The Seattle Foundation Funded “Teach Palestine.” Who Paid for It?

The Foundation restructured its funding policies following recommendations from an advisory committee that included DSA members and an individual affiliated with a mosque tied to Hamas-linked orgs

Rethinking Schools received $10,000 from the Seattle Foundation, specifically earmarked for the 2024 Spring Issue of Rethinking Schools’ magazine, according to the Seattle Foundation’s most recently filed Form 990. The 2024 Spring Issue was “Teach Palestine.”

The Seattle Foundation, which has over $1 billion in assets, restructured its grantmaking policies following recommendations from, among other organizations, the Democratic Socialists of America and a mosque with ties to Hamas-linked organizations.

The opaque nature of Donor-Advised Funds means individuals can provide thousands of dollars to organizations like Rethinking Schools, directly impacting K-12 classrooms, without meaningful public transparency.

The Seattle Foundation

The Seattle Foundation is a community grantmaking foundation founded in Seattle, Washington in 1946. At the end of 2024, the Seattle Foundation reported approximately $1.26 billion in net assets, according to its Form 990.

In 2024, the Seattle Foundation distributed more than $230 million in grants, roughly two-thirds of which ($155.6 million) came from Donor-Advised Funds. Donor-Advised Funds allow individuals, corporations, or organizations to route grants through the Foundation while shielding the identity of the recommending donor from public disclosure.

In 2021, the Seattle Foundation “revised” its grantmaking policies in order to “advance racial equity.” Equity, claims the Seattle Foundation, is at the center of all it does.

Alesha Washington, who came on board as the Foundation’s president and CEO in 2022, has said

By the time Seattle Foundation became a possibility for me, I was impressed by how explicit the foundation was about racial equity and justice, and how clear it was about the role that a community foundation could play in systems-change work through grant making and advocacy.

The Seattle Foundation commissioned an advisory board to provide feedback and recommendations on the foundation’s policies.

As a result, the Foundation revised its Grantmaking Policy, including how it governs its Donor-Advised funds:

In many instances, Seattle Foundation relies on the IRS to regulate potential distributees of its funds, but if Seattle Foundation has knowledge that a recommended organization is engaged in unlawful discrimination, and/or hateful activities (the Prohibited Conduct), it will bring that information to the attention of the recommending Advisor and will not permit a fund distribution to that organization. Seattle Foundation will make Fund distributions (and will make its own grant distributions from unrestricted resources) to support charitable programs and activities of organizations that agree they do not discriminate on the basis of age, race, national origin, ethnicity, sex (including pregnancy), gender, gender identity, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, caste, veteran or military status, immigration status, political or religious belief.

Hateful activities are defined to mean activities that incite or engage in violence, intimidation, harassment, threats, or defamation targeting an individual or group based upon their actual or perceived age, race, national origin, ethnicity, sex (including pregnancy), gender, gender identity, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, caste, veteran or military status, immigration status, political or religious belief. These activities are contrary to Seattle Foundation’s charitable mission. (emphasis added)

The individuals on the advisory board included:

• Kiyomi Fujikawa, at the time the co-director of Third Wave Fund, a grantmaking organization engaged in what it describes as the “fight for BIPOC gender justice & liberation.”

• Aneelah Afzali. At the time, Afzali was executive director of American Muslim Empowerment Network of the Muslim Association of Puget Sound.

In 2019 and again in 2023, Afzali co-authored op-eds with Jewish activists calling Israel a “racist” state and accusing Jews of “weaponizing” antisemitism.

The Muslim Association of Puget Sound took part in a fundraising event for REACH Education Fund (REF) in January 2025. REF officials have publicly supported Hamas. REF has also worked with Baitulmaal, a charity that funds Hamas proxies.

As reported by the Middle East Forum:

…Ayyad Yassin, the current chairman of Reach Education Fund, has posted “congratulations to all our people in Gaza” following the Hamas’s killing of Israeli soldiers, as well as praise for a terrorist attack by Hamas’s Qassam Brigades.

A significant number of Reach’s staff, including its Palestine Director, attend or graduated from the Islamic University of Gaza, an institution founded by Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, which the Israelis claim “serves as a central training center for Hamas engineers.” Meanwhile, posts published at Hamas’s Islamic University of Gaza’s official website and on its social media feature “announcements” from the Reach Education Fund, in which the American charity advertises programs established in “cooperation with Baitulmaal” (an Islamist charity profiled below).

