On September 13, 1993, keffiyeh-clad P.L.O. chairman Yasser Arafat and silver-haired Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords, shaking hands on the White House lawn with President Bill Clinton standing between them. Their agreement, which promised to bring Palestinian self-governance to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, was hailed as a historic step toward peace in the region.
But not everyone was rejoicing. Less than three weeks later, on October 1, about 20 senior leaders of Hamas, most of whom lived in the U.S., gathered at a Courtyard by Marriott airport hotel in Philadelphia in order to undermine what they viewed as an agreement made between “infidels and infidels.” Understanding that the accords would eventually result in the U.S. designating Hamas, which had begun just six years earlier, a terrorist organization, they avoided referring to it by name, instead calling it either “the movement” or “Samah” (“Hamas” spelled backward). Unbeknownst to them, the F.B.I. was listening in.
“Let’s not hoist a large Islamic flag, and let’s not be barbaric-talking,” advised Shukri Abu Baker, president of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which was then the largest Islamic charity in the U.S. “We will remain a front so that if the thing [Hamas being designated a terror organization] happens, we will benefit from the new happenings instead of having all of our organizations classified and exposed.”
“Are we going to say that we demand the 1948 territories?” one participant asked. “You cannot say it publicly. In front of the Americans.” Nonetheless, not saying so, the men reasoned, posed a problem of its own. “If someone asked you if you want to destroy Israel, what are you going to say on TV? If you give an inconclusive response, which is like you didn’t answer the question, someone will come to you and tell you that you have forsaken your principles.”
The solution, they decided, was to maintain two different sets of discourse, one for themselves and one for the American public. “I swear by Allah that war is deception,” said Abu Baker, and “we are fighting our enemy with a kind heart.” To do so, they would play “a very important tune to the average American, which is the issue of democracy, the issue of representation.”
In the U.S., said Abu Baker, it was imperative to get “non-Palestinians spearheading Palestinian activism,” for while it was “true there is an Islamic aspect to this cause … too much talking about an Islamic aspect is not going to do us good.”
According to Omar Ahmed, who was president of the Islamic Association of Palestine, and who would, just a few months after the Philadelphia meeting, co-found the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington, D.C., Hamas members in the U.S. should focus on growing their “influence [with] Congress.” This, Ahmed noted, “can be achieved by infiltrating the American media outlets, universities, and research centers.”
“The problem,” he explained, “and the catastrophe here in America is that the majority of the people who go to work for the U.S. government graduate from these universities from under professors who are under very strong Jewish influence. I mean, you won’t find one professor speaking in a classroom in a way which might harm Israel or praise the Palestinians.”
A plan, he said, “must be put in place … to specify the means through which we have a heard voice in these universities. This might begin by holding seminars to which we invite teachers in.... Most prominent universities have … Middle Eastern Studies … research centers specialized in Palestine. You can invite them and hold a seminar or conference … show them that you really adopt an opinion based on scientific things, that you are not a radical, that you are balanced and have research.”
“If you are going to tell yourself that [all of your ideas are] for the long range, you will keep postponing it,” counseled Nihad Awad, public-relations director of the Islamic Association for Palestine and later a co-founder of CAIR. Instead, he advised, “these are things you must think about beginning today.”
Ahmed agreed. “We must start, because he who starts now will reach the goal in 10 years.”
It was imperative to get “non-Palestinians spearheading Palestinian activism,” for while it was “true there is an Islamic aspect to this cause … too much talking about an Islamic aspect is not going to do us good.”
As it turned out, achieving the goal of using American universities as a font of anti-Israel sentiment and a front for Hamas’s political agenda would wind up taking 30 years. But what’s an additional couple of decades for a Middle Eastern terror organization so committed to its long-term goal of destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamic state that its newly appointed political leader, Yahya Sinwar, has likened the current war in Gaza to a seventh-century battle?
