Over the past month, caught in the most competitive race of his political career and with his family dynasty hanging in the balance, Rep. Duncan Hunter embraced a campaign strategy that has been viewed as controversial to say the least.

In addition to going after his opponent along traditional political lines in a district that has long been a Republican stronghold, Hunter has opted for a series of attacks labeling his Democratic challenger, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a “national security risk,” citing his Palestinian roots.

Campa-Najjar, who was born in the U.S. to a Palestinian father and Mexican-American mother, has repeatedly rebuked Hunter’s claim pointing to, among other things, federal security clearances he received while working in former President Barack Obama’s White House and Department of Labor.

The candidate has criticized the attacks as a desperate attempt by Hunter to distract from his ongoing legal troubles. Hunter and his wife were indicted in late August on federal charges of fraud and misuse of campaign funds. They both have pleaded not guilty and are due back in court in December.


Hunter’s ads have been criticized, including by a group of 17 San Diego area rabbis who put out a statement on Wednesday.

“These false fear mongering claims undermine important Jewish values including the commitment to tolerance, honesty and respect,” the rabbis said.

Hunter, 41, of Alpine, is not backing down.

“These are facts and the idea that we cannot raise national security concern based on political correctness, we are not going to be painted into that box,” said Mike Harrison, spokesman for Hunter, during an interview. “For the media to immediately say he’s playing the race card, that is lazy journalism because there are facts there that they have not looked into.”


Hunter’s allegations center on Campa-Najjar’s family history — specifically, Campa-Najjar’s father’s decades working for the Palestinian government and the candidate’s grandfather’s role in a 1972 terror attack at the Olympics in Munich.

The lives of Campa-Najjar’s father and grandfather played out on the world stage. The killing of Campa-Najjar’s grandparents in front of their young son was shown in a scene in “Munich,” a 2005 Steven Spielberg movie. And their story is far more complex than any 30-second political ad could convey.

There at the founding

Campa-Najjar’s grandfather, Muhammad Yusuf al-Najjar, was a leader in the Fatah political party, which was and remains today one of the largest factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization.


Al-Najjar helped found the party alongside Yasser Arafat — the former longtime leader of the PLO — while the two were Palestinian refugees working in Kuwait in 1965, according to news reports.

Al-Najjar’s success stemmed primarily from his skills as a gifted negotiator, forging ties between Palestinians and western European countries and negotiating among guerrilla factions of the larger PLO.

“He was a much loved leader, and his funeral cortege, together with his two comrades killed on 10 April 1973… was one of the largest in Lebanese history,” said Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University of al-Najjar, in an email to the Union-Tribune. “They were perceived by most Palestinians and Lebanese as national heroes.”

More than 100,000 people attended the funeral, and to this day al-Najjar has a hospital named after him in Rafah, Gaza.


The Munich Massacre

During the 1972 Olympics, eight heavily armed Palestinian terrorists stormed an apartment complex in Olympic Village, killing two Israeli athletes and taking nine others hostage. The terrorists were members of the organization known as Black September.

Although there is disagreement among historians regarding the degree to which Fatah and the PLO exercised control over the group, Black September received funding and other support from the Fatah intelligence service, according to a 1973 report by the U.S. State Department.

The terrorists demanded that Israel release more than 230 Palestinian prisoners. German authorities promised Black September and the hostages air transport to Cairo, but police planned an ambush before takeoff at an airport in Germany.

That rescue attempt was botched. In the ensuing chaos, the terrorists killed all of the hostages. A German police officer and five of the terrorists were also killed.


The attack, dubbed the Munich Massacre, thrust the Israel-Palestine conflict into a global spotlight, elevating tensions and eliciting a bloody Israeli response.

In the following days Israel bombed PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon, killing not only PLO members but many civilians. Shortly thereafter then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir also authorized an assassination campaign that was unprecedented in scale.

The campaign, which lasted decades, targeted members of Black September and the PLO, with the goal of going after those responsible for Munich, according to multiple news reports and books.

Among those targets was al-Najjar, whom the Israeli government believed was involved. Among historians, though, there is debate about the level of involvement of al-Najjar — and several other targets of “Operation Wrath of God” — related to Munich.


