Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five

Author

INTRODUCTION

Twenty-year-old Zaira Abu-Baker was still in bed in her parents’ home when she heard the banging on the front door. She looked at her phone and noticed several missed calls and a message from her friend Noor Elashi. She opened the message from Noor; it contained one word. Aju.

It means they came.

At precisely 7:00 a.m. central time, on July 27, 2004, the homes of Shukri Abu-Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh, and Mohammad Elmezain were raided by local and federal law enforcement. All five men, who would come to be known as the HLF-5, were taken into custody. Four years and two trials later, all five were sent to federal prison, serving sentences ranging from fifteen to sixty-five years.

I learned about the HLF-5 in the fall of 2011.

I had been asked to lecture at the University of Texas, in Dallas. After my lecture ended, I met with some of the student activists on campus, among whom were several daughters of the HLF-5.

HLF stands for The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. It was at one time the largest Muslim charity organization in America. As Ghassan Elashi would later explain to me, "Helping the poor, the orphans, and the widows is one of the pillars of Islamic teachings. HLF was a vehicle: it allowed Muslims in the US and worldwide to practice their religious duty of paying alms, or zaka, to help the needy, especially in Palestine."

On December 4, 2001, HLF was shut down by President George W. Bush under Executive Order 13224. Federal agents raided the charity’s offices and seized all documents, assets, and funds of the organization, as well as personal property of the employees.

Although all funds raised by the charity had gone to humanitarian aid and the government had found no illegal financial transactions by HLF, prosecutors relied on Executive Order 12947 issued by President Clinton on January 23, 1995, which prohibits financial transactions with any Specially Designated organizations. By the time HLF was shut down, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance movement, known as Hamas, was one of these organizations. The prosecution’s theory was that, by supporting needy Palestinians, HLF had freed up Hamas’ own assets to fund terrorist attacks, and that if Palestinians knew that HLF would provide support for their families if assistance became necessary, they would be more likely to become suicide bombers.

I have a personal history with Hamas’ suicide attacks: in 1997, my thirteen-year-old niece, Smadar Elhanan, was killed by one.

I was born in Jerusalem to Israeli Jewish parents, but my family was no ordinary family. My maternal grandfather was among the select group of Zionist leaders who signed the Israeli declaration of independence. My father served as an officer in the war that established Israel in 1948, and later as a general in the Israeli Defense Forces. He was a member of the IDF high command orchestrating Israel’s spectacular victory in 1967 during what would come to be known as the Six-Day War.

I did not need to be taught to love my country; that love was given to me with my mother’s milk, but it also came with a healthy dose of questioning authority and a desire to point out and eradicate injustice whenever and wherever possible.

My family hoped that the end of the war would be the end of fighting. As consecutive Israeli governments were populating the newly occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem with Jewish settlers, my father was meeting with Palestinian leaders, including Yasser Arafat, hoping to bring about a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Then on Thursday, September 4, 1997, Hamas orchestrated a suicide attack in Jerusalem that took the life of, among others, my niece. Although my father had passed away almost two years earlier, the headlines in the Israeli newspapers the following morning referred to her as the granddaughter of General Matti Peled.

I was living in the United States already, so I took the first plane home. My sister’s apartment in Jerusalem was packed with Israelis and Palestinians who had come to express their sorrow and horror. There were representatives of every news agency from around the world, but what they heard from our family was not the narrative they expected.

We all felt that the Israeli government was ultimately responsible for Smadar’s fate. We blamed Israel’s brutal occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people for her death and that of countless others, mostly Palestinians.

Smadar’s death had an enormous impact on me and on my life. When I returned to the United States, I was determined to become more involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and thankfully I was introduced to a Jewish-Palestinian dialogue group in San Diego. I attended the monthly meetings and realized that even though I was born and raised in Jerusalem, this was the first time I was meeting and speaking to Palestinians face to face. I later also realized it was the first time I was with Palestinians in the same place and we were equal under the law. In Israel, Palestinians are subject to civil laws that single them out as Arab citizens, as opposed to the Jewish citizens of the state. In the West Bank and Gaza, military law governs the lives Palestinians and Israeli civil law governs the lives of Jews. In other words, even though Israelis and Palestinians live in the same country, and are governed by the same state, they live in different worlds and under different laws.

By the end of 2011, I had completed my memoir, The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, the result of my soul searching and fact finding, which describes my journey as well as that of my family. I went from being a young Israeli patriot, eager to serve in the Israeli army, to a man questioning the very legitimacy of a Jewish State that was established in an Arab country where the majority of the population are not Jewish but Palestinian Arabs.

Fast forward to February 2012. I was invited to Dallas again, this time to speak at a fundraiser for the Muslim Legal Fund of America, MLFA, an organization that pays the legal expenses of Muslims in America who are targeted by the Justice Department, including the vast legal expenses for the HLF-5. Ralph Nader was there too; he gave the keynote address that evening. While in Dallas, I asked if I could meet the family members of the HLF-5 and if I could receive more information about the case. At the time that I arrived in Dallas, a request for an appeal on behalf of the HLF-5 had just been denied and their lawyers were contemplating their next move, a possible appeal to the US Supreme Court. On the evening of the MLFA event, I met with several of the HLF-5 family members, the wives and some of the older children, at the lobby of the hotel.

They are all devout Muslims; the women and girls all wear traditional head covers and simple modest clothes. The generation of the parents, now mostly in their mid- to late fifties, had come to America some thirty years earlier to create a better life for themselves and a future for their children. They established a vibrant and proud community with a kindergarten, a school, and a community center, and the Holy Land Foundation was at the center of their lives. That was how they were giving back.

As I traveled around the country and met young Muslim Americans, they all told me the same things: After school we would go as kids to the HLF offices to help; We would lick envelopes and stick postage stamps on them. This was a community activity. It was how they, as kids, all learned the importance of giving back; that was where their parents knew that their charity money, or zakat, was going to serve the needy.

What I saw before me were quiet, law-abiding, middle-class Americans. And it was clear that they saw their legal options running out.

I listened to their stories, and the more I heard, the more I wanted to know. I wanted to meet more people who were involved with the HLF and to learn as much as I could about the case. But more than anything I was moved by the daily trials of these families, and the community, who were hurled into a storm of anti-terrorism efforts mixed in with large doses of anti-Islam, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian sentiment. I felt that there was something seriously wrong here. I felt that these families and the Muslim and Arab community were implicated in something with which they had nothing to do: terrorism.

I asked the family members how I could get in touch with their husbands and fathers and if it was possible to visit them in prison. They mentioned to me that they were held in special prisons called CMUs, or Communication Management Units. Several weeks later I began a process that enabled me to get in touch with one of them via email, and reached Shukri Abu-Baker, the former CEO of the HLF and one of two defendants who received a sixty-five-year jail sentence. After several more weeks, I received my first email from Shukri, and we began a correspondence that has lasted for several years.

Over time I began to correspond with the others: Ghassan Elashi, also serving a sixty-five year sentence; Mufid Abdulqader, serving twenty years; Abdulrahman Odeh, fifteen years; and Mohammad Elmezain, also called Abu Ibrahim, serving fifteen years. I dove into their stories, their lives, and the saga of their families and their communities.

In the following pages, I will try to tell the extraordinary story of the HLF-5. I begin with the arrests of the men, but it is important as well to say something about who these men are and why they created the Holy Land Foundation. As I traveled and met these men—now serving long sentences in federal prisons around the country—I came to admire them as much as any individuals I’ve ever met. And I saw how important it is that others come to see them and to understand the background and the context of this story. Only then could anyone understand the travesty and indeed the tragedy that took place here.

The story of the trials is a long story, and I ask the reader to bear with me. But after reading through more than twenty thousand pages of court documents I am convinced that the details of the trials are important in understanding how the injustice was carried out. Because the story of these men—who have been wrongfully locked up in American prisons—is not just their story, as all too many African Americans, Native Americans and Arab and Muslim Americans know all too well.

Also important to this story is the deep regard these men and their families have for the Muslim faith—something I came to understand, respect and admire. I hope that in this book I can convey something of that faith because it was with their imprisonment that their faith was deeply challenged and profoundly deepened. In this way, the story is also a story of the triumph of the spirit.

I include for the reader’s information some important background: the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood, the creation and rise of Hamas out of the Brotherhood, the tension with the PLO and then the Palestinian Authority.

So, for me this was the beginning of yet another journey. Though it involved Palestinians, it took place in the United States. This journey went far beyond the story of these five men and their families. It was a journey of discovery into the very real impact that the US-Israel relations and the conflict in Palestine has on some of America’s finest communities: The Arab-American community, the Muslim-American community, and, more than anything, the Palestinian-American community. Along the way, I was able to see Islamophobia in all of its ugliness; found myself thinking and re-evaluating Hamas, discussing the role of NGOs and non-profits who, like the HLF, operate in the West Bank and Gaza (including Christian organizations such as World Vision, which Israel seems to have targeted); and looking at the role that the pro-Israeli groups like the Anti-Defamation League play and finally how media reports on cases where terrorism is involved. I had gone into the American prison system, stood in line with families waiting to see loved ones who are incarcerated, and discovered the deep dark secrets of the system, like the CMUs—the Communication Management Units—where Muslim terrorists communications are managed. The story of Shukri Abu-Baker and the HLF-5 was just the tip of a very large and disturbing iceberg.

THE HLF-5

Ghassan Elashi

I have been in prison since April 16, 2007, Ghassan Elashi wrote to me early in 2016.

First he was placed in solitary confinement, in the Special Housing Unit (SHU) at the detention center in Seagoville, Texas, for six months. Next he was transported via bus to the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City. After only a few days there, he was flown by a special US Marshal-operated airplane to Atlanta, Georgia, where he remained for about ten months at a medium security facility called USP Atlanta. Then, in August 2008, Ghassan was flown back to Oklahoma City Prison and bused to Seagoville again, where he would remain until the second HLF trial ended in April 2010. By the time the trial ended, he had been in prison for three years already.

After the trial, he was taken to the Communication Management Unit (CMU) in Marion, Illinois. After seven years there, Ghassan was transferred to Coleman, Florida, for about a year and then to McCreary, a high-security federal prison for male inmates in Kentucky. I applied to visit at each of these facilities. After years of denials, I was finally approved to visit him at McCreary. At the time, Ghassan was entering the ninth year of a sixty-five year sentence. He was sixty-three years old.

Three days before I left San Diego, I received an email from Ghassan saying the penitentiary had removed me from his approved visitors list.

Ghassan’s father was Medhat Abdul Ghani Elashi. He was born in Palestine in the ancient port city of Gaza in 1923. Coincidentally, this was the same year my father was born, also in Palestine, in the northern port city of Haifa. My father joined the armed Jewish Zionist militia while still in high school. Ghassan’s father graduated from Beir-Zeit University and then worked for the Palestine Bank.

Although our fathers never met, their fates were linked. When the Jewish militia became the Israeli Army in 1948, my father became a career officer. The ethnic cleansing conducted in 1948 by Jewish-Zionist forces in Palestine that turned Ghassan’s father and his family into refugees was a result of the new state of Israel to which my father and his generation of Zionist colonizers dedicated their lives.

Fadwa Hashim Elafrangi, Ghassan’s mother, was born in Palestine in the port city of Yaffa in 1932. Her parents had moved to Yaffa from Gaza a few years before she was born. In 1948, she fled Yaffa, along with her entire family and thousands of others, to escape the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. They sailed south back to Gaza with only a few belongings, expecting to return to Yaffa soon. But very quickly Israel drew a political boundary around Gaza and a few other cities surrounding it. The area quickly became known as the Gaza Strip. As more and more refugees fled their homes, the newly created Strip became one of the largest Palestinian refugee communities in the world. As part of an agreement between Israel and Egypt, the Gaza Strip was governed by Egypt.

In 1952, Medhat and Fadwa were married. Their son Ghassan was born in Palestine on December 19, 1953, in A’daraj, a suburb of Gaza City.

In 1956, when Ghassan was three years old, Medhat was hired by Riyadh Bank in Saudi Arabia. At first, he shared an apartment with other Palestinian expatriates, but in 1958 his family left Gaza for Saudi Arabia as well. By that point Ghassan had been joined by two younger brothers and a sister.

Ghassan’s father was determined to give his children the best education he could. After Ghassan completed first grade in a private school in Saudi Arabia, he and his younger brother Bayan were sent to boarding school in Egypt for a year, then returned to Gaza to their grandfather’s house to stay until 1967, when Ghassan was nearly fourteen.

Back in Gaza, Ghassan attended Salahudin Elementary School and then Al-Yarmouk Middle School. The former is named after the revered Muslim leader who in the twelfth century liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders, and the latter after the battle of Yarmouk, a major battle that took place in the year 636 C.E. between the armies of the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim Arab forces east of the Sea of Galilee. The result of the battle was a total Muslim victory, which ended Byzantine rule in Syria. The Battle of Yarmouk is regarded as one of the most decisive battles in military history, and it marked the first great wave of Islamic conquests after the death of Muhammad, heralding the rapid advance of Islam into the Levant.

Young Ghassan

Ghassan himself describes these years spent with his grandparents as joyful. His grandfather’s house, he says, was built in the Arabic style, spacious with an open area in the middle and rooms surrounding the open area.

The house sat at the edge of a ten-acre orange grove and in the summer the orange blossom fragrance, which spreads throughout the coast of Palestine, would fill the house. In the backyard Ghassan’s grandfather cultivated roses in various bright colors and jasmine and gardenia, olive trees and grapevines and of course the ubiquitous lemon tree, which seems an inseparable part of every Palestinian home.

Ghassan spent his summers picking wild cherry tomatoes, dill, and green chili pepper, which grew wild all over the ground in the orange grove, right under the trees. Ghassan would bring salt from the house, and using a clay bowl he would mix these ingredients to make a dip for the fresh pita bread that his grandmother baked.

During cold winter nights, Ghassan and his younger brother Bayan would sit with a farm hand named Alarabi, who worked for their grandfather, listening to ancient Arab fables or stories about the history of Palestine. To warm the room, Alarabi put hot cinders from burning orange tree trimmings in a metal container. Even the mattresses the boys sat on were stuffed with dried leaves from the same trees.

Ghassan vividly remembers standing with Alarabi on the roof of his grandfather’s house one dark night, enjoying the soft sea breeze and the fragrance of orange blossom. Alarabi was smoking a cigarette.

Looking toward the sea Ghassan could see the endless sand dunes that are typical of the southern coast of Palestine. At one point barbed wire cut through the dunes.

"Don’t ever try to cross this barbed wire, or the Yahud will shoot you. Ghassan had been warned. And indeed Israeli soldiers were under orders to shoot Palestinian infiltrators" on sight. Ghassan was not even allowed to see what life was like for his countrymen inside occupied Palestine.

The lights of Jewish cities and towns shone beyond the boundaries of the Gaza Strip. Why are the Arab nations unable to liberate Palestine? Ghassan wondered aloud.

Alarabi inhaled smoke, then blew it slowly out through his nose and mouth. He put his hand on Ghassan’s head.

As long as America is helping Israel we will never win.

Ghassan later wrote to me, I didn’t know anything about America [then] except that it was far away.

As a result of the Suez Campaign, a joint Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt that took place in October of 1956, Israel had come to occupy the entire Sinai Peninsula, including the west bank of the Suez Canal and the Gaza Strip. At that time, my own father was already a colonel in the Israeli army. After the Suez Campaign, he was appointed military governor of Gaza. The occupation lasted about six months before, under American pressure, Israel returned the occupied territories to Egypt, including the Gaza Strip.

On the 7th and 14th of March each year, refugees in the Gaza Strip commemorated the Israeli forces’ 1957 withdrawal. Schools were closed, and thousands of people marched through Omar Almukhtar Street, the main street in Gaza. Palestinian flags were raised and people chanted slogans calling for the liberation of Palestine from the Zionist occupiers.

The march terminated at Aljundi Almajhool Square. At the center of this square stands a white statue of a soldier pointing his hand and finger northeast toward occupied Palestine. On it there is an inscription: We Shall Return.

The statue of the Anonymous Soldier, Gaza City

"I recall marching with the crowd and growing aware of the Nakba," Ghassan wrote to me. By the mid-1960s, when he was old enough to truly understand, the occupation of Palestine and the existence of the state of Israel had been a reality for close to twenty years.

In 1965, the education board in Gaza, which as mentioned earlier was under Egyptian control, introduced a new curriculum that included the history and geography of Palestine. The history covered a period that began prior to the introduction of Islam and all the way to current times. For the first time, Ghassan was taught about the Balfour Declaration, the British commitment to establish a national home for the Jewish people in what was then Palestine, and the history of encouraging Jewish people to immigrate and colonize the area.

In June of 1967, Ghassan and his brothers, Bayan and Basman, left for Saudi Arabia, intending to spend summer vacation with their parents. Since there is no airport in Gaza the three boys took a cab to Cairo. It was a grueling ride that took more than ten hours in temperatures that exceeded one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, with no air conditioning.

When they reached the Suez Canal, the passengers had to get out of the car and wait for a raft that would take them across the canal. People, cars, and buses, along with camels and other livestock, all disembarked before the three brothers could board the raft that slowly drifted back toward mainland Egypt. Once they had crossed, they got back in the taxi and continued to Cairo. The main roads were crowded with military vehicles taking troops and equipment,