Devotion to the almighty God (Shuhada), prayer (Salla), and charity (Zaka) are among the major pillars of Islam, and they shaped the lives of the men who founded HLF as well as HLF itself.
When the First Intifada began in 1987, Mohammad Elmazain knew his people would suffer even if they were not directly involved in the uprising. Besides the high casualty count, Palestinians were also subjected to prolonged curfews, which resulted in their being unable to work or study as well as a severe lack of food, water, and medicine.
While he worked as Imam, Elmazain had become well known and highly respected for his in-depth knowledge of the Quran, his passion for Palestine, and his generosity, along with remarkable fundraising skills. Soon after the Intifada began, he, along with Ghassan Elashi and Shukri Abu-Baker, began to brainstorm how best to support their people who for the first time in forty years were rising up against Israel and were paying a heavy toll for this.
Together, the three established the Occupied Lands Fund, which in 1990 changed its name to The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, or HLF. Their purpose was to provide aid to Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan.
“The HLF was a dream come true,” Ghassan said. “It was the means through which we were able to repair some of the damages that the occupation of Palestine was causing.” They felt that by providing food, health care, and education they could give hope to thousands of Palestinians. Through HLF they were able to bring to life the important concept of zaka, or charity, in Islam. They gave those blessed with wealth an opportunity to contribute and to help others who are less fortunate. Ghassan explained,
We ran the HLF transparently by spending donations as donors intended, partnering with the most trusted charities, complying with the tax-exempt conditions and IRS filings, and keeping meticulous documentation of every donation we received and every donation we made.
With the help of legal counsel, HLF was incorporated as a non-profit charity and obtained a tax-exempt license. The charity grew from raising $300,000 in 1989 to close to $13 million in 2000 and 2001, becoming the largest Muslim charity in America.
HLF operated under simple, clear guidelines, and these guidelines were supposed to be their insurance policy. In Ghassan’s words:
If you hide nothing, and work with legitimate, registered, and licensed charities, if you never make payments to individuals, and keep clear, transparent records, then even if they accuse you of wrongdoing, you are able to prove your innocence.
The three founders decided to start by coordinating with a Palestinian charity based in what is now Israel, the Islamic Relief Agency (IRA). IRA’s office was located in Um al-Fahm, in the Wadi-Ara region in the north of the country; it is one of the largest Palestinian cities inside of the 1948 borders, and its residents are Israeli citizens. The organization was recognized and licensed by the State of Israel to conduct charity work all over Palestine, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It seemed like a safe charity. After all, Israel had given IRA the stamp of approval.
With his burning desire to send help coupled with the skills required to raise money, Elmezain became the main fundraiser for the organization, travelling from city to city and from one community to another in order to raise funds. When HLF was established, he was the chairman, and then a few years later, when he moved to San Diego, California, he became the head of the HLF branch there and expanded the work of HLF on the West Coast.
“The HLF was the most rewarding volunteer work that I have ever done,” Ghassan told me, echoing what I heard from others who had worked with HLF. “My life was divided between my work, my family, and volunteering with HLF.”
The work Ghassan referred to was InfoCom, his family business. Ghassan and his brothers worked next to each other, and even some of the wives volunteered to help out at the office from time to time. There was a room where their children could sit comfortably and do homework after school. They kept a complete kitchen at work, with a refrigerator and microwave so the kids could have snacks. Work was important to Ghassan and his brothers, but so was the flexibility to spend time with their wives and children.
InfoCom provided all HLF’s technology needs. Through InfoCom the operation was fully automated and computerized with elaborate recordkeeping and a donor database, which allowed them to track donations and follow up with the appropriate correspondence. In the late 90’s, with the rise of the internet, InfoCom managed HLF’s website and online donation forms. InfoCom also provided a cost-effective in-house call center to help raise funds during infomercials that HLF broadcast during Ramadan. This would be particularly important during the al-Aqsa Intifada, the Second Intifada.
In 1990, the board decided to hire Shukri as the first executive director of the foundation, and the family moved from Indianapolis to Culver City, California. Ghassan Elashi was already in California by then, and he and Shukri added staff and began taking the necessary steps to bring HLF into a new era. The two developed a close working as well as personal relationship.
In 1991, Shukri traveled to Palestine for the first time since he was a boy. The last time he had seen it was 1967. This time he traveled to set up offices for HLF.
In only three years, donations had risen from half a million to $3 million, and in 1992, Shukri suggested to the board that they move HLF headquarters to Dallas, Texas. The organization was growing rapidly, and expensive Los Angeles was not a long-term solution in terms of either their needs for office space or staffing. Dallas also provided a quiet and growing Muslim community with a religious school for the children.
The Elashi family rented a three-bedroom duplex in Richardson, Texas, where Majida and the children still lived when I met them many years later. Not only was this home less than two miles from the InfoCom and HLF offices, it was similarly close to the Richardson mosque. Ghassan was able to attend pre-dawn and evening prayers daily and encouraged his children to join him. “At first, they would just run around,” he admitted, “but I would teach them how to show respect at a place of worship.” In my many visits to mosques and Muslim community centers, the one thing that I have always enjoyed more than anything is seeing children everywhere. In Arabic culture, children are always present and involved in community events.
During donation drives, the entire family, their friends, and even some of InfoCom’s employees would come to volunteer at HLF’s offices across the street from InfoCom. As my friend Abdullah Shawky told me once, “HLF was a big family, and as kids we loved to come and help out whenever we could.”
In 1993, Shukri visited Palestine once again, this time to open an office in Jerusalem, to see the work that was being done there on their behalf already, and to visit other parts of the country where their help might be needed. He visited Bethlehem, Jenin, and Tulkarem and conducted a lengthy visit throughout the Gaza Strip. Quite a lot had changed in Israeli (and US) politics since his last visit. In October 1991, the hardline Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had been dragged kicking and screaming to attend the all-party Madrid Peace Conference that was co-convened by the United States and the (then nearly moribund) Soviet Union in the aftermath of Kuwait’s liberation from Iraqi occupation. Shamir’s continued support of Israel’s settlement-building project in the West Bank thereafter earned him the ire of President George H. W. Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker; and in Israeli elections in mid-1992, Shamir lost out to Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin. In December 1992, in one of his first acts in office, Rabin expelled 413 Palestinian community leaders from the West Bank and Gaza, many of them associated with Hamas.
In the United States, meanwhile, in the election of November 1992, Bill Clinton beat George H. W. Bush.
In March 1993, Shukri issued a Ramadan appeal to the Holy Land Foundation’s members in which he denounced Israel’s deportation of the 413 expellees. He wrote:
None of those arrested and expelled were charged, tried, or convicted of any violent act. On the contrary, they embody the cream of the Palestinian society. They are educators, religious scholars, and other key community leaders. Their only crime has been their ongoing effort to establish Palestinian social, health, and educational institutions that are independent of Israel.
