The Last Straw
It’s Time to Dismantle the Apparatus Terrorizing American Jews
The terrorizing of Jews attending a real estate discussion at New York City’s Park East Synagogue last week must be the last straw. Every few weeks, there’s another incident. Another synagogue surrounded by protesters chanting “we need to make them scared.” Another Jewish worshipper put in a chokehold. Another commercial event forced to cancel because organized mobs showed up to intimidate attendees. Another neighborhood placed under siege while elementary schools lock their doors early.
And every time, the response follows the same script: politicians condemn it, community leaders call it unacceptable, a few arrests are made for disorderly conduct, and then — nothing. The organization that planned it moves on to the next event.
No more. It’s time that we took action to ensure that the organization that was responsible for organizing the terror campaign is bankrupted and dismantled. Here I don’t simply mean the local organization that claimed credit -PAL-Awada NY/NJ, but the national organization, as well as associated organizations and funders that enabled the terror campaign. We need to stop pretending these are isolated incidents. They are not. They are part of a coordinated national campaign. What they are doing is illegal and it is long past time to use the laws on the books to end their campaign of terror.
Let’s Look at the Facts
Since late 2024, a group called the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation Al-Awda — known as PAL-Awda NY/NJ — has organized a sustained campaign of escalating intimidation against Jewish Americans in New York and New Jersey.
This is not a loose collection of angry protesters. PAL-Awda is the New York and New Jersey chapter of Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition — a formally structured national organization with a Coordinating Committee, an Executive Committee, mandatory financial reporting from chapters to national headquarters, and IRS registration as a tax-exempt nonprofit. It has bylaws. It has elected leadership. It has a strategic plan — and that plan is documented in its own words.
At a January 2025 public teach-in hosted at the People’s Forum in Manhattan, PAL-Awda described its “Stolen Land” campaign and laid out, on the record, its approach: a “dual pronged strategy to expose and stop these sales through legal challenges and confrontation in the streets, including future pre-emptive strategies.” Their campaign website states plainly that “we take various avenues to try and shut these events down.” The “sales” in question are Israeli real estate expositions — lawful commercial events, held on American soil, attended by American citizens.
That is their strategy in their own words: not just protest, not just legal filings, but deliberate physical confrontation in the streets, with explicitly pre-planned future escalation. And the events that followed show exactly what “confrontation in the streets” means in practice.
West Orange, New Jersey — November 2024. Protesters organized by PAL-Awda and affiliated groups descended on Congregation Ohr Torah. They had previously published the private home address of the event organizer to maximize intimidation. When the event was forced to relocate to the synagogue, the crowd followed — broke through police lines, stormed the property, and one protester placed a Jewish congregant in a chokehold for over 20 seconds while police ordered the crowd to disperse. Another pointed at a Jewish attendee and shouted, “The Jew’s here.” A Torah memorial service was drowned out with vuvuzelas. Congregants were physically tackled.
The Department of Justice filed a civil complaint. While that’s a good step, it only named a handful of individual defendants at one incident in one state. That is not enough.
Boro Park, Brooklyn — February 2025. PAL-Awda promoted the event using the phrase “Flood Boro Park” — a deliberate echo of Hamas’s own name for the October 7 massacre. Punches were thrown. A 61-year-old man was punched by a 42-year-old assailant. NYPD had to physically separate brawling groups. The U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the conduct “clearly designed to intimidate and harass Jews.”
Park East Synagogue, Manhattan — November 2025 and again in May 2026. Roughly 100 demonstrators surrounded the synagogue from two directions simultaneously, chanting “Death to the IDF,” “We need to make them scared,” and “Resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out.” Demonstrators formed Hamas targeting symbols with their hands. A Hezbollah flag was visible in the crowd. Scuffles broke out with police. The New York City Council was forced to pass legislation requiring the NYPD to formulate crowd-control plans specifically for protests at houses of worship — a remarkable acknowledgment that this has become a recurring threat.
Kingsway Jewish Center, Brooklyn — November 2024. Over 200 protesters gathered outside. Eight arrests. A daycare and two elementary schools closed early.
