A European nonprofit that promotes economic boycotts of Israel and U.S. companies that do business within the Jewish state received funding from a network of left-wing nonprofits that includes the Ford Foundation and George Soros's Open Society Institute and Foundation to Promote Open Society, a Washington Free Beacon review of financial records found.
The Amsterdam-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, known by its Dutch acronym SOMO, took in a total of almost $5.5 million from the Ford Foundation and Soros-backed groups between 2019 and 2023. The cash has empowered SOMO to pursue its mission of "eradicating the dominant corporate logic of 'maximising shareholder value,'" a vision that seemingly dovetails with its efforts to drive international businesses away from Israel, which it accuses of "committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."
Though the organization claims it is primarily dedicated to "restraining corporate power and championing social equity," its website currently features a banner declaring, "End genocide now in solidarity with Gaza."
SOMO's annual report includes a section outlining its priorities, which include "Gaza genocide." The blurb states that the group "exposed the supply chain of military jet fuel and, subsequently, the energy supply chain, which has enabled Israeli military action and illegal occupation" and that its work "supported successful campaigns effectively denying ports in Spain and the U.K. to ships carrying military jet fuel bound for Israel." Global corporations, SOMO contends, "provided goods and services that enabled Israel's crimes under international law."
SOMO is one of many organizations that has received money from the Ford Foundation and Soros-backed groups to wage a campaign against Israel. As the Free Beacon reported in 2024, the Ford Foundation has funneled millions of dollars to groups that celebrated Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel. Elias Rodriguez, the left-wing radical charged with the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers in May of this year, worked for a nonprofit that has received at least $1 million from the Ford Foundation since 2024.
Soros's organizations, meanwhile, have funded a long list of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic groups. One such nonprofit, PARCEO, produces a "curriculum on anti-Semitism" for students from kindergarten to college. The group is led by anti-Israel activists who claim allegations of anti-Semitism are "fabricated" and used to silence pro-Palestinian activists. A Soros-backed group gave $250,000 to establish a Middle East desk at Drop Site News, an anti-Israel startup that has published Hamas propaganda. Even Samidoun, an Israeli-designated terrorist group banned by the German government, is part of the Soros network, having received millions from the Tides Center and Tides Foundation.
Funding records show that SOMO has received $2,196,253 in total from Soros-affiliated groups since 2020, including from the liberal billionaire's Open Society Institute and Foundation to Promote Open Society. The Ford Foundation has injected $3,267,815 into SOMO since 2019, with several donations exceeding more than a million dollars per year.
The 2024 annual report listed SOMO's total assets at just over $5,843,000, meaning that the donations from the Ford Foundation and the Soros-backed groups compose a significant portion of SOMO's operating budget.
In the years since it began receiving donations from those groups, SOMO has published numerous reports accusing Israel of genocide and urging Western companies to cease doing business in the Jewish state. Some of SOMO's reports, including one from June 2024, detail the "obligations of third states and corporations to prevent and punish genocide in Gaza."
A second SOMO expose from April 2024—titled, "Making a Killing"—directly "calls upon states to suspend existing trade or economic association agreements with Israel and impose economic sanctions."
Israel, the group wrote, "is plausibly committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip," warranting a host of punitive measures that include "an arms embargo," "a fuel embargo," and "targeted sanctions on key individuals within the Israeli government." Global governments, the report adds, are required to "partially or wholly suspend existing trade or economic association agreements" with Israel, "as well as government-sponsored trade missions" with the country.
Corporations across the globe, SOMO says, must "decline any investment or funding from Israeli government entities, companies, or other institutions potentially linked to atrocities in Gaza."
The official Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—which, according to its co-founder, seeks the end of Israel—has featured SOMO's work. A December 2024 post on the BDS movement's website notes that, "according to a legal expert opinion commissioned by Al Haq and SOMO, 'A corporation or individual businessperson who knowingly assists a State in violating customary international law, including the prohibition of committing genocide, may be complicit in such a violation.'"
Those purported legal findings were used by the BDS movement to target a host of American and Western companies that operate in Israel, including big names like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Chevron.
Israel designated Al-Haq, a SOMO partner organization, as a terrorist organization in 2021 over its work on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group.
SOMA's executive director, Audrey Gaughran, touted her nonprofit's relationship with Al-Haq earlier this year when the Trump administration sanctioned the group for its efforts to drive legal complaints against Israel at the International Criminal Court.
"In solidarity with our Palestinian partner organisation Al-Haq Organisation | مؤسسة الحق, Al Mezan, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights," Gaughran wrote on LinkedIn, along with a similar posting from SOMA. "Sanctioned because they are demanding what everyone must: an end to - and accountability for - Israel's genocide in Gaza."
Representatives of both the Ford Foundation and Open Society told the Free Beacon that their respective organizations last gave to SOMO in 2023, though neither specified why they have not donated in the two years since. Open Society also provided the Free Beacon with descriptions of the two most recent grants the organization gave SOMO: "to support establishing a research fund to advance education on monopoly power and market concentration by building a vibrant and effective anti-monopoly movement" and "to support the development of a global civil society movement that counters the concentration of market power in digital mergers to contribute to a plural, democratic, and empowering digital economy."