Describing the beneficiaries of its efforts, the HLF provided a photograph of two Palestinian children with the caption:
Cold, Hungry, Sick, Sad, words that are not normally associated with Ramadan! But this is the case for many Palestinian families. They have lost their breadwinners who are now dead, detained, or deported. They are hurting so much now. So won’t you help ease their pain if you can?
The HLF pledge card declares: “Yes. I can and want to help needy families of Palestinian martyrs, prisoners and deportees.”
Part of Shukri’s job during his 1993 visit to Jerusalem was to establish a local charity registered with the State of Israel and hire a full-time office manager to run the office. The office manager was Mohammad Anati. He in turn hired staff to assist him in overseeing the charity work in the West Bank and Gaza. One of the first tasks of the HLF-Jerusalem office was to contact charities in those areas and obtain from them documentation for different kinds of proposals for HLF-USA. HLF’s Projects Committee would then evaluate and study each proposal and make recommendations to the board whether to sponsor partially, sponsor totally, or reject each proposal.
Back in the United States, and unbeknownst to Shukri, groups like the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) were already beginning to spread rumors against HLF. The ADL published a report in 1993 accusing HLF of supporting Hamas.9 At the time, Hamas was not designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization. That same year, New York Times reporter Judith Miller also wrote an article very critical of the HLF.
Shukri has some guesses about why ADL was concerned about HLF.
HLF as a member in a UN Committee on The Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. Later, we were elected as president of that organization. We gained membership with USAID (before it was revoked after the ADL stepped in). We were the president of the local VOAD (Volunteer Organizations Acting in Disasters), which included the Dallas chapters of The Salvation Army, Red Cross, and Food Bank among others. NATO forces helped HLF deliver aid to Kosovar war refugees in Albania. The HLF was the first Texas-based charity to respond to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, sending money and volunteers to assist first responders.
The pro-Israeli groups led by the ADL felt that the HLF challenged the monopoly they had on the narrative on Palestine. They felt that we had become so powerful that we could actually tip the balance of public perception about the plight of Palestinians under occupation. Also, it worried them that America’s largest Islamic charity organization was led by Palestinians. They protested HLF ads with radios, DART buses in Dallas, and city billboards. Also, they opposed our public service announcements with local radios and TVs, our outreach to the African American communities, our charitable events that involved the public at large, and they sabotaged our contract with American Airline’s Travelers’ Mileage Program.
In 1994, the ADL, along with the American Jewish Congress, launched a campaign to demand that the IRS revoke HLF’s tax-exempt status. This campaign was supported by then-Congressman Charles Schumer, Nathan Wiener, and Nita Lowey as well as then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. The FBI also began a surveillance operation that included tapping Shukri’s home and office phones. This operation would continue until the closure of HLF in December of 2001.
“Meanwhile,” Shukri wrote me when I asked him to tell me about these years, “[Ghassan] Elashi, HLF attorneys, and I had been meeting with the chiefs of the FBI in Dallas inquiring about media accounts alleging that the FBI was ‘looking’ into a North Texas link with terrorism, implicating HLF. In a meeting with Jim Adams, chief of FBI office in Dallas at the time, he dismissed such accounts and suggested that the HLF had a [public relations] issue instead: ‘Work on your PR,’ he advised. In addition, in 2000, attorney Mark McDougal, Mr. Elashi, and I met with Jim Jacks (Assistant US Attorney–Northern Texas at the time) to discuss floating allegations against the HLF. He assured us that his office was not taking any of it seriously.”
Jim Jacks would later become the chief prosecutor in the HLF trials.
As Shukri would later write,
In these tens of thousands of recorded hours of incoming and outgoing conversations, the prosecutors could not find a single sound bite of me calling out for “jihad” or supporting “violent acts” or promoting “the killing of the Jews” or cussing out Israel or calling Jews ugly names or expressing any anti-Semitic language.
In 1995, HLF began expanding its help to other regions. Shukri travelled to Bosnia where he organized a relief campaign with shipments of medical supplies from Germany. The trip was a dangerous one, but it opened Shukri’s eyes to the plight of Bosnian people. From there, HLF moved to relief operations in Albania, Chechnya, Turkey, and parts of Africa.
The year 1995 was also significant for Hamas: That was the year it was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States.
Without Hamas, there might be no story to tell. After all, Shukri Abu-Baker and Ghassan Elashi are each serving sixty-five years in a United States federal prison, Mufid Abdulqader is serving twenty years, and Mohamad Elmezain and Abdulrahman Odeh are serving fifteen years each, having been found guilty of providing material support to Hamas.
So what is Hamas? What are its origins, ideology, and goals? Who are its founders and what were their objectives? And how did it happen that this organization that operates many thousands of miles from the shores of the United States is an “enemy of the state”?
I have to confess personal ambivalence toward Hamas. I believe that the Palestinian struggle to free all of historic Palestine from the settler-colonialism that is the State of Israel is a just struggle, and I support it wholeheartedly. I accept that the State of Israel in its present form has no legitimacy, and in this I find Hamas’ goal to liberate Palestine completely justified. However, I do not condone the use of violence against civilians to further any goal. My niece was killed in an attack by Hamas on September 4, 1997. She was thirteen years old. She was not a soldier, and it is likely that she never would never have become one.
Neither her killing, nor the killing of thousands of young Palestinians by Israel, can be justified or excused.
Azzam Tamimi,10 a Palestinian scholar, and author of the definitive books on Hamas, Hamas: A History from Within and Hamas: Unwritten Chapters, defines Hamas as “an organization of Arabs and Muslims who happen to be Palestinian, and who perceive themselves as the immediate victims of a plot hatched by an unjust world order that saw fit to create a Jewish state in the very heart of the Arab and Muslim lands.” Furthermore, he adds that they see the Israelis as “oppressors who have dispossessed them and have persecuted them for generations.”11 In that belief Hamas’ view is no different than that of many other Palestinians, and indeed Arabs and Muslims the world over.
The Gaza chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, or Elikhwan Emuselmin, established Hamas in December of 1987. In the Muslim and Arab world, the Muslim Brotherhood is highly respected in many quarters because it is a movement that combines Islam with a struggle for both personal and political liberation. From its very inception, the Muslim Brotherhood had come out against Western colonialism of the Arab and Muslim world, while calling on Muslims to return to their faith and their roots in order to find the moral strength to liberate themselves and their countries.
Hassan El-Bana, a schoolteacher who lived and worked in the Egyptian city of Ismailiyah, founded “The Brotherhood,” as it is often referred to, in 1928. Ismailiyah is a city by the Suez Canal from which the canal is operated and managed; the Muslim Brotherhood was established largely in response to the injustices suffered by Egyptians subjected to foreign occupation and foreign control of their country’s government and resources. By the late 1930s, the Muslim Brotherhood had established branches all over Egypt, and by the end of World War II, it had an estimated 500,000 active followers in Egypt alone.
Rooted in Islam, El-Bana’s message dealt with many key issues: freeing Egypt and the rest of the Arab and Muslim world from colonial rule, the need to provide education and health care, and the need to return to the basic tenets of Islam. El-Bana brought up the problem of social inequality and the fact that foreign powers were draining Egypt’s natural resources. By emphasizing concerns that appealed to a variety of constituencies, Hassan El-Bana was able to recruit members from a cross section of Egyptian society—and dedicated followers from far beyond Egypt, too.
