Claims that billionaire investor George Soros funded pro-Palestinian protests at U.S. universities emerged in late April 2024, as student encampments spread across the country. The New York Post alleged Soros paid "student radicals" fueling the demonstrations.
The Post's April 26, 2024, article said three individuals received payments ranging from $2,880 to $3,660 through a fellowship program run by the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Snopes identified the organization as one that had received a grant from Soros' Open Society Foundations, but the Post reported the payments came through the group's own fellowship program — separating the direct source of those payments from the 2022 OSF grant.
Student encampments began forming in April 2024, with Columbia University students pitching tents April 17. An earlier sit-in at Vanderbilt University had taken place March 26, 2024. Students who participated risked suspension, expulsion and arrest.
Claims of Soros' involvement spread widely on social media, with some pointing to the uniformity of tents used in the encampments as evidence of outside funding. A Wall Street Journal opinion piece published April 24, 2024, linked two activists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale University to indirect Soros funding.
Soros' Open Society Foundations, now led by his son Alex Soros, describes its mission as funding groups that work for justice, democratic governance and human rights. OSF supports nonprofits across sectors including Palestinian rights and higher education.
OSF's last publicly available grant records date to 2022, before the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023. money from grants issued in 2022 would likely have been spent by April 2024, making it misleading to attribute direct funding for the 2024 protests to those grants.
Similar claims surfaced in May 2020, when some conservatives alleged OSF was funding Black Lives Matter protests.
Despite the OSF grant to the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, the two-year gap between that funding and the 2024 campus protests is central to the dispute over what the money actually supported.
