Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s charity has cut ties with a US-based Muslim organisation after pro-Palestinian statements made by its founder came to light.
The Archewell Foundation, which was set up by the couple in 2020, has given two grants totalling nearly £42,000 (roughly $55,700) to the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition (MMWC) since 2023.
US broadcaster NewsNation recently wrote to the Archewell Foundation notifying it of pro-Palestinian statements made by the MMWC’s Palestinian-American founder, Janan Najeeb.
The foundation announced it would cease donating to the organisation late last week after being informed of the comments.
NewsNation told the Archewell Foundation earlier this month that Najeeb had called Israel an “apartheid state” – a designation given by the International Court of Justice in a 2024 advisory opinion and by several major human rights groups, including Amnesty International.
NewsNation further revealed that Najeeb called for an arms embargo on Israel and the “liberation of Palestine”.
She also repeated the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, which many interpret as an anti-Zionist statement.
‘Against the values of the foundation’
“Israel’s 75-year occupation of Palestine and the genocide in Gaza are a grave injustice,” Najeeb wrote in a blog post last year.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever!”
In a letter to Najeeb, the Archewell Foundation said: “Janan, we’ve recently been notified of a blog post you wrote that goes against the values of the foundation.
“As a foundation, we celebrate different perspectives and backgrounds, but we have zero tolerance for hateful words, actions or propaganda.”
The letter added that the grant was intended to help Afghan women integrate into Milwaukee.
In 2023, Najeeb had thanked the foundation for its support, saying: “We took swift and impactful action in response to the war on Gaza.
“Our efforts, alongside other Wisconsin-based organisations, aimed to raise awareness and demand human rights for Palestinians.”
Prince Harry has previously declared his commitment to social justice and said it is “going to take every single person on the planet right now” to end racism.
He and Markle have also levelled heavily contested claims of racism against the royal family itself.
The latest row comes as Prince Harry has been widely criticised in the British press for flying to war-torn Ukraine while arguing in a High Court case that he needs taxpayer-funded security in Britain.
No member of the royal family visited Israel in an official capacity until 2018, when Prince William, Prince Harry’s older brother, travelled there to mark the 70th anniversary of Israel’s independence.
Some have speculated that Queen Elizabeth had a negative attitude towards Israel due to the violent insurgency waged against the British mandate in Palestine by Zionist armed groups in the 1940s, before Israel’s declaration of independence.
The late queen reportedly believed every Israeli was “either a terrorist or a son of a terrorist” and refused to allow Israeli officials into Buckingham Palace, according to former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.
Visiting Jordan in 1984, she was reportedly shown a map depicting the locations of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and said: “What a depressing map.”
King Charles has also previously drawn controversy for his views on Israel.
In 2017, a letter surfaced that he had written to a friend in 1986 after a trip to the Middle East.
Writing that he had read a bit of the Quran and admired “some aspects of Islam”, the then-prince said he had begun to understand the Arab “point of view about Israel”.
“Never realised they see it as a US colony,” he wrote.
“I now appreciate that Arabs and Jews were all a Semitic people originally… it is the influx of foreign, European Jews (especially from Poland, they say) which has helped to cause great problems.”
Most controversially, King Charles asked: “Surely some US president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby in the US?”