El-Bana also shed an important light on the issue of Palestine, which at the time was struggling under first British colonial rule and then a Zionist takeover.
El-Bana and the Muslim Brotherhood contributed to making Palestine an Arab and Muslim cause. During the 1936–1939 Palestinian revolt against the British occupation of Palestine, which many consider to be the first Palestinian uprising, the Muslim Brotherhood launched a campaign to support the Palestinian people in their struggle.12 The Muslim Brothers organized prayers, held political rallies, raised money, and distributed literature to educate people about the issue.
The Palestinian revolt was brutally suppressed by the British forces, leaving Palestinian society badly damaged. Then, in 1948, when the Nakba, the Zionist ethnic cleansing campaign of Palestine, was taking place and Palestinians were systematically being forced off of their land, Muslim Brotherhood members volunteered to fight in Palestine in support of their Palestinian brothers.
The Muslim Brotherhood took root in Palestine after World War II, opening an office in Jerusalem in May of 1946. However, in 1948, control over Palestine was divided by three states. The majority of Palestine was included in the newly established state of Israel; the newly created Kingdom of Jordan took control of the West Bank; and the Gaza Strip, which quickly became a humanitarian disaster and home to hundreds of thousands of refugees, came under Egyptian military rule. It wasn’t until 1967, when Israel completed its occupation of Palestine and the entire country was governed by a single state, that the Ikhwan was able to reunite.
For the next decade, the Ikhwan were busy gaining ground and getting organized by building an infrastructure of social services, medical clinics, and schools, mostly in the impoverished Gaza Strip. These facilities were sorely needed, due to Israel’s grave failure to live up to its responsibilities as the Occupying Power. Equally importantly, the Palestinian Ikhwan went on to develop a worldwide fundraising apparatus to support its services, which were given to Palestinians living under Israeli control, free of charge.
Local committees called zakat committees were established that were charged with receiving the funds and dispensing them. Then, in 1978, in what was one of the crowning achievements of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, the Islamic University in Gaza was opened—it was the first university to open in the Gaza Strip. It came as no surprise, then, that with the services it provided free of charge and the clean, transparent way with which its financial operations were handled, the Muslim Brotherhood gained a substantial following in Palestine. According to Azzam Tamimi, “The Palestinian Islamists may be viewed as pioneers in the way they transformed their intellectual and ideological discourse into practical programs providing services to the public through voluntary institutions.”
Between 1977, when the nationalist Likud party came into power in Israel, and 1987, there was a noticeable shift in the way the Israeli authorities, particularly security forces, were dealing with the Palestinians whose lives were under their control. With increasing restrictions on movement, ongoing humiliation, and constant harassment by the various Israeli security forces, the Gaza Strip was turning into a large prison.
Besides the ordinary, everyday systems of oppression, there was increasing pressure on the population to work with the occupation forces. It is no secret that no occupying force can survive without the use of collaborators. From money and other material benefits to preferential treatment in getting permits to go into Israel to work or get medical care, Israeli forces used—and continue to use—all the means at their disposal to recruit these collaborators: individuals who either out of greed or a lack of viable options ended up betraying their own people.
The Muslim Brotherhood was alarmed, not only by systemic oppression by the Zionist government but by what they saw as a decline in moral fortitude among Palestinians. The movement found an unlikely hero in a quadriplegic schoolteacher who lived and worked in an impoverished refugee camp in the Gaza Strip: Ahmed Yassin.
Although the Muslim Brotherhood had been contemplating joining the Palestinian resistance for close to a decade, it was one fateful day in Gaza in December 1987 that turned the key to the engine. On this particular day, December 7, 1987, an Israeli military vehicle crashed into another vehicle carrying Palestinian workers, killing three and injuring seven. This incident sparked the first Palestinian popular uprising against the Israeli occupation.
This mass uprising was overwhelmingly civilian and nonviolent. It occurred throughout the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip and soon became known as the Intifada—literally, the “shaking-off.” Thirteen years later, when another Intifada erupted, the one that started in December 1987 became known as the First Intifada.
On December 9, 1987, leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, led by Ahmed Yassin, decided to join the uprising. Thus was born the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas.
It should be noted that there was no one decision to start the First Intifada. It was ignited by the incident in which an Israeli vehicle plowed into a group of Palestinian workers in Gaza. But throughout the occupied territories, many broad-based popular organizations were primed and ready to act in response to that killing. Many of these networks were led by basically secular activists. But the Ikhwan also had their activist networks, and when the uprising began, their organizations knew what to do. They had a network of mosques, civic centers, and perhaps most importantly the Islamic University. They organized rallies and staged civil disobedience campaigns where they called for action not only to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but also to free the whole of Palestine. Hamas followers demanded to be allowed to return to their homes in the hundreds of towns and villages that were destroyed when Israel was established in 1948. They saw this as the beginning of a long-term struggle that would lead to the abolition of the State of Israel, something that an increasingly large number of people today see as a realistic and not necessarily a negative outcome and which, one can argue, may indeed be the key to allowing Jews and Palestinians to live together in peace.
Meanwhile, the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat and the Fatah movement, was caught off guard by the developments in Palestine. The PLO’s leaders, ensconced in their offices thousands of miles away in Tunis, had been working for several years to achieve US recognition. To that end they had long been preparing to make several major strategic changes: recognizing the State of Israel, limiting their demands to ending only the occupation of lands Israel had taken in 1967, dropping the demand for a full implementation of the right of return of the Palestinians refugees, and ending the armed struggle against Israel. These changes signified that the PLO was moving toward a more moderate vision, which arguably was becoming out of touch with the aspirations, wishes, and needs of the Palestinian people. Hamas, on the other hand, was on the ground coordinating events through its local leadership and overseeing the spread of the Intifada from the Gaza strip to the refugee camps and campuses in the West Bank. When analyzing Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian elections of 2006, this is one of the key factors that brought down the Fatah movement.
Israel, too, was caught off guard by the eruption of the First Intifada. Thinking that this uprising was a limited expression of anger, the Israeli authorities fully expected things to calm down within a few days. When the anticipated calm did not come, the Israelis did not know how to control the Palestinian population and began using military force to quell what was at that point a massive, unarmed popular uprising. Israel also began mounting mass arrests of Hamas and other leaders suspected of being behind the uprising.
None of the Israeli tactics worked. Instead, participation in the uprising and support for Hamas only grew. Eventually, the Intifada grew more intense as some Hamas military cells began capturing and killing Israeli soldiers in response to the brutal beatings and killing of Palestinians by Israeli forces.
