A large Palestinian flag flying from a luxury home on the Anchorage Hillside has raised eyebrows after local news outlet the Alaska Landmine identified the homeowner as Osama Abaza, a University of Alaska Anchorage professor who was born in Nablus on the West Bank and has deep ties to Palestinian academia.
Abaza, who teaches civil engineering at UAA, is a longtime figure in the civil engineering academic community both in Anchorage and in the West Bank. Before moving to Alaska at least 16 years ago, he held several high-level roles at An-Najah National University in the West Bank, serving as graduate coordinator for the transportation engineering department in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and as vice president for administrative affairs from 1999 to 2002. His career at An-Najah dates back to the 1980s, when he chaired the civil engineering department.
The massive flag, prominently displayed outside his Anchorage residence, is visible from a distance.
It’s unclear what the flag represents to Abaza. Several Palestinian organizations have been designated as terrorist groups by countries and international bodies due to their involvement in politically motivated violence. These designations do not apply to the Palestinian people as a whole, but to specific entities that represent many of them. Key terror groups include the Palestinian government, Hamas.
Hamas is the Palestinian Sunni Islamist organization that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, European Union, Canada, Israel, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, among others, due to its history of suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and other violent acts targeting Israeli civilians and military personnel. The October 2023 attack on southern Israel, which killed nearly 1,200 people and involved hostage-taking, was widely condemned as a terrorist act attributed to Hamas.
Hamas’s 1988 charter called for the destruction of Israel, though a 2017 document moderated some language while still rejecting Israel’s legitimacy.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad is a smaller, Iran-backed group focused on armed resistance against Israel. PIJ has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, EU, Canada, and others for its rocket attacks and suicide bombings, particularly during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s.
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a Marxist-Leninist group involved in terrorist attacks since the 1960s, including aircraft hijackings and bombings. It is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, EU, Canada, and others.
Other groups include the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, and the Abu Nidal Organization, which are designated as terrorist groups by various countries for historical acts of violence, including hijackings, bombings, and assassinations.
Read the professor’s biography at this UAA link.
Abaza is living in the United States, where the First Amendment protects even controversial forms of expression, including the flying of a foreign flag. The First Amendment protects unpopular speech and political dissent, and even protects symbols of anti-semitism, such as the Palestinian flag has become.
An-Najah National University, where Abaza spent much of his career, has in the past drawn scrutiny from international observers for its campus climate and political affiliations.
The Anchorage display comes at a time when the Palestinian flag represents Palestinian national resistance to some people, while for others, it evokes images of extremism and anti-Israel ideology and violent anti-semitism.
