The American Pro Palestinian civil disobedience movement

Post Reply New Topic

In cities across the country, highways have been blocked, trains have been delayed and sections of college campuses have been shut down by hundreds of thousands of people who have taken to the streets.

They’re protesting Israel’s invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack. Members of the movement say the size of the demonstrations is a response to the killing of more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Pro-Israel groups, meanwhile, are pushing Congress and federal law enforcement agencies to investigate whether any of the protests across the U.S. are getting money from abroad and whether their leaders have ties to Hamas or other terrorist groups.

To understand which groups are organizing the protests and any potential ties to foreign groups, NBC News reviewed the tax filings and social media posts of the organizations behind the highest-profile demonstrations, as well as court filings, government reports and legislative hearings related to the pro-Palestinian movement in America.

Despite accusations by some pro-Israel groups and former U.S. and Israeli government officials of potential ties between protest organizers and terrorist groups, public records show no clear evidence financially linking Hamas or any foreign governments to the American protests.

What did emerge is a vast network that includes left-leaning, billion-dollar American philanthropies and collaboration with at least one foreign organization that Germany and Israel have banned for allegedly working with or supporting Hamas and another terrorist group.

The movement overall appears grassroots, with localized efforts that coordinate primarily through social media using apps such as Telegram, X, WhatsApp and Instagram.

Nerdeen Kiswani is emblematic of the movement. Kiswani, 29, a law school graduate, founded the group Within Our Lifetime nearly a decade ago to build a community for young people who want to raise awareness for the Palestinian cause. With little more than social media posts, Kiswani, a Palestinian American activist raised in Brooklyn, New York, can attract thousands of New Yorkers to clog shopping districts, transit hubs and even roads to the airport — and bring them to a standstill.

“I just support the Palestinian people as a whole, and I believe that we have the right to resist,” Kiswani said. “If they’re mad at it, they can talk to Biden, they can talk to the secretary of state, they can talk to the elected officials who keep funding wars abroad, who keep funding death and killing in our name, with our tax dollars.”

Protest organizers say their aims are simple but far-reaching: to push lawmakers to stop giving money and weapons to Israel while getting Democratic voters to boycott President Joe Biden as political retribution for his support of Israel as large numbers of Gazans are being killed.

The goal of the demonstrations is to make “the Democrats feel the heat, not only from the mass protests, but also from the people who are being stopped in the streets, who aren’t making it to work on time,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, the national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, which has organized street protests in Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit.

And it is having an effect. Biden has taken extraordinary steps to avoid protesters at public and campaign events, NBC News recently reported. During the Democratic primary in Michigan, which has a large Muslim population, more than 101,000 voters marked “uncommitted” on their ballots. In 2020, just under 1,300 voters checked the box.

“At least with Trump, we know what we’re dealing with,” Kiswani said. “We know that he’s been anti-Palestinian. With Biden, you know, he literally can kill 30,000 of us and still pretend that he’s a friend.”

Following the money
Several of the pro-Palestinian organizations, including Within Our Lifetime and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, do not have public tax filings. However, they and several other groups use a progressive nonprofit group based in New York called Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation, or WESPAC, as their fiscal sponsor to collect and process online donations. U.S. tax law allows nonprofit groups with 501(c)(3) status to collect money on behalf of smaller groups.

Howard Horowitz, WESPAC’s board chair, declined to share its financial filings for the organizations it sponsors.

“Isn’t the big story the ongoing genocide in Gaza?” Horowitz said in an email.

Other groups have backing from major U.S. foundations. IfNotNow, an organization with the stated aim to “end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system,” was awarded $100,000 during the past five years by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a decades-old philanthropy based in New York. The fund has awarded close to a half-million dollars over the same period to Jewish Voice for Peace, another Palestinian rights organization.

“I think protests and civil disobedience, as long as it’s nonviolent, is an effective tool, and that’s why we support some groups that use that tool,” said Stephen Heintz, the president and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The Open Society Foundation, established by George Soros, has also given grants to Jewish Voice for Peace. A spokesperson said the foundation’s goal is to help establish lasting peace in the region.

Jewish Voice for Peace has organized hundreds of protests across the country with tens of thousands of participants since the invasion of Gaza. While its events are generally peaceful, it has come under criticism for some actions, including inviting convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh to speak at a national event in 2017.

Odeh’s supporters say Israel tortured her into a false confession. Odeh was a founding member of the Chicago chapter of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network before U.S. officials deported her in 2017 for failing to disclose a terrorism conviction in Israel.

Stefanie Fox, Jewish Voice for Peace’s executive director, said people must think critically about the U.S. government’s history of applying the word “terrorism” to specific communities. “International law recognizes the rights of occupied peoples to resist their oppression, including through the use of force within clear parameters that always protect civilians in conflict,” Fox said.