In December 1988, as the ground was burning in Palestine and Palestinians were in the streets, Yasser Arafat announced openly and unilaterally that the PLO recognized the right of the State of Israel to exist, rejected terrorism, and was willing to participate in peace talks based on what became known as the Two-State Solution. This solution envisioned the creation of a Palestinian state limited to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, alongside Israel. It was seen as a victory for moderate Israeli Zionist activists like my father who had been pushing “moderate” PLO leaders to take the organization in that direction. The Israeli government, however, was slow to respond, and while Arafat’s step did gain US support for the PLO, in the eyes of millions of Palestinians it was seen as tantamount to treason: proof that Arafat and the PLO had completely lost touch with the Palestinian people. They turned to Hamas to give support and lead the fight.
After several incidents where Israeli soldiers were abducted by Hamas fighters and killed, Israel finally arrested Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1991. He was rightly seen as the spiritual leader of Hamas and was sentenced to life in prison plus fifteen years for his alleged role in the killing of two Israeli soldiers. Yet somehow, even though Israel had incarcerated thousands of Hamas activists and leaders, Hamas was able to continue to operate. This was due to a strategy that foresaw the need to develop a leadership group in exile. These Hamas members were already living outside Palestine but were dedicated to the goals of the movement and allowed the organization to not only continue to function but even to grow.
As Israel was tightening its grip on Hamas activities and activists, there were groups of young Hamas activists all over Palestine who were now fugitives, running and hiding from the Israeli authorities. These young fighters decide to mount armed attacks against Israeli targets on their own, and it was this group of young Palestinians on the run who, independent of the Hamas leadership, had come to form the Izzadin al Qassam Brigades, which evolved into the armed wing of Hamas. They took it upon themselves to embark on an armed struggle against Israel. By doing so, they were transforming the Intifada from “a series of exercises in civil disobedience intended to oblige Israel to treat the Palestinians more humanely,” as Azzam Tamimi describes it, to an intense armed struggle.
By December 1992, Israel had arrested more than 2,000 Palestinians suspected of being Hamas activists, along with many others suspected of being activists in the secular resistance groups. On December 17 of that year, the newly installed Israeli government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin embarked on what was one of Israel’s worst public relations operations in its many attempts to destroy Hamas.
On a cold December night, 413 men were hauled from their homes or from prison cells from all around the occupied territories and were bused over the Lebanese border. After a long and painful bus ride, shackled, cuffed, and blindfolded, all 413 were quite literally dumped on the snow in a no-man’s-land between the zone deep inside Lebanon that had been held by Israeli proxy forces since 1978 and the area under the control of the Lebanese government.
These people, university professors, doctors, businessmen, university students, and religious leaders, with ages ranging from sixteen to sixty-seven years, were a slice of the “upper crust” of Palestinian society. Israel had intended for them to walk to the Lebanese-controlled area, but they refused. For Palestinians everywhere, this attempt at effecting a mass expulsion of so many of their compatriots all at one time revived traumatic memories of the ethnic cleansing to which the Zionist militias had subjected their people in 1948.
Before long, numerous aid organizations, including the Holy Land Foundation, began delivering food, water, warm clothing, and tents to the deportees, who settled in for a long stay in their hillside camp. The UN quite appropriately intervened on their behalf, and television networks from all around the world were there to cover the story. The situation quickly became a major public relations boost for Hamas and an embarrassment to Israel. Moreover, the Hamas leaders and activists from all around the West Bank and Gaza who were on the hillside were now able to hold lengthy strategy meetings with each other and with key allies who came to visit them from Lebanon and other Arab and Muslim countries—activities they could not conduct so long as they were still in tightly Israeli-controlled Palestine.
After eight months and a great deal of negotiating, the deportees accepted an Israeli proposal in which half were allowed to return to their homes immediately and the rest returned a month later.
This was not the last time that Israel embarrassed itself in its dealings with Hamas. It was the morning of September 25, 1997, when, apparently in a desire to avenge two massive suicide attacks in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the order to assassinate Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Mash’al. Mash’al was living and working in exile in Amman, Jordan.
On his way to work, two Mossad agents with Canadian passports assaulted Mash’al and injected something into his ear. Mash’al’s bodyguard managed to overtake the agents and proceeded to restrain them and call the Jordanian police, who apprehended the two agents. Though Mash’al seemed to be unharmed at first, by the end of that day it was clear that he had been poisoned. When news of this breach of his country’s sovereignty reached Jordan’s King Hussein, he immediately demanded that Israel send the antidote. Then he demanded that the Israeli government release the ailing Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, who by then had been imprisoned for nine years, without delay.
Faced with an international scandal, the Israeli government had no choice but to agree. Khaled Mash’al’s life was spared and Hamas’ spiritual leader was released in exchange for the safe return of the two Mossad agents to Israel.
After spending some time in Amman for medical care, Sheikh Yassin embarked on a four-month tour of Arab and Muslim countries, where he was received warmly and gained immense support. Once again Hamas had won the battle for the hearts and minds of people all over the Arab and Muslim world, and Israel was seen as blundering and irrational.
But widespread support for Hamas was not only a result of Israeli ineptitude. Hamas leaders came to embody the honesty, altruism, and dedication that are the hallmarks of Islam. As Azzam Tamimi writes, “No one joins Hamas to make money.” Donors who contributed millions of dollars to Hamas were aware that only a small fraction of money sent to Hamas goes into the pockets of Hamas leaders or to support the military wing of the organization. The lion’s share of the money went to support the vast infrastructure of social, medical, and educational institutions. Hamas provided everything from kindergartens to the Islamic university, from health care facilities to vocational training facilities—all free of charge.
This was in sharp contrast to the lavish lifestyle that became the hallmark of those who serve in the PLO, which morphed into what is known today as the Palestinian Authority. When I visited Gaza, my host Dr. Mahmoud El-Ajrami shared his own experience with me, an experience that demonstrated this very point: Dr. Ajrami served at one time as deputy foreign minister for the Palestinian Authority. According to him, under the Fatah foreign minister they would always travel first class when they went overseas and had extravagant meals costing many thousands of dollars. Once Hamas was elected into office and the foreign minister was a Hamas member, things changed. “We began flying coach and eating and living modestly,” he said. Furthermore, while the Fatah movement and the Palestinian Authority were bending over backwards to accommodate Israel and getting very little in return, Hamas was steadfast in its principles even under enormous Western pressure.
While Hamas was becoming a force to be reckoned with, HLF was protecting the Palestinian people in a different way. It wasn’t a smooth course, but to get the full story I had to track down Mohammad Anati, who had been the manager of HLF-Jerusalem in the mid ‘90’s. This was perhaps the most mysterious chapter of my journey toward the truth.
Mohammad Anati’s name came up many times as a central figure in the HLF case. It was Shukri who first suggested that I should meet him if I wanted to understand the full story of HLF, but then when I spoke to some of the lawyers, his name came up again in relation to a statement that he allegedly made admitting that HLF gave money to Hamas.
Armed only with the information that the Israeli human rights attorney Leah Tsemel was Anati’s lawyer when the Israeli authorities arrested him, I set out to find him.