Some, like Israeli historian Benny Morris, believe al-Najjar was involved. In his book “Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-1998,” Morris said that al-Najjar was “head of Fatah’s intelligence arm (which ran Black September).”

Other historians are less certain.

“Black September was behind the Munich attack, and some Fatah leaders were definitely involved, but Israeli intelligence accused so many Fatah leaders and cadres of responsibility (as an excuse for killing them) that it is absurd to believe their claims,” said Khalidi, the professor from Columbia University, by email.

“He may have been involved, but I doubt he was the ‘mastermind,’” he added of al-Najjar.


Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman — who researched the subject extensively and wrote the book “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations” — also told the Union-Tribune by email that the evidence about al-Najjar’s involvement was not conclusive.

“The question who was or was not involved in Munich (aside from the perpetrators themselves) remains a matter of dispute,” Bergman said.

Hunter’s attacks have gone well beyond the question of al-Najjar’s involvement, stating, “His grandfather masterminded the Munich Olympic massacre.”

But Mohammed Oudeh — who died of kidney failure in 2010 — is widely accepted to be the mastermind of the operation.


In Oudeh’s 1999 memoir, he told the story behind how he planned the attack. In the 1990s and 2000s he gave interviews in which he discussed the subject further and expressed no regrets for his actions.

The day of al-Najjar’s death, The New York Times reported that “although his name has been linked, because of reported intelligence activity, to the Black September guerrilla organization… it is not believed in informed guerilla circles that Mr. Najjar was in any operational control of the secret terrorist group.”

The nature of the struggle

On April 9, 1973, a squad of Israeli commandos — among them future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak — conducted a raid in Beirut, Lebanon, in which they stormed an apartment complex and shot al-Najjar and his wife to death while their children were in the apartment.

The death of al-Najjar and his wife left their four children orphaned, among them 11-year-old Yasser Najjar, who is the father of candidate Ammar Campa-Najjar.


After the raid, Yasser Najjar and his siblings were sent to Cairo by King Hassan II of Morocco, and in time were separated, according to a 2002 report by the Chicago Tribune.

Yasser Najjar studied in England and then later immigrated to the United States, where he gained citizenship, according to the Chicago Tribune. He moved to San Diego in 1981 and earned an MBA from San Diego State University. He opened clothing boutiques in Del Mar and La Jolla and met a girl from Logan Heights who he’d eventually marry, Abigail Campa.

In 1994, when the Palestinian National Authority was established and Yasser Arafat returned to Gaza, Najjar went as well, beginning what would turn into a 20-year-plus career with the group.

“I came back to Gaza eight years ago because I wanted to see what my parents died for,” Najjar told the Chicago Tribune in 2002.


For most of Najjar’s tenure he worked in the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation and as a diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Unlike his father who struck a more militant tone when dealing with Israel, Yasser Najjar publicly advocated for peace.

“The nature of the struggle has changed dramatically. Today it’s a worse struggle: coexistence,” Najjar told the Washington Post in 1996. “It’s like a wife that you don’t love, but you have to stay married. The Palestinian and Israeli people will inevitably work it out, to both their benefits.”

In 2003, he told NPR, “I can hate the Israelis or Ehud Barak forever, you know, and I’m entitled to. They took everything from me, my mother and my father. But at the end, for my children to live, I have to put my hatred aside. If I carry this hatred, my children will kill and end up being killed. And as a father, I don’t want that.


“Palestine and Israel — this area is the most beautiful on earth. Every year we are not building this country together, I mean, Israel and Palestine, every day we lose in conflict. It is a loss to us and to our children.”

During his time in the Palestinian Authority, Najjar also proved to be one of the group’s internal critics.

“Israel has taken our dreams away, but so has the conduct of the Palestinian Authority,” Najjar told the Tribune in 2002. “Their officials had no right to become millionaires and take the money that belonged to the people. Ours is no longer a revolution or a cause with any hope. And that is the reason why people today blow themselves up to become martyrs.”

During the interview Najjar also predicted that a new movement would eventually sweep aside what he called a “weak, corrupt and greedy” Palestinian Authority and that movement would work with like-minded people on the Israeli side to find a solution to the two nations’ conflict.