In 2020, Zoom, Facebook and YouTube shut down an online event featuring Leila Khaled, a Palestinian activist who spent time in prison for hijacking planes. In a statement condemning censorship, Jewish Voice for Peace called her a “Palestinian resistance icon” and slammed the tech companies.

According to congressional testimony, public statements and interviews, current and former government officials in the U.S., Europe, Israel and Canada claim that some leaders of the pro-Palestinian protest movement promote rhetoric from Hamas or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP. They also say some groups work with members of the PFLP. The State Department has designated both groups as terrorist organizations.

On and after the Oct. 7 attacks, when about 1,200 people were killed and more than 240 were taken hostage, the PFLP’s military wing, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, claimed on Telegram that it had participated in the carnage. It urged other Palestinians to join it. Federal investigators in Washington, D.C., said they do not dispute the PFLP’s claim that it participated in the attack.

Jonathan Schanzer, a former Treasury Department official, called for more aggressive investigation of ties between pro-Palestinian groups in the U.S. and terrorist organizations in testimony to Congress in November.

“Individuals who previously worked for Hamas charities are now a driving force behind the large pro-Hamas demonstrations taking place in major cities across America,” said Schanzer, who is now senior vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Schanzer cited Hatem Bazian, a longtime lecturer at the University of California Berkeley, as an example. Bazian founded the national branch of Students for Justice in Palestine to focus on campus-based activism, and he later launched American Muslims for Palestine. Both groups advocate for the U.S. government to end its support of Israel.

Schanzer argued that Bazian and his organizations are part of a network that is “providing training, talking points, materials and financial support to students intimidating and threatening Jewish and pro-Israel students on college campuses.”

The attorney general’s office of Virginia, where American Muslims for Palestine is headquartered, also opened an investigation of the group after an Israeli American family accused it of potentially using funds to benefit terrorist organizations.

Samidoun
Officials concerned about hidden links to terrorist groups point to a little-known international organization called Samidoun, the Arabic word for “steadfast.”

On its website, the Canadian-registered nonprofit group describes itself as “an international network of organizers and activists working to build solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in their struggle for freedom.”

But the Israeli government and several think tanks in Europe and Israel say Samidoun’s leadership is composed of current and former members of the PFLP. Germany banned Samidoun a few weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, arguing that Samidoun members had praised and supported Hamas during street protests.

The Israeli government declared Samidoun a terrorist organization in 2021. “They support terrorism, and they want to gain public opinion — support — for terrorism,” said Yossi Kuperwasser, the former chief of the research division in the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence wing.

The group’s international coordinator, Charlotte Kates, originally from New Jersey, is listed as one of three directors on Samidoun’s nonprofit registration in Canada. She did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Other members of Samidoun’s leadership in Canada and in Europe also did not respond.

But Samidoun does not hide its activities. In a Feb. 27 YouTube video in which Kates is featured along with Dr. Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, Kates described the Oct. 7 attacks as a “heroic operation.” In another February webinar on YouTube, she spoke to activists in New York and explained why her organization does not distance itself from Hamas or other groups deemed terrorists by the U.S. and Israel.

“What we see here is an alliance — an alliance of forces that is working together for a different future for the region that is free of U.S. imperialism and it is free of Zionist colonialism,” Kates told viewers. “And these forces of resistance, right now, are in the front lines of defending humanity.”

Kiswani, the New York-based activist, was featured in a 2020 Samidoun YouTube video in which she said “Zionists” had flooded her law school administration with emails claiming she is antisemitic. School officials cleared her of any wrongdoing.

Since Oct. 7, Samidoun has co-sponsored or co-organized at least three protests led by Within Our Lifetime and another group called the Palestinian Youth Movement, according to online flyers posted by the two organizations. Samidoun has “compiled a lot of history, things that we use in the movement to talk about Palestinian prisoners, and so we respect and appreciate them for that work,” Kiswani said.

There are active campaigns in Canada and in the European Union to ban Samidoun and have it classified as a terrorist organization. “I ain’t Jewish or Palestinian; I don’t have a stake in this,” said Leo Housakos, a member of Canada’s Senate, who has been pushing his government to shut down Samidoun and deport its leadership. “I feel strongly about a sense of security.”

Protected speech
Civil rights experts said that in the U.S., unlike countries with stricter hate speech laws, activist groups such as Samidoun can express their views more freely, as long as they are not working directly with designated terrorist groups.

“Even if you literally were advocating entirely, unambiguously pro-Hamas views in favor of all of their tactics, [it] is protected so long as the speaker is not coordinating with Hamas itself,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, a UCLA law professor who has represented detained immigrants and Muslim Americans in civil rights cases before the Supreme Court three times since 2016.

