As a politically active teenager in Arizona, Abraham Hamadeh had strong-held convictions when it came to Israel. The son of Syrian immigrants was a frequent poster on blogs devoted to the libertarian political maverick Ron Paul, and his posts include outlandish, yet clearly serious, claims against the Jewish state his relatives died fighting.
An archive of posts viewed by The Daily Wire reveal that a young Hamadeh in 2007 stated that “Israeli Mossad” was responsible for taking down New York City’s Twin Towers, and that a “missile hit the Pentagon.” He also made comments criticizing Israel for responding with force to terrorist attacks, and justified their assaults on Israeli citizens — making arguments eerily similar to those made by today’s radical anti-Israel Left.
In fact, in 2009 he criticized Israel’s last invasion of Gaza, stating: “Israel may have killed 200 Hamash [sic] fighters, but they just created 20,000 more. Sad…” He also defended Hezbollah, another designated terrorist group, in its war against Israel, saying attacks were justified because of Israel’s actions in “Palestine.”
“Israel is demolioshing homes in palestine they brought beirtu to there knees, and hezbollah fought back [sic throughout],” Hamadeh wrote in January 2007. “israel want hezbollah out because there scared shitless of them.”
In a wide-ranging interview with The Daily Wire, the now-32-year-old Republican congressional candidate acknowledged the posts’ authenticity, but said they couldn’t be a further representation of his current worldview. He openly declares that Israel has “no bigger ally” than him, and calls for the annihilation of terrorist groups that aim to harm it.
So what happened?
Simply put, Hamadeh says he grew up and started to “understand how the world actually works.”
The first “inflection point” on Israel for Hamadeh, he explained, was the so-called “Arab Spring” that began in 2010. Syria, where both his parents immigrated from, erupted in civil war, and Israel emerged as the “good neighbor.”
“My family is Syrian, and I remember that during the Syrian civil war, that Israel was actually having people who were injured come into the hospitals in Israel,” Hamadeh recalled. “So all this humanitarian aid was actually being done by the Israelis, and not the others in the Arab World.”
“That was the first instance of me looking at the truth, and having my eyes opened,” he said. “It just dismantles that whole narrative of Israel being this problem in the Middle East, when they’re actually being good neighbors.”
Hamadeh at the time was a political science student at Arizona State University, and as a law student at the University of Arizona a few years later in 2014, he decided to take an elective trip to Israel. It turned out to be an experience that confirmed what he took from the Arab Spring — he was welcomed into the country despite a background that led to extra scrutiny from Israeli officials when he arrived.
“I was pulled off to the side for like, two hours, and questioned really intensely,” Hamadeh said, recalling “probing questions” about his parents’ Arab backgrounds and their relationship.
Hamadeh, however, says the tone of the inquiry changed on a dime when the Israelis learned that he was also a cadet in the U.S. Army.
“Their tune really changed when they discovered I was a cadet in the Army,” he said. “It was a common camaraderie. And they profusely apologized and said, ‘This will never happen again.’”
The Israeli population’s respect for military service, in all its forms, was demonstrated to Hamadeh just days later on a tour by an Israeli military commander of the Golan Heights in northern Israel.
Hamadeh has a very real connection to the Golan Heights — his grandfather was killed there in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a Druze man fighting as a member of the Syrian Army against Israel. And as Hamadeh stood on the Israeli side in 2014, listening to the artillery fire back and forth in the Syrian civil war, the Israeli commander was putting in effort to show him where his grandfather likely died — there was no animosity towards Hamadeh due to his family’s history, but rather respect between “military guys,” he recalls.
In the next days, he learned for the first time how pluralistic Israeli society was — he visited a community of Palestinian Christians, a Druze village, and the Muslim Bedouins. And his travel just a few years later exhibited just how rare this is to find in the Middle East.
On a trip to Beirut, Lebanon, for his brother’s destination wedding, Hamadeh was actually barred from entering the country by Lebanese customs officers because he still had the sticker showing his travel to Israel on his passport.
“I get to the customs in Lebanon, and the lady looks at the back of the passport, and says, ‘Come with me,” Hamadeh explains. “I’m like, ‘oh, f**k,’ and then I go into this area and these military customs officials are saying, you know, you’ve been to Israel.”
Israel puts a sticker on passports rather than a stamp to help its visitors avoid situations like this. Hamadeh failed to remove the sticker, and ultimately, he was deported.
“My family is Syrian blood, my brother’s getting married this week, and Israel let me into their country,” he remembers thinking. “How are you not letting me into this country?”
Hamadeh, sensing government ineptitude, took a plane to London, removed the sticker showing his travel to Israel, and flew straight back to Lebanon, where he was granted entry to the country. He got in “Jason Bourne-style,” he says, though they caught him as he left and told him never to return to Lebanon — a promise he says he was happy to make.
The ordeal again showed him the unique nature of Israel.