Americans tend to think of Hamas—if prior to October 7, 2023, they had thought of it at all—as an organization based in the West Bank and Gaza and perhaps as one that operates out of Qatar and Turkey with backing from Iran. But in fact, Hamas and its members have also long operated within the United States via a series of U.S.-based nonprofits, nearly all of which connect back to that pivotal 1993 Philadelphia meeting.
What follows is an investigation into the ties between that network and anti-Israel student groups on American campuses (though it is clear that many, if not most, of the protesters themselves are motivated by authentic grievance). This is also the story of the decades-long efforts by both the U.S. government and the parents of the first American ever murdered by Hamas to disrupt and dismantle this network—efforts that are now once again gaining strength.
“Hamas Heights”
Hamas—an acronym for the Arabic words that mean “Islamic Resistance Movement” (and also the Arabic word for “zeal”)—officially began in 1987 as the Palestinian offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. “If you look at the leadership and the members of some of the hard-core terror organizations, many of them came from the Muslim Brotherhood,” says Ghaith al-Omari, who is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation senior fellow at the Washington Institute, a pro-Israel think tank. “Everyone from [Ayman al] Zawahiri, who was the leader of al-Qaeda after bin Laden was killed … to someone like Abdullah Azzam, who was one of the leaders of the mujahideen in Afghanistan.”
In the case of Hamas, many senior members hailed from the same towns in the West Bank and Gaza and were connected to each other by blood or marriage. But it was those who came as students to the U.S., such as Mousa Abu Marzook, the first chief of Hamas’s political bureau, who laid the operational and financial groundwork to advance their cause in America.
Born in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in the 1950s, Marzook arrived in the U.S. on a student visa in 1982. By 1984, he had earned a master’s degree from Colorado State University and was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in engineering at Louisiana Tech. All the while, he was shuttling between the Middle East and the U.S. as he worked with two intertwined Hamas-affiliated American nonprofits: the Islamic Association of Palestine (I.A.P.), which was founded in Chicago in 1981 at the direction of Khaled Mashal, who would later become chairman of Hamas’s political bureau; and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which Marzook was instrumental in founding in Indiana in 1988.
I.A.P. oversaw “a nationwide network [in America] that disseminated Hamas propaganda, raised funds and brought together old and new Hamas sympathizers,” according to Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.
In 1989, I.A.P. hosted a convention in Kansas City, Missouri, commemorating Osama bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam, who had recently been murdered. According to Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, by Matthew Levitt, director of the Washington Institute Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, I.A.P.’s convention, which was videotaped, featured “a hooded Hamas activist who called for financial assistance for terror attacks.” There was also an Arabic banner that bore a rallying cry, an abbreviated version of which would, decades later, be taken up on college campuses throughout the country: “Islamic Palestine from the river to the sea.”
That same year, Marzook established an Islamic think tank in Chicago called the United Association for Studies and Research. Every quarter, the U.A.S.R. published the Middle East Affairs Journal, edited by U.A.S.R.’s executive director, Ahmed Yousef. In 2005, Yousef became a senior adviser to Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza. (Last month, Haniyeh was assassinated in Iran in a targeted attack thought to be orchestrated by Israel.) In 2006, Yousef published an op-ed in The New York Times called “Pause for Peace” in which he wrote that Hamas was prepared to offer the Israelis a truce that was “no ruse, as some assert, to strengthen our military machine, to buy time to organize better or to consolidate our hold on the Palestinian Authority.”
Hamas members in the U.S. should focus on growing their “influence with Congress.” This, Ahmed noted, “can be achieved by infiltrating the American media outlets, universities, and research centers.”
Years later, as part of the U.S. government’s case against Holy Land, Marzook’s U.A.S.R. would appear on a Muslim Brotherhood document just below I.A.P. and just above Holy Land (then known as the Occupied Land Fund), together with 25 other associations, under the heading “A list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends. [Imagine if they all march according to one plan!!!]”
