific NGOs, specific amounts, and specific flows. The investigation is ongoing.

Brothers in Arms#

A third operation worth naming explicitly is Brothers in Arms (Achim Laneshek), founded in January 2023 by reserve Lieutenant-Colonel Ron Scherf. Brothers in Arms is the IDF-reservist arm of the protest movement.

In the months before October 7, 2023, Brothers in Arms ran a campaign to convince tens of thousands of IDF reservists to refuse to serve when called up, as a protest tactic against the government. The campaign succeeded enough to materially weaken IDF readiness. Less than two months before Hamas attacked Israel and murdered 1,200 people, IDF Brigadier General Ari Singer publicly warned the country:

“Protest leaders are conducting a propaganda and influence operation to topple the government, and appear willing to sacrifice the army’s reputation to do it. It’s called psychological operations, or psyops, and it’s being carried out brilliantly by those leading the protests. It’s like they read the 101 manual on subversion. The army doesn’t appear to recognize what’s happening, which is why it hasn’t adequately confronted the threat.”

Brothers in Arms has raised approximately $53 million since its 2023 founding, with the majority foreign-sourced — per its own filings with the Israeli Registrar of Nonprofits. Additional foreign funding flowed to its protest-period operations indirectly through Blue and White Future, which routed donations via PEF Israel Endowment Funds and the Middle East Peace Dialogue Network (MEPDN). Reported donors include Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Leslie Wexner, founder of the Wexner Foundation.

Weakening one of the strongest militaries in the world is expensive work.

In December 2025, Defense Minister Israel Katz blocked the promotion of a senior IDF reserves officer specifically because of his involvement with Brothers in Arms. The Israeli government is now actively confronting the operation that helped sabotage its military readiness.

The Wexner Foundation, on the other hand, has its own story.

The Wexner-Epstein-Barak bridge#

It was initially revealed that in 2008, Jeffrey Epstein sent a $46 million donation to a Wexner-affiliated charitable fund. Then in December 2025, leaked emails from Epstein’s inbox spanning 2005 to 2008 revealed Epstein had operated as the de facto CFO of both the Wexner family office and the Wexner Foundation, making decisions on taxes, lines of credit, large fund transfers, and politically sensitive grants.

The man whose other business was running underage girls to people in positions of power, whose origin story remains unaccounted for, and whose institutional protection over decades remains unexplained, was also directing financial machinery that funded operations against Israel’s democracy and military.

The Wexner Foundation also paid former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak $2.3 million “for 2 reports, 1 wasn’t finished.” That payment was made while Barak was simultaneously meeting with Epstein dozens of times and traveling on his private plane.

Barak — the highest-profile public face of the anti-government movement, public instigator of protests and “civil disobedience,” and private instigator of what he himself has described as a coup against an elected government — is the touchpoint between the Wexner-Epstein financial machine and the Israeli protest movement on the ground.

His February 2025 statement to Army Radio:

“30,000 citizens need to camp outside the Knesset in tents for three weeks, day and night, until the country shuts down and Netanyahu realizes that his time is up.”

In February 2026, after the US Department of Justice released over 3 million pages of Epstein documents, Netanyahu himself publicly named the Epstein-Barak connection: “His unusual close relationship with Ehud Barak doesn’t suggest Epstein worked for Israel. It proves the opposite.” For the past 3.5 years Ehud Barak has shown himself to be an agent of chaos working to destabilize Israel’s democratic system.

In a separate response, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir banned Israeli government employees from participating in any Wexner Foundation leadership programs. One lawmaker, agreeing with the decision, wrote that the foundation was part of Israel’s “shadow regime” and “a long arm of the deep state.”

A criminal complaint has been filed seeking a police probe into the Barak-Wexner Foundation relationship. As of publication, the investigation is open.

The Knesset Response#

In February 2025, Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a bill to impose an 80% tax on foreign-government donations to Israeli nonprofits. In December 2025 a further bill was introduced to restrict NGOs receiving more than approximately $30,900 from a foreign political entity.

The Western Front#

On October 8, 2023 — while Hamas terrorists were still actively hunting civilians inside Israel — the anti-Israel movement began activating on US university campuses, spreading within weeks to cities across the Western world.

The participants are mostly young Americans. The organizers are not.

The campus movement is run by a network of NGOs that serve as its organizational and financial infrastructure. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is fiscally sponsored by WESPAC (Westchester People’s Action Coalition), a progressive nonprofit that’s funded by Tides Foundation and the Elias Foundation, among others.

