Columbia University Paid AIPAC and ADL Affiliates While Suspending Pro-Palestine Student Groups, Tax Filings Show

In the fiscal year ending June 2024, Columbia University paid $100,000 to the Israel on Campus Coalition and $75,000 to the American Israel Education Foundation, an AIPAC affiliate, according to a review of the university's tax filings by The Intercept. In the fiscal year ending June 2025, the school paid $7,200 to the Anti-Defamation League for what its filings describe only as "program services."

The payments ran through the same period in which Columbia suspended the pro-Palestine student groups Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, cleared pro-Palestinian encampments, and twice called on the New York Police Department to arrest campus protesters. The analysis found little or no comparable funding to pro-Palestine, Arab, or Muslim organizations over the same years.

A Columbia spokesperson told The Intercept the grants did not come from the university's operating budget but were distributed through a donor-advised fund set up at Columbia, an arrangement that lets contributors direct gifts to outside charities while shielding their own identities from public disclosure.

"It's just so opaque. So, you can essentially make donations and not be identified," said Mark De Fusco, an expert on higher-education finance and former researcher at the University of Southern California's Pullias Center, describing how donor-advised funds work.

Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia, said the filings validate concerns raised by faculty and students since the fall of 2023.

"It confirms our worst suspicions since fall of 2023 that pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian politics are the official policy of this institution," Howley told The Intercept. "You could have surmised that from the institution's actions and speech, but it appears to also be revealed in its resource allocation."

Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian American activist who graduated from Columbia in 2025 and took part in the campus protests, said the payments confirm what demonstrators had argued at the time. Students had pressed Columbia to disclose its financial ties to Israel and pro-Israel groups and to divest from them.

"The whole reason why we were protesting in the first place is because we knew that they were deeply invested in the genocide in Gaza," Alwan said. "These findings confirm what we've been saying all along."

The Intercept reported that ADL leadership publicly welcomed the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, identified as a lead Columbia protest negotiator, by federal immigration officials, and that ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt had compared pro-Palestinian student protesters to Islamist militants roughly a month before Columbia announced a formal partnership with the organization in July 2025 for antisemitism "programming and training." Neither statement was quoted directly in the reporting, and Occupation Watch has not independently verified the remarks. None of the pro-Israel organizations that received Columbia funds responded to requests for comment, according to The Intercept.

Columbia's tax filings list the payments to pro-Israel groups under the category "program services," a term the university has not publicly defined. The filings show that, among more than 400 outside payments Columbia made in 2024, the pro-Israel organizations are among a small handful earmarked for relations with a specific foreign country.