But I needed to find Leah Tsemel first, and she is not an easy person to track down. As a lawyer, she has been the defender of Palestinian prisoners for decades, and as an activist, she has been an advocate for Palestinian rights for just as long. Her caseload is beyond impossible, and she walks and talks a million miles a minute. I visited her at home, and she told me that she had the file somewhere, but that it was so long ago that she couldn’t remember if she still had it in her office or if it has been stored elsewhere with old files. We decided to meet again the following morning at her office in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jerrah.
I arrived early before the office opened and waited on the stairs. When someone finally opened the office, I still had to wait an hour or so until Leah came. Then, urgent matters took precedence over my request for the file on the HLF and Anati. Several hours passed, and I was forced to leave empty-handed.
That afternoon she called me to tell me she thought she knew where to find the file. When I arrived at her office again, she showed me to a chair under the attic. I climbed onto it and looked, and after going through countless boxes, indeed I found the file on Mohammad Anati. She allowed me to copy whatever was permissible, and off I went to read. But I still wanted to meet and talk to him.
Leah Tsemel gave me a number she had for him that had been good several years before. I thought it was worth a try, but I got no answer. I left several messages but still there was no call back. Then one afternoon I got a reply.
It was Mohammad’s father, asking me to leave his son alone. He had suffered enough.
I told him I understood, but that Shukri Abu-Baker had asked me to call.
A few minutes later the phone rang again. It was Mohammad Anati.
“Of course I will be happy to help Shukri; whatever you need will be fine.”
“Thank you, where would you like to meet?”
Silence.
“Hello? Mohammad.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t speak to you. Goodbye.”
And he hung up. I had been so close. I wondered what had happened to him to make him still so afraid, a decade later.
The phone rang again.
“I am sorry. I will meet you.”
We decided on the Jerusalem Hotel, in East Jerusalem, the following day at 6:00 p.m. It was the holy month of Ramadan when Muslims fast all day and eat after sundown, so by the time I arrived at the hotel, tables were set and families were enjoying Iftar, the meal to break the fast.
The dining room at the hotel is like a large covered balcony, with vines growing above so you feel like you are outdoors but still protected from the street and from the elements. I ordered tea and waited. I watched the families as they were recovering from the heat and exhaustion of fasting since sunrise. Even though it is Ramadan and people fast all day, life still goes on and most people go to work as usual, which makes it harder still.
After half an hour with still no sign of Anati, I called his number. No reply; I decided to wait till seven. Seven o’clock came and went as well, and I decided to wait till 7:30. Transportation on the Palestinian side is unpredictable at best, and one never knows when one might arrive to an appointment, even though he was coming from Shu’afat, which is just on the outskirts of the city. There are sometimes checkpoints to pass. Find a soldier in a vindictive mood and you may be held for hours.
I recall the first time I took the bus from Jerusalem to Ramallah. I asked a fellow traveler sitting next to me how long it takes to get to Ramallah. He merely looked at me. In fact one of the most imposing aspects of Israeli control of Palestinian life is that Palestinians have little to no control over their time. They may be detained at any moment and any place and they have no say and no recourse.
Mohammad did not show up that day, nor did he answer the phone or return my calls, although I stayed past 8:00.
I was not able to contact him again for two years.
By the summer of 2015, I had met Hussein Elkhatib, who was the last manager to oversee HLF’s operation in Palestine before the office was closed in 2001. Hussein, who knew Mohammad, had a friend in Jerusalem who could help me make the connection.
I met Hussein’s friend, who asked me not to mention his name, at a hotel lobby in Jerusalem. He asked that I turn off both of my phones and place them on a table far away from where we were sitting. Then he went ahead and turned his phone off, too, and placed them in his bag and at some distance from our table. I never encountered such security measures before. We spoke for a while, and I explained who I was and why I needed to speak to Mohammad. This was becoming more and more like a Cold War–era novel. The friend said he would call me to set up the meeting.
Later that day, he called with the plan: he and Mohammad would meet me at a designated parking lot in Jerusalem at 7:30 that evening and then together we would drive to a public area in East Jerusalem where we could talk.
The parking lot was in a small strip mall in a residential area between West and East Jerusalem, what is often called the “seam zone.” The mall was dark and the stores closed. I parked my car with one or two others in the lot and waited, watching the occasional car go past on the quiet street. Each time I wondered if it was Mohammad; each time it was not. Finally, my phone rang.
“We will be there shortly.”
Palestine time. It means that 7:00 can mean 7:30 or even 8:00. It is not a reflection on the people, though the culture here does tend to view time quite casually. It is, like everything else that ails the society, the economy, transportation, relationships, and life in general, a symptom of living in the shadow of The Occupation.
Then, a minivan pulled over and parked by the curbside, and my phone rang again. I confirmed my identity and was permitted to approach the minivan and get in the back seat. Mohammad Anati, at last, was in the passenger’s seat.
We greeted one another in Arabic, and Mohammad seemed friendly and relaxed. With our mutual “friend” driving, we made our way to East Jerusalem. In a café on the ground floor of a small hotel, we ordered some juice, and I was able to talk to the man who had eluded me for two years.
“May I record?”
“Yes, no problem. What would you like to know?”
“Everything. When did you work for HLF? What did you do? What happened when they arrested you?”
Mohammad Anati looks like a big friendly child. He is tall and chubby with an open face and disposition that shows beyond any doubt that this man could not and would not hurt a fly. I could easily imagine that going through an arrest, interrogation, secondary interrogation, intimidation, and beatings by the Israeli police, secret police, and border guards would leave enormous emotional scars. Now I knew why it took two years and a mediator for him to agree to speak to me, even when he was no longer under a gag order.
Mohammad began working for HLF in 1993. HLF had been working on projects in the West Bank and Jerusalem area, and Shukri Abu-Baker had come over to open an office in Jerusalem to consolidate the work and offer local support. “We worked mainly with children, orphans, and education and with health institutions. This was before the Palestinian Authority came in, so everything we did had to have Israeli approval and permits.” Shukri had come to ensure that the permits were in order.
Most of the organizations that worked in the field of charity and relief had an Islamic background, Islamic characteristics. HLF too was an Islamic organization. But none of these were part of any political party or military wing of any organization.
Under Mohammad’s tenure, HLF worked with organizations that had social workers in the field. These organizations identified people in need, and HLF supplied the items necessary to meet those needs. With HLF’s donations, orphans were supplied with necessary school uniforms, coats in the winter, and school supplies.
“During the holidays,” he said, “we supplied holiday clothes for them and some funds to buy food for Eid.”
People could sponsor an orphan through a special program that HLF had in place. Because there were so many orphans, it was a particular need. HLF helped connect people who wanted to give with children who needed them.
As HLF became well known, more and more health organizations began asking for help from HLF. “But we did not just give without checking credentials and permits,” Mohammad insisted. “We looked into every organization before agreeing to work with them. We made sure they had all the permits from the Israeli authorities and that they were legitimate.”
HLF would review how each organization operated and how funds were distributed. They made sure that the funds were used efficiently and benefitted the largest possible number of people. All the money for these projects came through Israeli banks, and HLF strove to make its operations completely transparent.