By 1990, Marzook was living in northern Virginia, where, according to Levitt, he invested, on behalf of both Hamas and himself, in a housing development in the suburbs of Maryland that law enforcement reportedly referred to as “Hamas Heights.” Around the same time, Marzook was helping to fund both Holy Land and I.A.P. and leading Hamas’s political bureau from the U.S. But he was also, according to Israel, responsible for 10 Hamas terrorist attacks that resulted in the deaths of 47 Israelis over a period of five years.
In 1995, the U.S. sanctioned Hamas. Marzook, who had been a legal U.S. resident for more than a decade, was arrested. Ultimately, after being held in a Manhattan jail in a kind of legal limbo for nearly two years, he was deported to Jordan in May 1997. According to The New York Times, Marzook believed that the American judicial system’s treatment of him “stemmed from an American prejudice against Muslims and Palestinians.” Five months after Marzook was deported, the U.S. designated Hamas a terrorist organization, just as those at the Philadelphia meeting had predicted. Today Marzook lives in Qatar and remains a senior member of Hamas.
The “Holy Land Five”
In December 2001, just three months after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government declared Holy Land a supporter of terrorism and froze its assets. Eventually, Holy Land’s five highest-ranking executives, including its president, Shukri Abu Baker, who had attended the Philadelphia meeting, would all be indicted for providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization and also for committing money-laundering and tax fraud.
The government charged that Holy Land had funneled more than $12 million to Hamas, including funds that went, via Hamas-controlled charities in the West Bank, to the widows and orphans of Palestinian suicide bombers. Supporters of the “Holy Land Five,” as they became known, claim the money had gone to those whose parents had been killed by Hamas for collaborating with Israel.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, the grieving parents of a 17-year-old named David Boim, who, in 1996, became the first American citizen killed by Hamas when he was shot in the head at a bus stop outside Jerusalem, filed a civil lawsuit against Holy Land, I.A.P., and other Hamas-linked organizations. The Boims argued that under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987 these organizations, which had financed Hamas, should be held responsible for their son’s death.
This seemingly quixotic civil lawsuit would become a quarter-century-long legal odyssey, gathering force as it went. Together with the government’s parallel yet interconnected criminal case against Holy Land, it would catalyze the reorganization of Hamas’s network in the U.S.
In January 2002, just one month after Holy Land was shut down, a new organization named KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development was established in the Toledo, Ohio, home of a man who had been an official at an al-Qaeda–linked charity called Global Relief Foundation (G.R.F.), which would soon after be shut down by the U.S. government. Four years later, in 2006, the Treasury Department would seize KindHearts’s assets, charging that the organization had been established to “fill a void caused by the closures” of Holy Land and G.R.F., and that it was a front for Hamas-affiliated organizations throughout the Middle East and Europe.
In December 2004, the Boims won a $156 million judgment against Holy Land, I.A.P., and the other defendants, at which point I.A.P. shut down. But, in 2006, yet another pro-Palestine organization with a three-letter abbreviation sprang up in Chicago, this one called Americans for Muslims in Palestine (A.M.P.).
Like KindHearts, A.M.P. also had ties to people involved in Hamas-linked organizations. Rafeeq Jaberm the former president of I.A.P., gave a speech at A.M.P’s first convention. Osama Abuirshaid, who used to edit I.A.P.’s newspaper, is now A.M.P.’s executive director. This past school year, he spoke at many campus protests.
There was also an Arabic banner that bore a rallying cry, an abbreviated version of which would, decades later, be taken up on college campuses throughout the country: “Islamic Palestine from the river to the sea.”
In 2009, in Falls Church, Virginia, the tax-exempt Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation (A.J.P.), which would serve as A.M.P.’s fiscal sponsor, was founded. What this meant, in effect, was that people could get a tax credit for donating to A.M.P.—even though it was not a 501(c)(3)—while keeping their donation to it concealed. Donors would technically, legally, be donating to the tax-exempt A.J.P.; A.J.P. would then pass on some portion of each donation to A.M.P. But as the Boims’ counsel successfully argued, both A.M.P. and A.J.P. are “alter egos” of Holy Land and I.A.P., and as such may be liable for the family’s multi-million-dollar judgment.