Federal officials say fine lines separate protected speech, hate speech and incitement. Federal prosecutors can prosecute speech if it rises to the level of clear threats of violence when stated specifically and if violent actions are being planned. Hate speech alone is not enough to deem a person or an organization a terrorist.

“Unlike many of our foreign partners, the United States, under the First Amendment, cannot designate organizations based solely on hateful speech,” Vincent Picard, a spokesman for the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, said by email. “The Secretary of State must determine that it is a foreign organization that engages in terrorist activity that threatens the security of United States nationals.”

While governments may lack the power to shut down most of these groups, private industry has more leeway, as shown last month when Instagram took down Within Our Lifetime’s accounts. A spokesperson for Meta, which owns Instagram, said the group violated community guidelines, which included the platform’s Dangerous Organizations & Individuals policy.

Deplatforming campaign
Former federal officials say that as presidential administrations have prioritized fighting the Islamic State terrorist group and domestic extremism in recent years, law enforcement agencies have made investigating ties between U.S groups and Hamas or the PFLP less of a priority.

Frustrated with the lack of U.S. government action, pro-Israeli legal activists launched a campaign in 2021 targeting Samidoun’s fundraising efforts in North America. They focused on the Alliance for Global Justice, an Arizona-based nonprofit group whose stated mission is to foster “social change and economic justice,” which served as Samidoun’s fiscal sponsor.

Zachor Legal Institute, an organization based in Montana, led the deplatforming effort, writing letters to Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and other financial companies.

“We say: ‘There’s a terror-connected group that uses this system, and as a result, you’re facilitating donations to terror groups. You should look into that because this is a violation of federal law,’” said Marc Greendorfer, the founder of Zachor. “I’m only in this to defend the rights of Jews to be a people.”

Samidoun’s online donation page says it is now disabled and directs users to send written checks to the Alliance for Global Justice, which did not respond to requests for comment.

With Samidoun unable to collect donations online, pro-Israel groups have turned their attention toward WESPAC, the New York nonprofit group that serves as a fiscal sponsor for several protest groups and processes their online donations, including the national branch of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Charles Asher Small, the founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, a nonprofit research group, names WESPAC in a forthcoming report. In an interview, he said the problem goes beyond antisemitism. “The ideology that these people are fighting for is anti-democratic,” he said.

The pro-Israel institute previously shared research with the Trump administration to investigate funding streams for pro-Palestinian organizations.

But Mike German, a former FBI agent who has accused the bureau of conducting excessive surveillance of Muslim Americans, said counterterrorism experts’ practice of linking anti-Israel protesters to terrorist groups is fraught.

“They’re targeting people who are two or three degrees away from people who are committing harm,” said German, now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “It’s a way of demonizing protest movements and political ideologies that challenge government power.”

1993 World Trade Center bombing
U.S. law enforcement agencies began looking in earnest for financial links between foreign organizations and U.S.-based Muslim charities after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The FBI spent the next 10 years investigating the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, at the time one of the country’s largest Muslim charities.

Several Palestinian American men were charged with money laundering and providing material support to Hamas. A federal judge sentenced five men — the “Holy Land Five” — to prison sentences of 15 to 65 years.

In 2018, the Trump administration began reviewing the activities of protest groups that Jewish leaders and federal officials had flagged as antisemitic and anti-Israel. It was preparing to open investigations into some groups’ ties to foreign funds and leadership, but officials said the inquiry was cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We were working on developing programs and responses to try and expose it and get to the root of it,” said Reed Rubinstein, a Trump administration official who led antisemitism investigations at both the Justice and Education departments.

In 2019, the Israeli government said in a report that Hamas and PFLP operatives were working in humanitarian organizations in the Middle East, Europe and Canada focused on Palestinian rights, with the ideological goal of “elimination of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on whether the agency was conducting any ongoing investigations.

Free speech protections often inhibit federal prosecutors from criminalizing speech, but they have greater latitude to investigate whether a person provided “material support” to a group designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, like Hamas. Material support includes giving financial assistance, expert advice, training and weapons.

Legal advocates have argued in court that the federal material support law is too vague. They say it unfairly targets humanitarian agencies and activists who are aiding families in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and other parts of the Middle East.

Muslim American organizations, meanwhile, say they are being flooded with reports of anti-Muslim bias since Israel invaded Gaza. The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported a rise in incidents of anti-Muslim bigotry at school, at work, after attending street protests or in criticizing Israel online.

“It’s a trope at this point that if you’re a Muslim who speaks up for Palestinian human rights and freedom, you’re going to be accused of being a terrorist,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, CAIR’s national deputy director.