“We had a budget and an accountant, and every transaction was documented. HLF was getting bigger and busier and I had to start hiring employees and we had to rent a larger space. I got us an apartment in Beit-Hanina [a suburb of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem]. Then, at one point, for no reason and with no foundation, the Israeli authorities started coming to the office and going through our papers and creating problems. They came over and over again; then they took all our files and took me and the other employees for interrogation. Then they came again and closed us down for a year. That was in 1995. They took the computers and everything we had. They took my number and they said, ‘We will call you.’ ”
There was no money for the authorities to take and few assets to seize; the US office of HLF sent money only as it was needed for specific projects. HLF tried to appeal the closure, but because the office had been shut down under the draconian “Emergency Regulations” in force in East Jerusalem, there was no recourse.
When the year was up, HLF’s attorneys agreed that it was safe to reopen the office. Trouble followed almost immediately.
A few days after Mohammad and his staff re-opened the office, Israeli authorities came. They asked who gave HLF permission to open.
“We said that the closing period was for a year and since a year had gone by we re-opened. That’s when they started to threaten me personally.”
With tensions rising, Mohammad moved the office to A-Ram, which is outside Jerusalem and closer to Ramallah. Israeli authorities, mostly Shabak (the Israeli secret police), would return periodically and ask the same questions.
“In ‘97 they came to the office in A-Ram and again they took our files and everything we had. I wasn’t there at the time. I was visiting Jordan, but when I returned they arrested me at the bridge on the way back.”
This time the Israeli authorities took every piece of paper they had at the office, every single file, and they interviewed Anati about all of it.
They interrogated me for four months and asked me about each and every document. Even papers they found in the trash. It was exhausting. For a month and a half I was held in solitary confinement. I was held with no food or water, and the smell was terrible.
I was telling them that HLF has no connection to Hamas or any other political or military organizations. When I started working with HLF, Shukri interviewed me, and he made it clear from the beginning that HLF has no relation or affiliation to any other organization. He stressed to me that if anyone had any personal political affiliation they must keep it outside of work.
HLF was a good company, and it was trusted and liked by everyone. The problem is that for the Israeli police and intelligence services, anyone who has a beard or walks by a mosque is considered Hamas. They didn’t know what to do because our documents were in order, and so they investigated us over and over again. I was being interrogated seventeen hours every day—it was insane.
The Israeli authorities translated Anati’s statements and sent them to the United States, where they would eventually be used by the prosecution in the HLF trial. According to the translation submitted by the US government, Anati admitted that HLF was giving money to Hamas. But the translation was wrong. The defense team, which had contacted Leah Tsemel about this statement and heard from her that it was wrong, had an independent, authorized translation service translate the Anati statement into English. That translation revealed an entirely different story.
The Israeli authorities began asking people about Anati, trying to get information to incriminate him and prolong the process, and they found nothing. “They were trying to connect the orphans we helped to Hamas—if there was any relative who was a shahid then they accused them of being Hamas.” Shahid means martyr, but, colloquially, it can also mean someone who has died during a time of strife. In essence the Israelis’ strongest argument that the orphans were connected to Hamas was to overanalyze a bit of slang.
“The accusations they made, made no sense. They wouldn’t stop; they kept putting pressure on us. Leah Tsemel began to yell at the judge in court: either charge him with something or let him go.”
As an attorney experienced in cases like Mohammad’s, Leah knew what the Israeli authorities were capable of. Her concern was that they would keep him under administrative detention, which meant they could hold him without charging him for months on end. “They went back at my life as far as when I was a kid in school, in college. Every time I went to court the press was there and crowds of photographers, etc. In the media they tried to connect me to all kinds of bad things.”
The first time he was detained, Anati was kept in solitary confinement for a month and a half. Then for three months he was in a cell with another prisoner. After that, he was moved to another prison for an additional six months and to Askelan prison for the final two months.
After all those months, the interrogations finally stopped. The interrogators had found nothing. Anati was accused of having connection to Hamas, but no charges were ever brought against him. Even so, the court proceedings lasted hours. “When the police would come to get me to go to court they would call home to let their family know they won’t be home for dinner,” he explained. “During the last hearing the judge was so tired we had to move to his office for him to sit more comfortably.”
Altogether Anati spent nine months in prison and then six months under house arrest. “During the house arrest I was not even allowed to see the doctor, I was only allowed to go to court. Twice a week I had to go the police station to sign in.” Anati also had to pay 40,000 shekels, which at the time was the equivalent of about $10,000, bail. “At the end I was not cleared of the charges, but the judge considered the time served as my sentence.”
It was during Anati’s house arrest that he was called by Shabak agents and told to come to their office. When he arrived, there were Americans there who said they were FBI, and they, too, began questioning him. They asked Anati to come to the United States to testify against HLF, and Leah Tsemel, who was still representing Anati at that time, promised they would think it over. The FBI would eventually question Mohammad Anati three times.
The FBI even offered me US citizenship and immunity if I testified that HLF was linked to Hamas. At the first meeting with the FBI there was a representative from the US embassy in Tel Aviv to show that they were serious about offering me US citizenship. What I told the FBI was what I told everyone else: the HLF was an Islamic charity organization, not a political organization, and that it had no political affiliations.
In the end they destroyed everything, and I was completely broke. I was forbidden from communicating with any other HLF people, and the police sealed our offices.
All this was a prelude to what was to follow in the United States.
When the Oklahoma City bombing took place on April 19, 1995, HLF was the first Texas-based relief organization to go there. They had fifty volunteers helping to raise funds and collect blood donations.
Meanwhile the campaign to vilify HLF continued and became stronger, particularly in Dallas. The Dallas Morning News jumped on the bandwagon and started to publish articles claiming that HLF was funding Hamas.
But HLF was taking steps to ensure that it was not funding Hamas and that it could not be seen as funding Hamas. In February 1995, as John Robert McBrien would later testify, HLF and other Muslim and Arab groups requested a meeting with US Treasury Department officials. Mr. McBrien was an associate director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the Department of the Treasury (OFAC); at the time, he was the Chief of the International Programs Division. The head of OFAC, Richard Newcomb, also attended for the Treasury Department, as did Stephen Pinter, who headed the Licensing Division. This was a very comprehensive list of the senior officials responsible for deciding whether organizations were engaging in transactions with specially designated terrorists. The Treasury Department even included Serena Moe, a senior attorney in the Chief Counsel’s office. The organizations hoped to obtain guidance so as to make sure they were not engaging in inappropriate transactions, as well as to help reassure the US government that they were taking all steps in their power to direct their charity money to legitimate charity.
During the HLF trial, it was revealed that (very strangely) no official record existed of this meeting beyond a sign-in sheet that was initiated not by the Treasury but by one of the other participants. This sheet was found in a box at the InfoCom facility. The guidelines the organizations had requested were finally released in 2002—after HLF had been closed down.
Between 1996 and 2000, Ghassan traveled often to the Middle East to explore new business leads, offering InfoCom technology and consultation. Sometimes the trips would last as long as three months. Ghassan also represented InfoCom in technology exhibits around the Middle East, as a US-based company, providing technology outsourcing services to customers in the Middle East.