Each of these events was organized. Each was coordinated. Each was part of an explicit, stated strategy to use fear and physical confrontation to stop Jewish Americans from exercising their legal rights — to worship, to attend a real estate exposition, to participate in the commercial life of their own neighborhoods. And in doing so they are in violation of numerous Federal laws. Laws that can and must be used to end this reign of terror and intimidation.
The Legal Tools Exist for the Federal Government to Act.
Here is what the law provides.
18 U.S.C. § 245 makes it a federal crime to use force or threat of force to intimidate someone because of their religion in connection with a commercial transaction or place of public accommodation. Every one of these events is a potential violation.
18 U.S.C. § 247 prohibits obstruction of religious worship through force or threat. Storming a synagogue while a memorial service is in progress — physically assaulting worshippers on religious property is illegal.
The Hobbs Act (18 U.S.C. § 1951) prohibits interference with interstate commerce through threats and coercion. PAL-Awda has publicly boasted of forcing the cancellation of multiple real estate events. It includes people crossing state lines to engage in the campaign of intimidation. That is not protected speech. That is interference in legal commerce.
And then there is RICO. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was designed to address exactly this kind of situation: a formally structured organization, operating across state lines, conducting a pattern of predicate criminal acts through an enterprise whose own bylaws require the coordination of exactly that conduct. Al-Awda’s national leadership sits in Florida. Its chapters operate in New York and New Jersey. Money flows between them with mandatory national oversight. The Coordinating Committee directs chapter activities. This is the definition of an interstate criminal enterprise.
The DOJ has prosecuted street gangs, corrupt police units, and white-collar fraud schemes under RICO. There is no principled reason why a formally structured organization that coordinates physical violence against religious minorities across state lines should be treated differently.
The Terrorist Connection We Cannot Ignore
There is one more dimension to this that should also be investigated.
Al-Awda’s national leadership has documented ties to Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network — which the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated in October 2024 as a terrorist entity and described as “a sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)” — itself a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.
Samidoun’s coordinator, Khaled Barakat, is a U.S.-designated Specially Designated National who is also a member of Al-Awda’s coalition. His wife, Charlotte Kates, Samidoun’s International Coordinator, is listed on Al-Awda’s National Board. In 2024, Kates traveled to Iran to accept an award alongside the leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad — another designated terrorist organization.
Germany has banned Samidoun. Canada has designated it a terrorist entity. Belgium has revoked its leaders’ refugee status. The Netherlands barred its coordinator from entering the country.
And yet Al-Awda — whose national leadership is interlocked with this designated terrorist network — continues to operate as a tax-exempt American nonprofit, organizing mobs to terrorize Jewish Americans in their synagogues and neighborhoods.
The FBI’s counterterrorism division should be asking hard questions about what money, if any, has flowed between this network and its designated foreign terrorist affiliates. The DOJ’s FARA unit should be determining whether any Al-Awda officials are acting as unregistered foreign agents. And the IRS should be asking whether a 501(c)(3) that coordinates criminal intimidation campaigns and maintains leadership ties to a U.S.-designated terrorist entity deserves its tax-exempt status.
The Pattern Proves the Point
After the West Orange incident, the DOJ said it was the first time the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act had ever been applied to protect a house of worship. The Assistant Attorney General said prior administrations had failed to apply the law evenly. That’s a good start, but it must only be a start.
Because what the evidence shows is that these are not a series of unrelated actions, but they are coordinated across multiple cities and states. It is a consciously coordinated campaign that has a name, a structure, a strategy, and a leadership. It has a track record of boasting about the events it has forced to cancel and the communities it has terrorized
This is not speech protected by the First Amendment. It does not protect chokeholds. It does not protect storming synagogues. It does not protect a declared strategy of using physical confrontation to suppress the lawful commercial and religious activities of an ethnic and religious minority. The Supreme Court drew that line clearly in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware — violence and true threats fall outside constitutional protection, no matter what political cause surrounds them.
Jewish Americans are entitled to attend their synagogues, participate in their communities, and conduct their legal business without being physically assaulted by organized mobs. The legal tools exist to protect them — not just at one synagogue in New Jersey, but nationally, and against the organization that is coordinating these attacks.
It is time that we require that the Federal government enforce the laws that were written to protect Americans- no matter, race, religion, creed, or cause – from exactly these types of action. If you agree please make sure that all relevant organizations and agencies join us in demanding that this action be taken. Sooner rather than later.