Middle East Cultural and Charitable Society (MECCS)

Two initiatives are listed on Middle East Cultural and Charitable Society’s tax forms — the EI Project, which is the pro-Palestinian media outlet Electronic Intifada, and the Palestine Film Festival, which is carried out by the Chicago Palestine Film Festival and the Boston Palestine Film Festival. ¹

Initiatives

Electronic Intifada

The radical-left anti-Israel publication Electronic Intifada is a “program service” of the Middle East Cultural and Charitable Society. ² The Electronic Intifada produces news and commentary about the Palestinian nationalist cause. ^{3 2}

Tax forms claim the Electronic Intifada is “committed to comprehensive public education” regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the “question of Palestine,” as well as a “needed supplement to mainstream commercial media’s presentation” of the conflict. ⁴

Palestine Film Festival

The Chicago Palestine Film Festival claims to be “the longest running Palestine Film Festival in the world.” On November 2, 2024, the Chicago Palestine Film Festival hosted one of its Palestine Cinema Days on “the somber anniversary of the Balfour Declaration” (the British declaration that it would permit Jewish immigration to the British Mandate of Palestine), in which it screened a movie outside of the official film festival. Palestine Legal co-sponsored the event. ⁵

The Boston Palestine Film Festival was founded in 2007 and its 2024 event took place from October 18th to 27th. ⁶ In 2008, it presented an exhibit entitled “Expressions of Nakba,” commemorating the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence, or what Israel’s detractors call “the Nakba,” meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic. ⁷

The Boston festival website lists Areen Bahour, Michael Maria, Fatima Razzaq, Rania Said, and Nadia Zimo as members of the volunteer executive committee, and Rula Abu-Rajab, Karameh Hawash Kuemmerle, Rasha Srouji, and Matthew Walleser as members of the fundraising committee. ⁷

Leadership

Tax forms list Ali Abunimah as president of the Middle East Cultural and Charitable Society. ⁸ Abunimah is also the executive director and co-founder of Electronic Intifada. He wrote the foreword to a book entitled Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities by Ashley Dawson and Bill V. Mullen, published in 2015. ⁹

Abunimah has a history of virulently anti-Israel posts on Twitter. On March 8, 2024, Abunimah tweeted, “Zionism and Zionists are evil.” ¹⁰ On October 25, 2010, Ali Abunimah tweeted, “Supporting Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.” ¹¹

Secretary Omar Fayez is also a member of the Jerusalem Fund’s Palestine Committee. He is a Chicago-based litigation attorney at Huston, May and Fayez, and a member of the Arab-American Bar Association. ¹²

Nora Barrows-Friedman, an Electronic Intifada staff writer and associate editor, ¹³ is listed as a reporter on tax forms. Treasurer Katherine Hanna is a retired public school teacher and was a co-founder of the Boston Palestine Film Festival. Hanna also volunteers with 1for3.org, a nonprofit involved with a United Nations-run refugee camp in Bethlehem. ¹⁴

Financials

MECCS reported revenue of $586,004 and expenses of $558,719 in 2022. ¹⁵ That year, the group spent $263,306 on “consulting,” amounting to about 45percent of its annual budget ¹⁶ and over $7,000 on “bank fees.” ¹⁷

The group received $10,000 from the Cultures of Resistance Network Foundation in 2022, which donated to several other organizations supportive of Palestinian nationalism, including the Middle East Children’s Alliance, United Palestinian Appeal, and Birzeit University. ¹⁸ MECCS also received $101,000 from the Lannan Foundation in 2023, which was earmarked for Electronic Intifada ¹⁹ and $75,000 from Tides Foundation in 2019. ^{20 21}