On one of these trips he had the opportunity to perform the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that is fundamental to the Islamic faith. During the Hajj pilgrims wear seamless white cloth and perform a series of rites over nearly a week. “It was an unforgettable and rewarding experience,” Ghassan says, “especially to meet with other Palestinian Muslims living and working in Saudi Arabia.”
The year 1999 found Abdulrahman Odeh in Albania. The war in Kosovo was filling refugee camps, and Abdulrahman was coordinating ways to feed them. He had an entire team and a system that included a French bakery equipped with one thousand tons of wheat flour, thirty tons of yeast, twenty tons of salt, and a professional Turkish baker to teach them how to bake. There was an engineer to put the system together. They also had three ambulances and coordinated their work with United Nations and the Salvation Army.
“I was baking bread in the beginning for the Hamala refugee camp,” Abdulrahman recalled for me. “At one point the commander of the US forces in Kosovo came to talk to me.” The military, too, needed a steady food supply, and Abdulrahman’s bakery could provide it. “I fed the US troops; I made bread for them.”
When Abdulrahman’s duties for HLF in Albania were over, he returned to the United States. Before he could board his flight from Rome to New Jersey, however, an FBI agent stopped him, ostensibly to thank him for the bread.
It wasn’t long before the agent’s agenda became obvious, though. “He … asked me who I met in Albania and if I spoke to any Mujahadin there.” Abdulrahman told the man that as far as he knew, there were no Mujahadin in Albania. The agent then asked Abdulrahman if he’d be willing to work with “us.” When Abdulrahman declined, the agent kept trying, saying that obviously Abdulrahman knew the community and would be a great asset. Abdulrahman was polite and truthful and just as persistent in refusing to work with anyone. The agent mentioned that if at any time Abdulrahman wanted to work with “us” he should call. That was at the end of 1999.
A few months later, another agent approached Abdulrahman on his way to work. This agent suggested Abdulrahman could work with the FBI. When Abdulrahman again refused, the agent insisted that he take a business card, in case he changed his mind.
Abdulrahman knew he would not change his mind.
No one has been more consistent in his refusal to “work” with the Feds than Abdulrahman. He knew that they wanted him to spy on people within his community, and that was something he was not going to do, not under any circumstances.
In March 2000, Abdulrahman was approached yet again. This time, the agent didn’t wait for him to leave the house.
There was a knock on his door at 5:00 a.m. When he looked through the window, he saw a woman dressed in high heels and a skirt. Although he did not know it at the time, the woman was Special Agent Lara Burns. Burns had joined the FBI the year before and had been assigned to the Dallas field office after graduating the Academy in January 2000. This newly-minted agent would spend more time on the stand than any other single witness in the HLF trials.
On that day in March, Abdulrahman Odeh did not open the door for Agent Burns. Nor did he allow her into her house when she came the next time, again at 5:00 a.m. The third time she came and was refused entry, Agent Burns left with a threat.
“You will regret this,” Abdulrahman remembers her saying.
While Abdulrahman Odeh was fending off advances from the FBI, HLF’s work had to continue. Hussein Elkhatib was responsible for coordinating efforts in Palestine. Another displaced Palestinian, Hussein decided to leave the United States after spending nearly twenty years in Minnesota and return home in 2000.
I met Hussein for the first time in Minnesota in April 2013. I had been invited to speak there at an event hosted by American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).
I arrived at the hotel and found Hussein waiting. He and I hit it off immediately, which is no surprise since he’s one of the friendliest guys you will ever meet. Tall with broad shoulders and a big warm smile, he is an educator by training and worked as a school principal.
In 2014, we met again at the national AMP conference in Chicago, which was when he told me in great detail about his work with the HLF. After the convention was over, we sat together in a quiet corner in the lobby of the Chicago Hilton, and he told me of his harrowing experience living and working in Palestine between the years 2000 and 2002. His story belongs to the HLF experience in Palestine itself and what people who operated HLF there had to go through under the Israeli authorities.
Hussein had already volunteered with HLF for some time when he decided to stop postponing the decision to return to his home in Azzariya, a town adjacent to Jerusalem. His oldest daughter was five at the time.
When Shukri heard that Hussein was leaving Minnesota, he tried to convince him to come to Dallas to work at the HLF main office. But for Hussein, it was very clear. He told Shukri that “if I moved out of Minnesota it will be back home to Azzariya. So it was proposed that I would go there to manage the entire HLF operation in Falastin.13”
In preparation for his new position, Hussein traveled to Dallas for a month of training and worked closely with Shukri at the HLF main office. But nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to experience once he returned to Palestine.
In order to fully understand why Hussein was such an asset for HLF, it’s important to clarify how Israel classifies Palestinians and the types of identification with which the State of Israel provides Palestinians.
All Palestinians still living in their homeland are governed by Israel under a complicated web of laws and restrictions that constantly change. The type of identification card and the precise designation a Palestinian has will determine their ability to travel around the country. It will impact their work and even their relationships with other Palestinians. This designation also determines whether a person can fly overseas using Israel’s Tel Aviv airport or has to travel overland to Jordan and fly from Amman, adding at least two days (and some non-trivial costs) to their travel.
The designation of “Arab Citizen of Israel” was given to Palestinians who remained within the boundaries of Palestine that in 1948 became the State of Israel. These are often referred to as the pre-1967 borders; Israel refers to these Palestinians as the “Arabs of Israel,” while Palestinians call them “the Palestinians of 1948.” An “Arab” citizen may fly out of Tel Aviv airport and travel freely throughout the country.
It gets more complicated.
After East Jerusalem was occupied by Israel in 1967, Palestinians who resided in East Jerusalem were granted “permanent resident” status. Identification cards were given to them that resemble an Israeli ID, but they are not citizens and do not have citizens’ rights. Palestinians residing in the West Bank have a green ID card with their own unique classification and limitations.
Palestinians who reside in the West Bank are prohibited from traveling to Jerusalem and to parts of the country outside the West Bank without a special permit, but the Jerusalem ID gives its holders the right to travel and work almost anywhere around the country, including all of the West Bank. The Jerusalem ID is usually taken from Palestinians if they get a citizenship in another country or happen to be absent from their home in Jerusalem for more than a certain length of time. The length of the absence, which determines if they lose their status, changes from time to time.
Just for the sake of comparison, Jewish residents of Jerusalem and Jews who live in the West Bank have the same full citizenship rights in Israel with no limitations placed on them at all. Any citizen of Israel may be gone for decades without losing his or her citizenship even if they gain citizenship in another country.
Hussein had a Jerusalem ID and a US passport, and for reasons that are unclear to him, even though he had lived in the United States for a long time, the Israeli authorities did not revoke his Jerusalem ID. This was an important advantage in his new position in the HLF because it allowed him to live in Jerusalem and travel freely throughout the country and visit Palestinian communities everywhere.