• Two unnamed representatives of “DivestSPD”, a project of the Seattle Democratic Socialists of America, committed to defunding Seattle police.

DivestSPD is followed by Jesse Hagopian.

Hagopian is on the editorial board of Rethinking Schools and is campaign director for the Zinn Education Project, a joint initiative of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

In 2024, Teaching for Change received $226,899 through the Seattle Foundation. $200,000 was to “provide support for Teaching for Black Lives,” a campaign of the Zinn Education Project.

The Teaching for Black Lives campaign provides teachers support, resources, and encouragement to teach young people honestly about systemic racism and how to organize for justice.

A further $16,899 went to support an unspecific program of the Zinn Education Project.

Jesse Hagopian

Hagopian is a Seattle-based educator and activist.

In 2006, “Jesse served as the campaign manager for Seattle Black Panther founding captain Aaron Dixon’s Green Party bid for U.S. senate with the message of, “Out of war…and into our communities!””

In 2011, Hagopian was part of a delegation to Israel and the Palestinian territories with Interfaith Peacebuilders (now known as Eyewitness Palestine). Eyewitness Palestine has had some unsavory associations over the years and has expressed support for convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh.

After a return from the delegation, Hagopian took up with Black4Palestine.

At the Rethinking Schools’ Teach Palestine book launch (a separate project to the magazine issue funded by the Seattle Foundation), Hagopian claimed that “Israel is trying to annihilate the past, the present and the future of people” and that Israel is worse than the Jim Crow South.

Teach Palestine Spring Issue

The Teach Palestine Spring issue overlaps in content with Teaching Palestine, Rethinking Schools’ book published in February 2025:

For example, What We Learned from Our “Oakland to Gaza” K–12 Teach-In by members of Oakland Education Association for Palestine appears in both.

Secondary students were similarly engaged during the virtual panel, which included speakers from the Palestinian Youth Movement, Jewish Voice for Peace Bay Area, and the Black Alliance for Peace, and was moderated by an Oakland parent. Panelists spoke about their personal relationship to the Palestinian struggle for freedom, why it is important to them, and how it connects to issues students face in Oakland and the Bay Area. A Palestinian American panelist shared that “for me, being engaged in the Palestinian freedom struggle means rejecting . . . the separation of my land and my people that has been forced on me because of the massacres my grandparents faced.” And a Jewish panelist shared that to him, engaging with the Palestinian freedom struggle means “rejecting Zionism’s attempt to say that the only way Jewish people can be safe is through . . . militarized violence.”

As do

• Resources for Teaching Palestine which include

- “The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War In the United States”, a film, narrated by Roger Waters, which defends Hamas and “Pali Answers”, a “crowdsourced database of short responses to Zionist lies,” which again contains defense of Hamas.

• “No, Anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism”, by Bill Bigelow in which Bigelow argues that because some Jews are anti-Zionist and some Zionists are anti-semitic, anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism. Bigelow of course never deals with the definition of Zionism in his piece nor, when discussing the history of Zionism, does Bigelow mention the Holocaust or the Farhud.

During the book launch for Teaching Palestine, Bigelow describes Zionism as a “movement of segregation and domination”, and that the Zionist movement “has contempt for Palestinian life.”

• “Israel’s War on Gaza Is Also a War on History, Education, and Children” by Jesse Hagopian.

The Seattle Foundation’s Donor-Advised Fund policies were revised following recommendations from an advisory committee that included members of the Democratic Socialists of America and an individual associated with a mosque which has ties to Hamas-linked organizations.

The Seattle Foundation alleges that it “will make fund distributions … to support charitable programs and activities of organizations that agree they do not discriminate” on protected grounds, including national origin, ethnicity, and political beliefs. Yet, Teach Palestine was funded through the Seattle Foundation.

Because of the nature of Donor-Advised Funds, we cannot know which individual or group recommended the funding to Rethinking Schools, Zinn Education Project and Teaching for Change. What we do know is that Donor- Advised Funds have a direct influence on K-12 classrooms and the public is not privy to who is underwriting that influence.