Meet Kamala’s Palestinian Best Friend Who Changed Her Mind on Israel

“I say this as someone who’s known her since 1997: She’s trying,” Hala Hijazi assured a panel at an anti-Israel DNC event that once she was president, Kamala would crack down on Israel.

Hijazi, a Jordanian immigrant who has roots in Gaza, is close to Kamala and they both came up through the ranks together. The Muslim official and fundraiser had worked as a special assistant to former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown whom she described as a “mentor”.

Hala Hijazi was there for all of Kamala’s races, raising money for her Senate campaign, promoting an event co-hosted by Willie Brown, and promising that one day Kamala would be in the White House. And she can be seen posing in 2004 at the Bimbo’s club with Kamala, who had just begun her political career as San Francisco’s DA, and Obama, running for Senate.

After obtaining American citizenship in 1994, the Muslim immigrant quickly began climbing the political ladder, working for Willie Brown, becoming a ‘human rights’ commissioner, and getting to know everyone in Democratic politics. Hijazi’s social media feed is decorated with photos of her posing with Bill Clinton, Hillary, Pelosi, the Obamas, and above all else, Kamala.

“I’ve raised over $12 million for the Democratic Party,” Hijazi boasted at the anti-Israel panel.

Along the way, Hijazi visited Saudi Arabia by invitation of the royal family, advocated for the Iran Deal, which allowed the Islamic terrorist state to develop its ballistic missile and nuclear program, and condemned efforts to stop Muslim terrorists from coming to America.

And repeatedly denounced the Jewish State. A 2012 Free Beacon article by Adam Kredo profiled Hijazi as an “Obama bundler”, while noting her frequent attacks on Israel.

In old letters to the editor in 2009 when Hamas first attempted to use tunnels to invade Israel, Hijazi, who described herself as a “Muslim Palestinian-American”, claimed that the blockade of Hamas lacked “any moral justification and humanity” and denounced Israel for “destroying places of worship and education.” She had claimed elsewhere that for the Israeli government, “one death of an Israeli soldier equals a thousand Palestinian children.”

After the Hamas massacres of Oct 7, Hijazi relaunched her activism, claiming shortly afterward that 40 members of her family had been killed by Israeli bombing campaigns against Hamas. At the DNC, Hijazi claimed that over 100 members of her family had been killed in the fighting. She provided no further details, but did hold up a photo of a military age man.

A recent report by the Israeli N12 channel revealed that a Hamas official had privately admitted that 80% of the Arab Muslim settlers killed in the Gaza campaign were Hamas members or their families. It’s unknown who Hijazi’s family members are or what their relationship to Hamas may be, but they lived in which Gaza City was a stronghold of Hamas and, if true, the high death toll among her family members would raise the possibility of their links to Islamic terrorist groups.

The Hijazis are a prominent family in Gaza City and their members include Nizar Hijazi: the Hamas appointed mayor. Hijazi is a relatively common name, but a number of Hamas figures, including former commanders Hisham Hijazi, Muwaman Hijazi and Akram Hijazi, shared it.

It’s unknown if any of them are related to Hala Hijazi.

Al Jazeera, the state media arm of Qatar, a sponsor of Hamas, claimed that 141 people from the Hijazi family had died in the fighting. Reports out of Gaza claim that multiple airstrikes hit members of the Hijazi family, not only in Gaza City, but in Rafah and elsewhere. These repeated incidents are unlikely to be a coincidence which raises the distinct possibility that someone close to a presidential candidate is from a Hamas family.

Members of Hala’s family in America engaged in anti-Israel activism including what appears to be her sister who headed a chapter of the Hamas-linked American Muslims for Jerusalem. Hamas terrorists with the last name Hijazi have been fighting Israel going back decades and while it is a common last name, Arab societies are defined by such large interrelated families.

No one in the media was however interested in following up.

Hala Hijazi’s claims quickly made their way to her friend Kamala who took the lead in pulling the Biden-Harris administration away from Israel. In Dubai, Kamala broke with the initial pro-Israel position, complaining that “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” and set limits on what Israel could do against Hamas.

Her source for this was Hijazi.

On November 2, Kamala Harris told members of the British press that, “I have a friend, who I talked with recently, who has family in Gaza and has lost a number of the members of her family — innocent civilians.” Politico described this as “Harris has suggested that conversations with friends have influenced her thinking about the war.” Either way it was clear that Hijazi was influencing her friend even in the initial weeks of Israel’s response to the Oct 7 attacks.

Hijazi, who had bragged of becoming “a trusted source” for politicians, was succeeding in moving her old friend of over two decades into the anti-Israel camp.

Halal Hijazi has been reluctant to discuss Islamic terrorism or the actual causes of the war. She claims to be an interfaith activist and a “moderate”, but she can also be found moderating an event at the Islamist Zaytuna College in 2019 with Hamza Yusuf and Salam Al-Marayati.