As it turns out, it would be this ruling that would prompt Virginia’s attorney general, Jason Miyares, to open an investigation into A.J.P. this past November for “potential violations of Virginia’s charitable solicitation laws.” In addition, Miyares announced he would also be investigating “allegations that [A.J.P.] may have used funds raised for impermissible purposes under state law, including benefitting or providing support to terrorist organizations.” The investigation is ongoing; just last month, a Virginia court ordered A.J.P. to produce an extensive list of financial, legal, and other documents requested by the attorney general. Muslim Legal Fund attorney Christina Jump says A.M.P. is “challenging the scope” of the Virginia A.G.’s investigation.
In 2008, after a mistrial, all of the “Holy Land Five” were convicted. Abu Baker, and one other, are currently serving 65-year sentences. Two others have already been released, and another is serving a 20-year sentence and is to be released next year.
Levitt, who served as an expert witness at the trial, believes the Holy Land convictions brought about a fundamental shift in Hamas’s U.S. strategy. With their ability to raise funds restricted, Hamas needed to “create a culture of support for the things [they] believe in, in particular on campus. ”
“We Are Back!!”
As it happened, there was a group in the U.S. that had been set up for just this purpose: Students for Justice in Palestine. S.J.P. was co-founded at U.C. Berkeley in 1993 by a graduate student named Hatem Bazian, who strongly opposed the Oslo Accords. A speaker at I.A.P. gatherings, he would become the chairman of A.M.P. and also the president of its fiscal sponsor, A.J.P.
In 2011, S.J.P. held its first national student conference. (There are now approximately 200 such groups across the U.S.) That same year, B.D.S. co-founder Omar Barghouti spelled out his aims in a book titled Boycott Divestment Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. “BDS is a civil form of struggle against Israel, regardless [of] what religion most Israelis follow,” Barghouti writes in response to the critique that the movement is anti-Semitic. As for the charge that B.D.S. undermines the Israeli peace movement, Barghouti retorts, “What Israeli peace movement?”
(At the time, there was a vocal Israeli peace movement. However, one of its most notable activists, Vivian Silver, was killed by Hamas on October 7. Other peace activists were taken hostage. The movement has since lost much of its support.)
According to Levitt, today’s student activists are consciously choosing to use the language of post-colonial theory and intersectionality to re-frame the conflict. “Instead of trying to have a vanguard of people who truly understood the esoteric ins and outs” of the Middle East, Levitt says those spearheading the student protest movement decided to “plug it into the intersectional framework and convince anybody involved in progressive causes, if you’re pro Black Lives Matter, you’re pro this.”
Al-Omari points out that Islamists have a long history of forming strategic alliances with outside groups—at least until they have achieved their objectives. “Maybe the clearest case,” he says, “is the Iranian Revolution. In 1979, Khomeini, the first ayatollah, aligned with the Communists and others, and once he got in power, he basically turned against them, and many were killed, executed, and exiled.” As another, more recent, example, he cites the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the Arab Spring of the early 2010s. “The Muslim Brotherhood initially aligned with a lot of secular forces, and then once they came to power, they completely marginalized these forces.”
Similarly, Vidino says, Hamas’s supporters understand that on American campuses it is a “successful hook” if their cause is linked to “the narrative that America itself is a colonial project.” This explains why S.J.P. typically refers to the U.S. by its “Indigenous name” of “Occupied Turtle Island.” “If you talk with people who start their speeches doing a land acknowledgment, ‘I’m standing here on land stolen from whatever Native Americans,’” he says, “that’s a pretty receptive audience if you frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the same way.”
U.A.S.R. would appear on a Muslim Brotherhood document, together with 25 other associations, under the heading “A list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends. [Imagine if they all march according to one plan!!!]”
On October 5, 2023, after five months of inactivity on its Instagram account, S.J.P. Columbia posted in Arabic the words “Revolution until victory!” over an image of the state of Israel colored red, superimposed over a photograph of a fence with olive trees, fields, and what looked like a town in the distance. “We are back!!” read the message. “First general body meeting to be announced soon.... Stay tuned.” Two days later, Hamas invaded Israel. Did S.J.P. have some kind of foreknowledge?