I knew that the Israelis had closed the HLF Jerusalem office, so I was curious how it was that they could continue to operate after that. “The Israelis closed the Jerusalem office, but we were in Ramallah and there was a little separation there because we were under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, so it was a different authority governing us.” Once again, the bureaucracy making Palestinians’ lives more difficult had been a blessing in disguise to HLF.
After spending time in Dallas at the main office, Hussein left for Palestine in August 2000 to get organized. His duties included managing the entire HLF operation in Palestine. His family followed shortly after.
“I was hoping to arrive and slowly get settled. I wanted to take my time to familiarize myself with the operation.”
But Hussein had no time to ease into his new responsibilities because on September 28, following years of frustration and worsening conditions for Palestinians, the Second Intifada erupted, sparked by a visit by Ariel Sharon to the Haram Elsharif, known to most Westerners as the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem.
“We were in emergency mode immediately,” Hussein recalled.
Palestinian casualties were growing rapidly; mass arrests, curfews, and restrictions on movement for Palestinians in the West Bank made life conditions impossible. Palestinians and other Muslims and Arabs in the United States were horrified by what was happening to their brothers and sisters in Palestine. Because of HLF’s reputation in the community for reliability and compassion, donations to HLF had quadrupled. Hussein’s job was to determine what was needed, where it was needed the most, and then to get the money there.
“People thought that I was crazy, but there I was, going to Hebron, to Ramallah, to Jenin, and everywhere else that I was needed, including Gaza.”
At first Hussein opened an office in the small village of Bethany in East Jerusalem, and then a larger central office in Ramallah. From there he travelled to see what people in the West Bank needed. Money was wired to Ramallah, where Hussein and his staff would evaluate need and pass it on. There was also a satellite office in Gaza making distributions from there.
“Most of what we did was send food packages,” Hussein told me. HLF’s purchases were an important boost to the Palestinian economy, which was barely surviving during that time. HLF bought food packages in local stores using local merchandise and locally grown food. As the operation grew, HLF needed packing, warehouse space, and distribution drivers. This meant that HLF gave to Palestine in two important ways: by creating employment opportunities and by distributing much-needed food, medical supplies, and school supplies for the children.
The HLF office would coordinate with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which would then distribute the food to people who had registered and qualified, proving that that they have a legitimate need. The vast majority of HLF’s charity was conducted in this manner; the office distributed what Hussein remembers as “very little cash.”
Silwad kindergarten built with HLF support
“We worked with the zakat committees, the local charities, as did the United Nations and the United States government, but we did not give them money. We gave clothes, food packages, and school bags equipped with school supplies. We gave school uniforms, backpacks, pencils, and so on. I would rent a warehouse, and we would bring all the supplies and distribute from there.”
HLF also sent wheelchairs to Gaza, which they purchased from the Wheelchair Foundation. Hussein organized donations to hospitals of more costly “big ticket” items.
“We donated fifteen fully equipped ambulances. We even held a ceremony and local dignitaries were invited.”
The caravan of ambulances drove the ten kilometers from Beit Hanina, another Palestinian town that is part of the greater Jerusalem area, to Ramallah. But when the ambulances arrived at the Qalandia checkpoint, roughly halfway to their destination, Israeli authorities would not let them cross.
“Only when the United Nations officers intervened did they let the ambulances go through.” As Hussein was remembering this scene, he smiled. “We bought the vans overseas, and they arrived into Israeli ports. Then Israeli companies equipped them. So why were they afraid? Everything we did was known and completely legal—it was all reported in the media.”
Plaque mentioning HLF at Silwad kindergarten
Another project they sponsored was the development wing of the HLF, helping communities make long-term improvements in addition to the urgent relief projects. One example of this type of charity was contributions to the construction of a new girl’s school in Jerusalem called The Imam’s School. Another was the Silwad School.
Later, prosecutors would claim that HLF’s relief efforts had spared Hamas from having to do the same charitable work. The first time this came up in our conversation was the first time Hussein laughed. It was a bitter laugh, unlike his ordinary sunny manner. He stopped talking for a minute and shook his head in disbelief.
“Another thing that they said was that we gave to children of martyrs—well, we gave to everyone! We even gave to families of traitors, of Jawasis, because whatever the father did was not the fault of the family, and if the family was in need we were there to give.”
Palestinian communities all over the West Bank and Gaza are plagued with collaborators. This is not unique to Palestine. All foreign occupiers control territory using people who out of greed or desperation agreed to act against their own people, their own community, and in some cases, even their own family. Needless to say, within occupied communities everywhere, no crime is deemed worse than collaborating with the occupier. But HLF made no distinctions.
The mission of HLF was to provide for those in need; they did not believe it was the fault of the children or the family how they became poor, how the breadwinner of the family died, even if they were killed as a result of committing the unforgivable crime of being collaborators. They left those moral judgments to a higher power.
“The guidelines were as follows: $1,000 for an injury per person if there was a hospital report and there was proof of the injury, and $5,000 to a family who lost a loved one.”
Later, US prosecutors would claim that by giving to the orphans, HLF encouraged suicide bombings and other forms of terrorism. The defense demonstrated clearly that of the lists of orphans, none of their fathers were involved in what could be described as terrorism. Furthermore, out of roughly 200 suicide bombers that operated in Palestine at the time, none had children. So the claim had no foundation.
The first time the IDF raided the Ramallah office, they went through everything, Hussein told me. “It was brutal,” he said. “I wasn’t there; I was in the field, and I could not return to the office. They destroyed the furniture, and they took all the papers.” Hussein stopped to think for a short moment, then he continued. “I wish we had those papers now because they would prove our innocence.”
Ghassan Elashi also recalled HLF’s work during the Second Intifada for me. “The most urgent need was to assist families of Palestinians who were arrested by the Israeli security forces. Most of these families had no source of income once the breadwinner of the family was arrested.”
It is estimated that from 2000 to 2003 Israeli security forces detained between 4,000 and 6,000 Palestinians. HLF allocated $100 to $250 to each family, and the money was given only after the Islamic Relief Agency provided extensive documentation about each family, including the name of the detainee, the number of children in the family, and a certificate from the International Red Cross signed and stamped certifying that the arrest took place by the IDF or other Israeli security agencies.
Israel, pro-Israeli Jewish groups in the United States, and the prosecution in the HLF trials interpreted this, too, as supporting families of terrorists. And even though the vast majority of the prisoners were never charged with acts of violence, the Israeli public relations campaigns made it seem as though this money was used as an incentive for young Palestinians to join the resistance against Israel. One wonders if they ever considered that the best motivation to resist the Israeli occupation was the occupation itself and the brutal oppression that came with it.
9 The report was titled ADL Special Report—Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood: Islamic Extremists and the Terrorist Threat to America.
10 Palestinian academic and political activist living in London. At the time of publication, Dr. Tamimi is the chairman of Alhiwar TV channel and is its editor in chief.
11 Tamimi, Azzam, Hamas: a History From Within (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2007)
12 Several historians have identified the 1936–39 Palestinian revolt as a key antecedent for the First Intifada that broke out in 1987.
13 The Arabic word for Palestine.