The fuller list of NGO actors driving the campus movement:

Then the Jewish-named cover organizations:

  • Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) — funded by Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Open Society Foundations, Tides Center, and Benjamin Fund. JVP’s stated strategic objective is to drive a wedge into the American Jewish community and weaken US support for Israel.
  • IfNotNow — funded by Open Society Foundations, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and FMEP (financier of Al-Haq, linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terrorist organization).

The ADL and NGO Monitor have each published public reports documenting this network.

US Federal Response#

In March 2025, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent letters to 60 universities under investigation for antisemitic discrimination and harassment under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Major institutions — Columbia, Brown, UCLA — entered binding agreements restoring previously-frozen federal funds in exchange for sweeping policy overhauls.

The Trump administration has revoked student visas of foreign campus protesters and pursued deportations. USAID itself, the historical financing channel for the kinds of NGO operations documented here, was dismantled by the Trump administration in early 2025; approximately 83% of its programs were cancelled by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in March 2025.

This is the federal acknowledgment that the network exists and that the federal government had been complicit. The dismantling of USAID under DOGE was the structural admission. The Title VI enforcement is the operational response on the campus side. The House Judiciary investigation is the legislative branch’s accounting.

Symmetry#

The two networks are two sides of one object. The same names appear on both sides.

Note: In May 2026, with the network’s existence on the public record, Open Society Foundations pledged millions to “progressive Jewish groups to combat antisemitism.” The same Open Society Foundations that funds the operation to divide the American Jewish community against Israel and the campus movement that has terrorized Jewish students. You might find yourself a bit skeptical about what that money will be used for.

The networks share a playbook. The pattern in both countries:

  • NGO-organized “grassroots” movements with professionally-produced ad campaigns
  • Highway blockades and direct action targeting daily life
  • Mass-media-trained spokespeople
  • High-end PR firms running coordinated narrative campaigns
  • Mass-mobilization tactics targeting symbolic dates and events
  • Slogans that are professionally manufactured but presented as organic
  • A consistent demand that the elected government must be removed
  • Calls for civil disobedience by named former officials with documented foreign ties

The networks share simultaneous intended outcomes.

In Israel, the protest infrastructure works toward removing Netanyahu. On Western campuses and in Western cities, the same network works toward stripping Israel of its diplomatic and financial support, pressuring Western politicians to abandon their most consequential Middle East ally, and normalizing anti-Israel sentiment into mainstream political discourse.

In Israel: weaken Netanyahu’s domestic support.
In the West: weaken Israel’s external support.

Two battlefields. One war. Same money.

What to watch for#

The Knesset will dissolve in the coming weeks. Elections will likely be held in September. The protest infrastructure has had three years to refine its playbook and is now poised to surge into election season.

You can expect:

  • A new wave of NGO-organized protests at Kaplan and Habima in Tel Aviv, increasing in frequency as the election approaches
  • New high-budget ad campaigns by NGOs targeting Netanyahu and his coalition
  • IDF reservist refusal campaigns reactivating
  • New “civil society” coalitions launching with prominent leadership figures
  • Diaspora-Jewish voices on social media echoing the NGO talking points
  • Western-press coverage uncritically presenting the protest movement as the popular will of Israeli democracy

Notice the funding paths when they appear. They will be the same paths documented in this piece. The same foundations. The same intermediaries. The same families. The same playbook.

You can trace it yourself. The funding network documented in this piece is fully visible via public data. The full trace is publicly searchable.

Closing#

Israel is a country of nine and a half million people, surrounded by enemies who have spent eight decades attempting to destroy it militarily. Each attempt has failed. The country is now under a different kind of attack — one waged in NGO offices in Washington and Tel Aviv, in foundation boardrooms in New York and London, in PR firm meeting rooms preparing the next ad buy, in classroom curricula being shaped by the next grant cycle.

The Israeli citizens who fill Kaplan Street have come to believe they must save democracy from authoritarianism by overthrowing the democratically elected prime minister.

They are right to debate the serious internal questions that the country faces about its judiciary and the future of its political institutions. But who decides those questions?

Does the decision belong to Israeli voters making it themselves or to foreign enemies that have spent over $900 million to influence the minds of the Israeli public?

Watch the parallelogram. The pattern is visible from above. The cost of seeing it is the willingness to look.

A complete bibliography of all sources cited in this piece is available at: https://profound.af/parallelogram-bibliography-bc8a6023a577.

For the broader pattern of historical US government and foundation funding flowing into political destabilization operations globally, see my prior research piece Aiding & Abetting: The Dark Money Network Trying to Overthrow the Israeli Government.

Written by Jeremy Musighi.