The Tulsa-Israel Connections
Christian Zionists, a Defense Contractor, and Billionaire Philanthropists
Hamas’ terror attack, and Israel’s ensuing genocidal assault, feel impossibly distant from northeast Oklahoma. They aren’t. People and organizations link Tulsa to the Israeli occupation and onslaught. Here are some of them.
The Christian Zionists
“We are circumcised in our hearts,” Pastor Sharon Daugherty affirmed, “as we believe in Jesus.” She was speaking at Victory Church last March, drawing “a connection between us and the Jewish people.”
The audience had gathered for Tulsa’s annual Night to Honor Israel—“a kind of music and prayer, evangelical-style traveling road show” held countrywide.
Tulsa first hosted this event in 1982, at the Performing Arts Center downtown. It was at Oral Roberts University’s Mabee Center a decade later, and moved to Victory by 2007.
The South Tulsa megachurch is a logical site for these gatherings: Daugherty, who transferred Lead Pastor duties to her son, Paul, in 2014, continues as Oklahoma’s State Director for Christians United for Israel (CUFI).
Both CUFI (founded in 2006) and the Nights (dating to 1981) originate with the same man: the Rev. John C. Hagee, Senior Pastor of San Antonio’s 22,000-member Cornerstone Church. “God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land,” he preached in 1999.
CUFI is the largest pro-Israel organization in the U.S. Its membership is over 11 million—more than three times that of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful lobbying group. And CUFI “has been critical,” The Jerusalem Post reported, “in Israel garnering the backing in Congress of senators and representatives from states without significant Jewish communities”—like Oklahoma.
Top legislators are regular attendees at Tulsa’s Nights to Honor Israel. Former Republican U.S. Senators Don Nickles and Jim Inhofe, and former Republican U.S. Representative Jim Bridenstine, have spoken at the event.
Oklahoma’s CUFI chapter lobbies these lawmakers every summer. “We go to our senators and our congressmen with three talking points,” Daugherty explained, “to have them stand with Israel.”
Supporting Israel, for CUFI, means meeting certain policy goals. One is recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights—recognition former President Donald Trump extended in 2019. Inhofe backed this move, along with Republican U.S. Senator James Lankford—who spoke at CUFI’s 2022 Summit—and Republican U.S. Representatives Tom Cole and Kevin Hern. UN Secretary-General António Guterres dismissed Trump’s announcement, stressing that “the status of Golan has not changed.”
Another CUFI win came when Trump relocated the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018. Both Inhofe, who had called for it since 1995, and Lankford backed this decision. But Amnesty International contested it, arguing the shift “intentionally undermines Palestinian rights,” and “rewards Israel’s illegal annexation and settlement policy.”
The violence driving that policy, for one company with a local presence, is a source of profits.
The Defense Contractor
“L3Harris Technologies’ stock is up by a considerable 11% over the past month,” Yahoo! Finance reported in late November, when the Gaza death toll was over 15,000. The defense contractor has major operations in Tulsa. And the Israeli military has used its products to bomb and besiege Palestinians.
The company formed in 2019, when the Harris Corporation merged with L3 Technologies. Its Tulsa facilities, according to its Form 10-K (an annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission), are part of L3’s Integrated Mission Systems (IMS) program.
Through IMS, the firm provides “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” tools to the U.S. government, U.S. military, businesses, and “select foreign military services.”
The 10-K is vague: it doesn’t indicate what L3Harris does in Tulsa; it doesn’t list all the foreign militaries its IMS program supplies. But the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) closes some information gaps, showing how Israeli missiles and warships employ L3Harris technology.
For example, Israel attacked Gaza with JDAM-guided bombs in 2014 and 2021. JDAM stands for Joint Direct Attack Munition—a “guidance kit that converts existing free-fall bombs into accurately guided smart weapons.” Boeing manufactures these kits, and L3Harris builds the systems aircraft use to carry and fire JDAM missiles—one of which “doubles the number of smart weapons” an aircraft can carry.
In June 2015, the UN Human Rights Council examined the toll these smart weapons exacted on Palestine the year before. Its report describes the impacts of a pair of Israeli JDAM-equipped bombs, which struck “the Dheir family house in Rafah,” in southern Gaza, around 4.30 AM on July 29: “In total, 19 family members were killed including 9 children and 7 women; one of the women was 6 months pregnant. Another 3 children suffered serious injuries.”
Seven years later, Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that Israel fired JDAM-equipped missiles in its May 2021 strike on al-Wahda Street in Gaza City. The bombing leveled three multi-story buildings, killed 44 civilians—and was an “apparent war crime,” HRW concluded.