According to Levitt, the idea, while not impossible, is rather unlikely. “Hamas had very good operational security,” he says. “Hamas leaders in Qatar knew something was going to happen, but they didn’t know when.” As for S.J.P., he says, “They did not necessarily need foreknowledge of the attack. No, they just spent 15 to 20 years preparing.”
In the days and months after October 7, National S.J.P., an organization that most Americans had never heard of, was suddenly dominating not just campus politics but even the national conversation. On October 8, the group put out a five-page “Resistance Toolkit” with instructions for sit-ins and rallies. “Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea … reminding each of us that total return and liberation for Palestine is near,” it read. A “national day of resistance” was held on October 12.
The tumult on campus escalated through the fall, leading to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and University of Pennsylvania. In the spring, tent encampments were set up on campuses across America, and as the academic year drew to a close, protesters clashed with police, who had been called in by university officials. When President Biden delivered the commencement address at Morehouse College this past May, he told the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, “I promise you, I hear you.”
So did Hamas. When student protesters ran into Harvard Yard with tents, Hamas shared a video of the mêlée on Telegram, an encrypted-messaging platform. After students at the Columbia encampment were arrested, Hamas political-bureau member Izzat Al-Rishq posted on Telegram, “The American government led by President Biden violates human rights and the right to freedom of expression and arrests students and members of faculty for their opposition to the collective extermination carried out by the Zionists the new Nazis.... Today’s students are the leaders of tomorrow. The consequence of today’s repression will be a heavy electoral price that the Biden Administration will pay.”
This past May, former Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, a billionaire who lives in Qatar, addressed American student protesters in a speech at the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Flood of the Free” conference in Turkey. (Hamas’s October 7 invasion was code-named Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.)
“We thank the great student flood which emerged from the American, European, and Western universities and has reached all countries of our nation,” Mashal began. “We have an opportunity to dismantle the Zionist enterprise … and to make Palestine a blessing to mankind by annihilating the Zionists.” But to do so, he noted, “three major steps are required from you. The first step is to continue what you started immediately following October 7.” Step two: “Continue your financial jihad,” by raising money not only for shelter and food for Gazans but also for weapons for “the mujahideen.”
Mashal wanted “a flood in the form of a siege of the Israeli and American embassies.” He wanted a “media flood” so that “the truthful Palestinian narrative [could] reach far and wide to control all social media platforms and forums.” Finally, he wanted a “legal Flood like in The Hague” in order to “prosecute criminal killers.”
Al-Qaeda chimed in, too. “While we support the assassination of the infidel Zionists and the beheading of them,” its general command said in a statement, “we also appreciate and value the movement of Western demonstrators and sit-in students from Western universities.”
On October 5, 2023, S.J.P. Columbia posted in Arabic the words “Revolution until victory!” on top of an image of the state of Israel colored red, superimposed over a photograph of a fence with olive trees, fields, and what looked like a town in the distance.
Not to be outdone, Hamas’s financial sponsor, Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran, posted a lengthy letter to the protesters that he excerpted in a series of consecutive posts on X. “Dear university students in the U.S.,” one read. “My advice to you is to become familiar with the Quran.” “Dear university students in the United States of America, you are standing on the right side of history,” went another.
Khamenei also posted videos made by “Khamenei Media.” Titled “Letter4u,” one clip showed a seated Khamenei putting pen to paper while James Bond–like music played. The imagery then shifted between the war in Gaza and the American university protests. “I am writing this letter to the young people whose awakened conscience has moved them to defend the oppressed women and children of Gaza,” a male voice—British, no less—intoned. “I too am among those who empathize with you young people and value your perseverance.”
Another video had a more direct message: “You have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front.”