“Israel, which has every reason to not have me come into its country, they love me,” he said. “And then Lebanon doesn’t have me because I’ve been to Israel. Just so unreasonable.”
Hamadeh’s posts as a high school and college student weren’t just random thoughtless asides — he appears to have been well-read and deeply interested in the Middle East and Israel. He just gravitated towards reading anti-Semites.
Asked on the Ron Paul forum for a book recommendation on Israel, Hamadeh suggested Jimmy Carter’s “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid,” in which the former president accuses the Jewish state not only of apartheid, but also promotes anti-Semitic tropes regarding Jewish control over the media and politicians.
He also defended a Scottish politician, George Galloway, who was expelled from Britain’s Labour Party over his anti-Semitism — and is even too anti-Semitic for Jeremy Corbyn. He told critics of Galloway that they should “research him more.” That research would have turned up meetings with Iraq’s Saddam Hussain in which Galloway praised the dictator’s “strength” and “courage,” and calls for a complete rejection of Israel, which Galloway describes as an “illegal, barbarous, savage state.”
(Galloway was recently reelected in Britain after his two-decade-long political exile on a purely anti-Israel ticket, with his campaign signs fashioned as Palestinian flags.)
Hamadeh’s politics seem to have been driven entirely by his views on Israel. In a post on the 2008 election, he says that Muslims supported Republican George W. Bush in 2000 only because “Al Gores VP was Joe Lieberman, a Zionist supporting you know what.” (Hamadeh in the posts said he also supported Bush.)
Regarding the 2008 election, in which Hamadeh supported Barack Obama over “radical fascist” John McCain, he suggested Obama surround himself with figures known for their anti-Israel views such as Chuck Hagel, who once said that Israel “keeps Palestinians caged up like animals” when discussing the existence of terrorist suicide bombers, and alleges that the “Jewish lobby” controls the State Department.
He said in the post that it’s important for politicians to speak to Muslims “because there [sic] going to be the biggest religion in 2020, and going to beat out the Judiasm [sic] religion in America in 2020.”
“If you think Jews arent [sic] big in america (2%) how come 56% of them are CEO’S,” Hamadeh wrote in a 2007 post.
He also used the forum to raise money to build support for Ron Paul, even buying ad space in a Dearborn, Michigan, paper for his group called, “Arab Americans for Ron Paul.” At the bottom of a pro-Paul ad that, according to the forums, appeared in the Dearborn-based Arab American News in November 2007, there is a disclaimer: “If you would like to comment, email Abraham Hamadeh,” and goes on to list the same email address he used on the forums.
His profile was deleted, along with his social media posts, making a full accounting of his activity on the forum impossible. The posts visible on the forum are only ones that other users replied to.
Now Hamadeh states unequivocally that terrorist hijackers from Saudi Arabia are responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and blames “radical Islam.” He says it’s hard to listen to his past words read back to him, and that he struggles to “get into the brain” of his teenage self that was so active on the forums.
“I don’t really recall a lot of what I was saying,” he said. “I was just getting into politics, and I was a libertarian, anti-war type of guy … clearly my views have dramatically changed.”
Hamadeh says that despite his anti-Israel views, he thinks there’s a major ideological difference between where he was and the current mobs of Hamas defenders that have emerged since the terrorist group’s October 7 massacre of civilians.
“I think I was coming more from a libertarian anti-war perspective,” Hamadeh said. “I think these ones are coming from this total Marxist perspective. And that’s what’s so scary.”
He doesn’t regret his libertarian beliefs, but says he’s strayed from that worldview with experience.
“I can’t speak ill towards Ron Paul — he was kind of like the Bernie Sanders of that time period, he enlightened a lot of people,” he said. “But clearly my foreign policy, my whole worldview has changed. I think I’m much more conservative than libertarian these days. For foreign policy, joining the military really kind of shows you, especially when you serve overseas, you really start to understand how the world actually works.”
His political allies say that Hamadeh is a trusted friend of Israel, and that his change of heart should be an example for other Arab-Americans in the country.
“Throughout my friendship with Abe, he has shown me in words and in actions that he stands tall with the Jewish community,” said Bryan Leib, a political operative who works to fight anti-Semitism and reached out to The Daily Wire unsolicited after hearing about the story from Hamadeh. “I understand there are some old message board posts from Abe when he was a teenager. I am not concerned at all with these posts.”
“Abe has been to Israel and has seen first hand that Israel is not the Apartheid nation that Democrats such as Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib falsely accuse it of being. I think many Arab-Americans can learn from Abe’s lead on this and should spend time building bridges and supporting the Jewish community just like Abe has done his entire life, instead of spreading lies like Tlaib and Omar do.”
Hamadeh was Arizona’s Republican candidate for attorney general in 2022, but he lost by just a few hundred votes. He is now running in a crowded Republican primary for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.