In his career with the Palestinian Authority, Najjar also had run-ins with the militant Hamas organization, a group the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization since 1997.

In 2004, Najjar expressed concern to the Financial Times that Israel’s intent to withdraw settlements from the Gaza Strip would empower Hamas.

Then in 2009 while working as an ambassador in Norway a letter circulated on an Arabic-language website claimed Najjar was assisting Israel in the war in the Gaza strip. Najjar said at the time the letter was fake and likely generated by Hamas.

Najjar left the Palestinian Authority earlier this year and lives in Norway, according to his LinkedIn. He did not reply to a message seeking comment. Campa-Najjar said his father was fired from the authority after the candidate’s public criticism of his grandfather’s actions.


Despite Najjar’s talk of peace, the PLO and the Palestinian Authority’s relationship with Israel has historically been complex and often hostile.

U.S. President Donald Trump, left, meets with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Tuesday, May 23, 2017, in the West Bank City of Bethlehem. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (Evan Vucci / AP)

Prior to 1993, Arafat and the PLO refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist and one of the group’s explicit goals was to liberate and uproot Zionists from the region in an effort to reclaim the land Palestinians themselves were expelled from when the state of Israel was established after World War II.

Although Arafat and the PLO formally recognized Israel’s right to peaceful existence in 1993, peace talks in the time since have been turbulent or halted all together, with frequent armed conflict and civilian causalities.


American life

Ammar Campa-Najjar, 29, of Jamul, was born at Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa in 1989 — 16 years after the death of al-Najjar.

Campa-Najjar said he doesn’t recall his father talking about his family or life in the Middle East during those early years, but rather he was just a seemingly “happy go-lucky” guy “immersed in his American life.”

“He was really dedicated to being a father, a businessman and a husband, then a switch turned,” Campa-Najjar said of his father.

Three years after Yasser Najjar left for Gaza in 1994, Campa-Najjar along with his brother and mother moved there as well, in an effort to make sure the boys had both of their parents in their lives, he said.


Campa-Najjar, his mother and brother, never lived with Najjar while in Gaza, and shortly after their arrival he remarried. Campa-Najjar said his father attempted to spend time with him but their relationship was strained.

Life in Gaza also came as a huge culture shock for Campa-Najjar, who was 8 when he arrived. Although he attended a Catholic School there and saw some westerners because of that, most everything else was unfamiliar.

Although he speaks Arabic — along with Spanish and English — his cousins would laugh at his efforts, and ultimately other children still viewed him as an American.

“Because I wasn’t fully embraced by native Palestinians, I was forced into an outsider’s view of the conflict and even something at a young age told me it’s not black and white,” said Campa-Najjar, who supports a two-state solution for the region.


After living in Gaza for four years, Campa-Najjar, his mother and brother fled escalating violence and moved back to San Diego County. From that point on, Campa-Najjar — who was 12 at the time — rarely saw his father, who remained in Gaza.

Over the past month he has found himself forced to talk less about the issues and more about his family heritage due to Hunter’s attacks.

Campa-Najjar said that he knew his grandfather would come up in the campaign, so in February when an Israeli newspaper first broke the story about his grandfather’s terrorist ties he wasn’t surprised.

Campa-Najjar condemned the attack in Munich and his grandfather, which he did on multiple occasions thereafter as well.


“I have said that my grandfather was associated with something that was heinous, that was wrong and he was brought to justice,” Campa-Najjar told reporters just a few weeks ago following a press conference by Hunter’s father. “I fully, unequivocally disavow the murder of innocent people.”

During a recent interview Campa-Najjar said he never really heard much about his grandparents when he was younger or while he was in Gaza. He had heard people say they were killed in the ’70s and were martyrs, although he didn’t know what that meant at the time.

It wasn’t until he saw the film “Munich,” released in 2005, that he realized what had happened. After that he began asking questions, but found answers limited. He remembers his aunts and his father saying their father wasn’t a terrorist, but never offering many specifics.

Despite criticism of Hunter’s attacks on Campa-Najjar and his family, the candidate said he has not changed his views on his grandfather’s actions.


“I condemn the massacre, and if he was involved then my view remains the same,” Campa-Najjar said.