“Genocide Josh”
On May 14, Republican congresswoman Virginia Foxx, who chairs the Committee on Education and the Workforce, which has been investigating anti-Semitism at universities, and Republican congressman James Comer, who chairs the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, wrote a letter to the Treasury Department. They asked for any Suspicious Activity Reports—the documents that U.S. financial institutions must file when they suspect a client is committing money laundering or fraud—relating to a list of 20 different nonprofit organizations. The list includes S.J.P., A.M.P., and Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as foundations including A.J.P., George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and the Westchester Peace Action Coalition Foundation.
Two days later, CAIR, which is headquartered on Capitol Hill, and whose executive director, Nihad Awad, was present at the 1993 Philadelphia meeting, sent a scathing letter to Representatives Comer and Foxx. Their request “lacks any legitimate congressional purpose” and is a “flagrantly un-American political stunt disguised as congressional work,” it read. “You have no basis to believe that suspicious activity reports exist for any of the named entities, and in any case, such reports do not represent any evidence of wrongdoing or provide a basis for congressional action.”
Two weeks later, Comer wrote to National S.J.P., via Abuirshaid, telling the student group that A.M.P., which he noted had “founded and controlled” National S.J.P., has “substantial ties to Hamas via its fiscal sponsor, Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation, Inc.,” a group currently under investigation in Virginia.
Comer went on to say that “four former employees of [Holy Land] now work for AMP, which frequently sponsors events featuring past leaders of [Holy Land] and their families.” He then requested that Abuirshaid provide him with documents related to S.J.P.’s funding, its policies and procedures, and its promotion “of illegal activity or activity providing material support to terrorist organizations including, but not limited to, Hamas.” Comer also requested “all documents and communications, regardless of topic, created on or sent between October 6, 2023 - October 8, 2023, inclusive.” National S.J.P. did not respond to AIR MAIL’s request for comment.
Jump, who responded to Comer on behalf of A.M.P., argued that the organization is neither the founder nor parent of National S.J.P. and that the two entities are “neither identical nor interchangeable.” Contrary to Comer’s assertion, Jump wrote, the two have “no corporate relationship,” and A.M.P. has none of the documents in question.
Comer, meanwhile, has warned Abuirshaid that “if A.M.P. continues to fail to produce the requested documents, I will consider other measures, including the use of compulsory process to gain compliance and obtain this material.” “We have responded to the congressional committee’s inquiry and have not heard anything back since we provided our last response,” Jump says. “We believe the issues to be resolved.”
While U.S. student protests dissipated during the summer, the movement rejoiced, and even claimed credit, when Kamala Harris chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz over Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, whom they branded “Genocide Josh,” as her running mate. “Has social media ever worked so quickly to vet and eliminate a VP candidate?,” Zahra Billoo, the executive director of CAIR’s San Francisco office, posted this past Tuesday on X. (Against all evidence, Billoo also appeared to attribute Biden’s withdrawal to pro-Palestine activism.)
Basim Elkarra, the executive director of CAIR’s lobbying arm, CAIR Action, released a statement cheering the pick, and encouraging Harris and Walz “to address the concerns of voters who abandoned President Biden” by, among other things, “implementing a weapons embargo of Israel” and charting “a different course than the disastrous last ten months of the Biden Administration.” He ended with a warning: “Muslim swing voters, due to their numbers, will likely decide this election.” A.J.P. Action, the lobbying arm of A.J.P., which is being investigated by the Virginia attorney general, not only thanked Harris for choosing Walz over Shapiro on X, but stated, “This is a crucial step in ensuring our movement is not criminalized.”
On August 19, the Democratic National Convention will begin in Chicago, the same city that hosted the event back in 1968, a year, as many have noted, that was also marked by massive and unwieldy anti-war protests. But the location of the convention is significant for another reason, one that doesn’t require making strained historical analogies. After all, it was in the city of Chicago that a major Palestinian document, issued 36 years ago, on August 18, 1988, was published in English by the Islamic Association of Palestine. The document? It was the founding charter of Hamas.
Johanna Berkman is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. You can read her story about anti-Semitism at Harvard University here
