What Is the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights? Group Training Protesters

The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), a longtime pro-Palestinian nonprofit organization, has staffers and youth fellows across the country who have taken part in the series of Gaza-related protests that have become commonplace.

Numerous pro-Palestinian protests and encampments have spread from coast to coast after seemingly being inspired by actions of students at New York City's Columbia University, extending to institutions including George Washington University, Fordham University, the University of Alabama, Yale, Harvard, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Texas at Austin, among others.

The demonstrations have attracted both praise and scrutiny as they've grown and commanded more attention, leading to arrests and large crowds galvanizing for or against the cause—which has included individuals calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and encouraging divestment in Israel and cutting off funding toward companies they say support the war in the Middle East.

Their calls for "just and lasting peace for Palestinians and Israelis" are based on aspects including human rights, international law, equality, and relevant United Nations resolutions. The nonprofit opposes U.S. military, diplomatic, financial, corporate, and all other forms of support "for Israel's occupation and apartheid policies toward Palestinians."

"We stand against Zionism as a political system that privileges the rights of Jews over the rights of others," says the organization's website. "We also reject the charge of antisemitism when it is used spuriously to silence legitimate criticism of Israel's policies and practices."

Ahmad Abuznaid is currently the group's executive director.

Newsweek reached out to USCPR via phone and email for comment.

A 2023 annual report published by the organization detailed extensive efforts on behalf of Palestinians in a few short weeks following Hamas' October 7, 2023, attacks against Israel which left 1,200 dead and 240 taken hostage. Since then 34,000 Palestinians are believed to have been killed in Israel's retaliatory war in Gaza.

Such efforts included the sending of nearly 1 million emails and 150,000 calls to congressional members in every district to demand a ceasefire; two large national mobilizations and marches in Washington, D.C.; virtual "phone jams" involving thousands of activists; and sit-ins and "civil disobedience at elected official's offices" to pressure lawmakers on a ceasefire.

The group's revenue stream in 2021, according to tax returns, was $1.51 million.

Democratic billionaire and donor George Soros has been linked to the group, which gives around $7,800 to its community-based fellows and an amount ranging between $2,800 and $3,660 for campus-based fellows, according to the New York Post.

USCPR says on its website that since the fall of 2020, it "has built youth organizing skills and leadership through 10 cohorts" of fellowship. That includes 29 fellows who work about eight hours per week to "nurture campaigns and tactics that translate grassroots power—local boycott campaigns, student divestment wins, and local policy changes—into change in deeply unjust federal policies."

Examples of such campaigns include Seattle End the Deadly Exchange, UT Dallas Divest from Death, and Reject IHRA Montgomery County.

Fellow applicants who are being considered as part of this year's programs are encouraged to develop strategies promoting cultural boycott campaigns, as well as identify "new boycott or divestment emerging targets."

City council campaigns are also desired, encouraging money to not be spent toward pro-Israel causes.

Nine USCPR youth fellows led local organizing work in their cities in 2023.

Craig Birckhead-Morton, a USCPR youth fellow and senior at Yale majoring in history, was reportedly among 48 students arrested last week by Yale Police who cleared a pro-Palestinian tent encampment in Beinecke Plaza.

USCPR has praised him for his efforts, saying he's "doing phenomenal organizing with the Yalies4Palestine student group."

Birckhead-Morton wrote an op-ed in the Yale Daily News criticizing Israel's "genocidal war" against the Palestinians.

"This is not accidental," he wrote. "On the contrary—it is by design. Throughout history, the colonizer has always understood that education is a powerful weapon in the hands of the colonized."

The university has "extraordinary obligations" to Palestinian students and is implored to build connections with Palestinian universities such as Birzeit, he added—also mentioning Yale's purported complicity in colonial war crimes based on war industry partnership or partnerships with Israeli academic institutions that shun Palestinian academics.

Newsweek reached out to Birckhead-Morton via email for comment.

Another USCPR youth fellow, Malak Afaneh, is a law student at the University of California-Berkeley.

Afaneh told Organizing My Thoughts, a newsletter written by Kelly Hayes, in a piece published on April 29 that a 3,000-plus-person walkout was the biggest pro-Palestine student campus protest in the school's history.

"We all have a collective responsibility to insert the word Palestine everywhere, whether in our school spaces or work conversations, in every platform possible," Afaneh said. "And also the reason we're doing this is that today there is not a single university that is standing in Gaza that those people, the students, the faculty, the administration, they've been shot, they've been killed, they've been detained, they've been arrested, and not a single university is standing.

"And we are the ones that have been complicit in allowing this to happen."

She drew mixed responses last month when she and other pro-Palestinian activists interrupted a backyard dinner hosted by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school, and his wife for third-year law students.

"We're trying to bring this back to why I was there. I was there because UC should divest from apartheid," Afaneh said after the fact, per reports. "More than $2 million of our tuition money goes to weapons/arms manufacturers.

"And this is much bigger than myself, much bigger than any students here. This is about stopping a genocide. And that's important to remember."

Afaneh, an aspiring lawyer, also accused the dean's wife, Catherine Fisk, of assault.

"Fisk's assault was a symbol of the deeper Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism and religious discrimination that runs rampant within the UC administration," Afaneh said in a statement, according to USCPR's Instagram page.

"I was attacked not only for speaking about Palestine but also because I was a Muslim woman who dared to wear a hijab and a keffiyeh and speak in my native tongue of Arabic, equating my identity with something that should be feared and someone who deserved to be silenced."

Newsweek reached out to UC Berkeley via email for comment.

In November 2019, the Jewish National Fund and 12 individual Americans living in Israel filed a lawsuit against Just Peace in the Middle East, an alternate name for USCPR, claiming damages under the Anti-Terrorism Act for the organization allegedly causing incendiary devices to be launched into Israel from Gaza.

The Jewish National Fund claimed that USCPR was responsible due to collecting funds from U.S. donors for the Boycott National Committee in Palestine, in which one of its members is a coalition that includes Hamas.

USCPR's motion to dismiss was filed March 5, 2020, and later granted by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on March 29, 2021.