Yusuf, a founder of Zaytuna, had described Judaism as a “most racist religion” and at a cop-killer benefit two days before 9/11 warned that “this country is facing a very terrible fate.”

“I am a citizen of this country not by choice but by birth. I reside in this country not by choice but by conviction in attempting to spread the message of Islam in this country. I became Muslim in part because I did not believe the false gods of this society, whether we call them Jesus or democracy or the Bill of Rights,” Yusuf had admitted.

Salam Al-Marayati had defended Hamas and Hezbollah, and individual terrorists and claimed that Israel was behind 9/11. Among the terrorist attacks he defended was the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine Barracks which killed over 200 American military members.

Marayati had analogized Islamic terrorists to “American freedom fighters hundreds of years ago [who] were also regarded as terrorists by the British.”

Other Zaytuna College faculty include Hatem Bazian, a founder of the anti-Israel campus movement, who targeted Jews during his career, spewed antisemitic hate, described Jewish history as imaginary, and fundraised for a Hamas-linked charity. Bazian had co-founded Students for Justice in Palestine whose chapters have celebrated the Oct 7 attacks.

At the anti-Israel DNC panel, Hijazi claimed that, “I’m a long time Democrat, moderate Democrat”, but there was nothing moderate about her ties to Zaytuna and Yusuf.

Hala Hijazi joined a podcast with Hamza Yusuf to discuss “The Hundred Years War on Palestine”. Yusuf described Hijazi as a “dear friend and her father was a dear friend and they’re from Gaza”.

“She’s been just advocating for decades now, at least a few decades, and has worked in the Democratic Party in particular. But I think she really understands the ins and outs of how this system works,” Yusuf said.

Hijazi described herself as being part of a family that had “been in Gaza for generations”, claimed that she had “been doing this work for 25 years” and laid out her philosophy that America as “this country is built on two numbers, number of votes and numbers of dollars raised.”

Hijazi’s career certainly appears to have been built on that cynical premise.

“It’s a critical time in our country’s history to show our power,” Hijazi urged and then laid out a plan to build up Muslim power over Americans.

The Obama and Biden bundler advised Muslims to start at the bottom, focus on school board races “because they end up running for mayor, assembly and state senate.”

Muslim parents should consider getting “our little children to start thinking about being a journalist or working for the government” to create a pipeline for anti-Israel PR.

Hijazi strategically told Muslims to start befriending non-Muslims, blacks and Latinos to cultivate allies because “this is where we are at a disadvantage where the other folks, that’s what they’re doing. This is where we are at a disadvantage, where the other folks that’s what they’re doing. They’re everywhere. And they look like they’re the hospitable ones and the righteous ones.”

Who are the “other folks”? Presumably the Jews.

In more strategic benevolence, Hijazi told Muslims to start doing “philanthropy”. Research had shown, she claimed, that the Jewish and Muslim communities “were the most giving and generous communities in this country. And the problem with us is that we’re mostly giving it to Muslims organizations and mosques. And to Muslim causes. But we also need to start showing our power and our strength by giving money also elsewhere so that we can cultivate those relationships. And again, all this is political, like again, everything we’re doing is political.”

Charity was the most political of all.

“We need to start doing more with the American Red Cross or the American Cancer Society. You guys say, well that’s not politics, but it is. This is where a lot of these major sponsors, fundraisers and donors to buildings and to City Hall and to politicians are also the chairs of these organizations.”

This may shed some light on why Hijazi is on the board of directors of the American Red Cross in Northern California.

Building political power, Hijazi explained, was about building relationships that could suppress criticism of the Hamas mobs.

“In San Francisco, we have regular meetings with the District Attorney’s office, we have regular meetings with the police chief, we have regular meetings with the FBI, we have regular meetings with the Attorney General. So when someone like me sees a crazy post by an elected official, I can call them on their cell phone and say, ‘Hey, do you understand that either you or your staff just tweeted something racist, Islamophobic’, and calling our protesters pro-Hamas protesters is an abomination to anything democratic.”

Denouncing the Hamas mobs in the streets was an example of the kind of thing that Hijazi and her allies could get politicians to suppress.

“Whether it started on October 7 or starting tomorrow, you guys need to start now,” she urged Muslims.

“They,” she said, meaning the Jews, “they have an ADL, and AIPAC and JCRC”.

Muslims needed to build up their power over American cultural and political life.

But Hala Hijazi’s closeness to Kamala Harris raises questions not only for Jews but for all Americans. The Muslim bundler had fumed over the Trump administration’s efforts to keep Muslim terrorists out of America, and furiously denounced a minority of patriotic Democrats who had voted for the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act that required vetting Syrians and Iraqis for terror ties before allowing them to penetrate the United States of America.

What sort of influence would Hijazi’s friend exercise over a Kamala Harris administration? And how many Americans and Jews will die because of it just as they are dying now in Israel?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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