L3Harris also enables Israeli crimes at sea. The firm “manufactured the management systems for Israel’s Sa’ar 5 and Sa’ar 6 warships,” AFSC explains. The former vessels “were the mainstay,” for decades, of Israel’s navy; the latter, operational since April, “are far larger and more powerful.”
These seacraft enforce Israel’s 16-year blockade of Gaza. Amnesty International describes this blockade as a form of collective punishment—one that “amounts to a war crime.”
Citing its support for the Israeli military, AFSC recommends divestment from L3Harris. That tactic—touting investment pullouts, on moral grounds—has drawn sharp opposition from groups like the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and one prominent Tulsa charity.
The Philanthropists
The cause: “Mobilizing to Support Israel and Oppose Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).” The total gift, from 2015 to 2016: $3 million. The donor: the Tulsa-based Schusterman Family Foundation—since January 2021, the Schusterman Family Philanthropies (SFP).
“At its simplest,” Vox explained, “BDS is a global nonviolent protest movement.” Its supporters push for Palestinian rights, calling for:
“economic and cultural boycotts against Israel”;
“financial divestment from the state”;
“government sanctions to pressure Israel’s government to abide by international law and end its controversial policies toward Palestinians.”
The SFP’s $3 million went to the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), a group the billionaire Schustermans co-founded, with Hillel, in 2002. Form 990s—the annual tax forms nonprofits submit to the IRS; they’re available via the IRS website and ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer—show the Schustermans have given nearly $10 million to the ICC since 2011.
On its website, the ICC outlines a vision for “the American college campus”: a place “where supporters of Israel feel confident about openly celebrating the Jewish state,” and “where the anti-Israel movement is marginalized.”
To realize this vision, the ICC—relying on its “links to both Israeli intelligence and AIPAC”—recruits “student informants belonging to Jewish and pro-Israel campus organizations,” who then “gather intelligence on pro-Palestinian students and groups,” reporter James Bamford explains.
“We built up this massive national political campaign,” Jacob Baime, the ICC’s CEO, affirmed—one intended “to crush” Palestinian rights supporters. “With the anti-Israel people, what’s most effective,” he elaborated, “is you do the opposition research, put up some anonymous website, and then put up targeted Facebook ads.”
A joint investigation from Forward and ProPublica, published in 2018, reveals the organization’s methods. The ICC created, and paid to promote, misleading Facebook pages—in violation of the site’s misrepresentation policies—to protest Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi during his campus book tour in November 2016. The year before, the Schustermans donated over $35,000 to the ICC for its “pro-Israel messaging and social media campaign.”
In September 2016, the ICC monitored some 15 Jewish college students attending a weekend workshop at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University. Open Hillel, a “tiny progressive Jewish student group,” had called the meeting to discuss a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions-related campaign.
It’s unclear how defamation and surveillance square with the Schustermans’ stated efforts “to pursue justice, repair the world, and treat all people with dignity and respect.” And the ICC is just one of many controversial groups their nonprofit, with some $873 million in revenue, supports.
The SFP also gives tens of millions of dollars to organizations that, critics charge, whitewash on Israel’s behalf. There’s the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF)—AIPAC’s charitable arm—for example. The Schustermans have donated over $11 million to AIEF, which flies members of Congress to Israel for eight-day excursions. IfNotNow, the progressive Jewish group, derides these trips as the “propaganda tour.”
Birthright Israel, the recipient of over $19 million from the Schustermans, is critiqued on similar grounds. For Jewish Currents, Birthright—which offers free ten-day trips to Israel for young Jewish adults—is “one of the most effective propaganda campaigns on behalf of the Israeli government and its occupation of the Palestinian territories.” Jamie DeLine, who led two Birthright trips, agrees that “the narrative presented is skewed heavily in Israel’s favor,” and ignores “contemporary Arab and Palestinian perspectives.”
A strain of prejudice, masquerading as scholarship, marks the recipients of other Schusterman gifts. These donations include:
over $1 million to the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which political scientist Sarah Marusek linked to a transatlantic Islamophobia network;
over $196,000 to the Middle East Media Research Institute think tank, which the Center for American Progress deemed Islamophobic;
$108,000 to the Investigative Project on Terrorism research group, which New York Attorney General Letitia James called “a known anti-Muslim hate group.”
The Schustermans also have an entire branch of their organization in Israel, but information about its giving is difficult to find. The SFP’s Form 990s indicate only that the parent organization, in Tulsa, sends money to the Jerusalem office: nearly $14 million in 2019, for example, and over $16 million in 2018.
But there is an exception. In 2008, the SFP’s 990 listed the Israel branch’s grantees. One stands out: Ein Prat Academy, which received $25,000. The school is in Kfar Adumim—an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank.