Is the UN legitimizing a Hamas affiliate?

Nadav Shragai

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The Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Return Centre, active in London since 1996, was recently named an observer NGO in the U.N. despite being classified in Israel as unlawful • The group seeks Palestinian “right of return” as a means of destroying Israel.

The Palestinian Return Centre, one of the more venomous and effective anti-Israel propaganda centers in London, has managed to fly under Israel’s public diplomacy radar for some years. It has also been absent from the global discourse surrounding the anti-Israel boycott movement and the delegitimization of Israel. But a few days ago, the U.N. Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations put an end to the PRC’s relative anonymity in Israel by granting it consultative status. This grants international legitimacy to the PRC, which Israel has identified for years with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. The decision is not final, though; it is still pending the approval of higher ranking U.N. officials.

Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Ron Prosor tried to demonstrate how outrageous this decision was when he remarked “According to this script, one day we may find Hezbollah sitting at the Security Council and ISIS voting at the Human Rights Council. This is the peak season for the UN’s Theater of the Absurd.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry officials also expressed dismay. But the PRC’s story is somewhat more complex, particularly since it has been around for a while.

The Palestinian Return Centre, active in London since 1996, has all the necessary components to rouse the Israeli public diplomacy mechanism. Over the last two weeks, following the controversy over remarks by Orange CEO Stéphane Richard, this mechanism has gone into high gear. PRC harbors a lot of hatred toward the Zionist enterprise and toward the State of Israel. It promotes complete delegitimization of Israel as a Jewish state. Its campaigns on campuses and in other public institutions promote the Palestinian “right of return.” It maintains an active partnership with other groups engaged in delegitimizing Israel. In the not so distant past, the PRC also supported the path of jihad.

To be clear, the PRC’s opposition is not to any particular Israeli government policy but to the existence of Israel itself. It rejected the Oslo Accords, the generous Geneva initiative and even the far-reaching proposals made by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert with the same passionate intensity with which it regards the State of Israel in the Netanyahu era. Like several of its fellow boycott-promoting organizations, the PRC refuses to accept the existence of a Jewish state, and hopes to see it wiped off the map.

The PRC has two main characteristics. One is a broad and deep emphasis on fulfilling the Palestinian “right of return” inside the borders of tiny Israel. The other, as stated above, is an affiliation with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood that goes back many years. Five years ago, Israel outlawed the PRC on the grounds that it was part of the Hamas movement. Then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak signed an order stating that the PRC served as “coordinating and organizational arm of the Hamas movement in Europe,” according to a statement by Shin Bet officials.

That statement also has to do with the mini-drama that took place this week within Hamas when the UN granted the PRC consultative status. That mini-drama illustrates mainly how sensitive Hamas is to any report about itself, since the PRC’s new status has not even been approved yet. The mini-drama began several days ago, when Hamas’ Arabic and English media outlets reported that Ismail Haniyeh, the deputy director of Hamas’ political bureau, had telephoned Majed al-Zeer, the director general of the PRC, to congratulate him on the occasion of the PRC’s acceptance as a consultative member of a UN committee. In view of the PRC’s past close ties with Hamas, the latter’s response was odd: Hamas officials denied that any such conversation had ever taken place.

Researchers at the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, who documented this “rashomon,” or story with opposing interpretations, found that following the PRC’s denial, Haniyeh’s spokesman did some quick damage control by asking journalists not to mention the congratulatory telephone call (as reported by The Associated Press).

Annual conventions all over Europe

The link between the PRC and Hamas — certainly the ideological one that the PRC now denies — was not something that it had tried to conceal some years ago. A comprehensive report of the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, compiled four years ago and recently reissued, exposes the PRC as an extreme anti-Israel propaganda group that works with other groups to promote BDS measures against Israel. According to the report, the PRC has accused Israel for years of committing war crimes, practicing apartheid and engaging in ethnic cleansing, genocide and massacres.

At the center of the PRC’s activity in Europe are annual Palestinian conferences held in cities such as Berlin, London, Vienna, Rotterdam, Copenhagen and Milan. Activists and delegations from various countries in Europe attend these conferences, as do members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sheikh Raed Salah, the head of the Islamic Movement’s branch in northern Israel, “represented” Israel at the conference in 2008, and Amir Makhoul, who was convicted of spying on Hezbollah’s behalf, did so in 2010.

Hamas activists, representatives of foundations providing funding for Hamas in Europe, and even representatives of Hamas in Gaza have attended the conferences on occasion. Ismail Haniyeh addressed three of the gatherings in conference calls streamed onto a large screen. The agenda and ideological messages of these conferences partially match those of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. The message of the “right of return” of all the Palestinian refugees to Israel receives is regarded as sacred and inviolable. Many of the speakers at these conferences rule out, again and again, the State of Israel’s right to exist, criticize the peace process and send well-wishes to jihad fighters.

At the PRC’s constitutive conference, which took place more than a decade ago, Director General Majed al-Zeer said that the Palestinians must regain “their full rights,” and that to do so they were ready to continue to “sacrifice” and engage in “resistance.” Al-Zeer spoke about the hearts of the Palestinians who cleaved to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nablus, Jaffa, Haifa, the Carmel mountains and the plains of Jenin. He also said: “We have rights and [we are] the owners of the land. They [the Israelis] know it is only a question of time, and time is running out. … Thus they can be seen chasing after solutions which might lengthen the life of their state by a few years.”

“Exploit the trend in Israel”

The PRC’s third conference, which took place in Vienna in May 2005, reveals a great deal about the methods used by organizations that advocate BDS and the delegitimization of Israel — methods that are now beginning to bear fruit. Several workshops were held during the conference. The discussions centered around ways to inculcate the concept of the Palestinian right of return and undermine Israel’s legitimacy among European target audiences. The Meir Amit Center report quotes several ideas that were discussed and adopted during one of the workshops. It appears that the writing was on the wall:

“Advantage should be taken of the current shift in public opinion in Europe in every matter concerning the Palestinian cause and the occupation project. Efforts about the fundamentals of the Palestinian cause and the dimension of the historical deprivation of the Palestinian people should be increased. It should not only turn the spotlight on the details of the deeds of the regime of the occupation and its military forces.

“What we should exploit is the trend within the Israeli public for ongoing reevaluation, including publications made by new historians and their critical remarks in the [Israeli] media, as well as the positions and unprecedented admissions resulting from them. That should be done to fundamentally redefine the Palestinian cause in the collective European consciousness, and thus turn a spotlight onto the racist, aggressive nature of the Zionist enterprise. That obliges us to draw attention to the fact that the Zionist movement established a racist state on Palestinian land. [This state] is based on stolen lands, the dispersion of the Palestinian people and a policy of expansionism.

“The vital role of the Arab-Muslim communities in Europe should be exploited for political backing. … The growing political and social weight of those communities should be exploited for the sake of the just Palestinian cause.”

Indeed, in a later conference of the PRC, Majed al-Zeer said: “Sixty years — but we are closer to the return. Ladies and gentlemen, it is only a matter of time before the dispersion returns to the Beit Shean plain, the alleys of the old city of Acre and the foothills of Mount Carmel. We came here to come closer to the places our hearts desire: Jerusalem, which sparkles before our eyes, to Jaffa, whose golden beach we long for, to Lod, to Ramla, to Majdal [i.e., Ashkelon], to the Galilee, to glorious Nazareth, to lofty Safed.”

The PRC was also quick to carry out — exactly as described in one of the workshop ideas quoted in this article — the recommendation to exploit “the trend within the Israeli public for ongoing reevaluation … to fundamentally redefine the Palestinian cause in the collective European consciousness.” At one PRC conference, American anti-Israel professor Norman Finkelstein, who once visited Lebanon as a guest of Hezbollah, stood beside Archbishop Hilarion Capucci, who was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment in 1979 for using his diplomatic status to smuggle arms from Lebanon to the Palestine Liberation Army, and Palestinian-Canadian lawyer Diana Buttu.

Over the years the PRC’s organ, Return Review, which is published in Arabic and in English (its Arabic title is Al-Awda), has published exhortations urging Israel’s destruction, anti-Israel incitement and support of terrorism. Return Review has published interviews with Hamas leaders, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Khaled Mashaal. In May 2004 it ran an article in Arabic stating that “the imperialistic Zionist project failed completely” and that Israel was completely dependent on external political and economic factors. “Therefore,” the article stated, “the importance of the resistance [i.e., terrorism] of the Palestinian people within [inside the territory of the State of Israel] is clear, despite the many losses it will suffer. The resistance will stab the [Zionist] entity in the liver and paralyze its capabilities from within.”

An article published in the June 2006 issue stated: “There is one concern, one enemy, and one land — a unity that cannot be divided. From its river [the Jordan River] to its sea [the Mediterranean Sea]. It cannot be divided, from Rosh Hanikra [the most northern point of Israel] to Umm al-Rashrash [i.e., Eilat, the southernmost point of Israel]. It will not be divided by any initiative or plan or map brought from beyond the ocean.”

Hamas activists work openly

The PRC’s past and current leadership leaves no room for doubt as to its stance. Its members received broad exposure at the first World Conference against Racism that was held in Durban, South Africa in the summer of 2001. A number of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist nongovernmental organizations attended that notorious conference. They turned the gathering into a smear campaign against the State of Israel, and at the end, called for the complete isolation of Israel as an apartheid state, together with the imposition of sanctions and boycotts.

Zaher al-Birawi, chairman of the PRC’s board of trustees, served between 2001 and 2003 as the chairman of the Muslim Association of Britain, which is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood there. One of the founders of the MAB was Muhammad Sawalha, a senior Hamas activist in Judea and Samaria who fled to Britain. Al-Birawi, who also headed the Palestinian Forum in Britain, helped organize a party in Manchester to celebrate Hamas’ victory in the Gaza election.

He is also on the board of trustees of a group called Education Aid for Palestine, which was established in 1993 by Issam Youssef, a founder of an organization called Interpal, which is involved in transferring money to Hamas’ “charitable societies,” according to the Meir Amit Center’s report. (Interpal was later outlawed both in Israel and in the United States.) Over the past decade, al-Birawi has been involved in sending convoys known as the “LifeLine convoys” to the Gaza Strip, and also attended the ceremony marking the start of the Mavi Marmara’s voyage to the Gaza coast, a voyage that ended in a violent attack on the Israeli soldiers who boarded the vessel and the killing of ten of the attackers in the clash that ensued.

According to the Meir Amit Center report, the PRC director general attended Jerusalem Day events in London, sponsored by the Iranian regime. He also attended the International Arab Congress for the Right of Return in Damascus in 2008, where he sat on the stage beside Hamas political chief Khaled Mashaal, among others. Al-Zeer was cited in the report as believing that the right of return was a sure way to destroy Israel.

Sheikh Majdi Muhammad Hassan Akeel, a member of the PRC’s board of trustees and a Hamas activist (the Shin Bet’s website also lists him as a Hamas operative), was born in Gaza, and has been active in Interpal in the past.

Another activist is Dr. Arafat Madi Shukri, the PRC’s executive director. He is also the chairman of the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza, an umbrella organization that dispatches flotillas to the Gaza Strip. Dr. Shukri also participated in planning the Mavi Marmara’s voyage, together with the Turkish NGO known as IHH, and admitted to arranging meetings between campaign activists and representatives of Hamas.

Dr. Daud Abdullah (born David Miles on the Caribbean island of Grenada; he converted to Islam in 1975) is a former high-ranking member of the PRC. He served as an assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, which boycotted International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Abdullah signed the Istanbul Declaration in support of Hamas’ “jihad and resistance” — meaning terrorism against Israel. He later claimed that he had attended the conference on his own and not as a representative of any group. When his attendance at the conference in Istanbul became known, the British government demanded that he resign the chairmanship of the MCB. On his refusal to resign, the British secretary of state ordered the termination of the MCB’s funding.

The link between the PRC and the ideology of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood — and, sometimes, their practical stances as well — is proven by the many documents provided by the Meir Amit Center. The Jewish and Israeli coalition that is closing ranks against the BDS movement and the delegitimization of Israel will certainly make use of them. While it may be late in the game, it is not too late to stop the PRC from gaining status in the U.N

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