Huwaida Arraf
HUWAIDA ARRAF, A Detroit area civil rights attorney and activist and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, prepared this presentation for a Wayne State University Board of Governors meeting on December 11, 2024 to advocate divestment from corporations complicit in Israel’s war crimes in Palestine. Nearly two dozen students, faculty and the general spoke.
MY NAME IS Huwaida Arraf, a human/civil rights attorney and activist. I struggled with how best to use my two minutes and communicate to you the legal, historical, ethical and moral implications of not adopting an ethical investment policy in this moment.
I thought about what it means for an institution of higher learning, a place we send our children to prepare them to be the leaders and changemakers of tomorrow, to treat its students the way that this board has treated its students — ignoring the democratic will of the student body, disregarding their repeated pleas to refrain from investing their tuition money in the murder of their families, and attacking their principled and inspiring campaign to end this university’s complicity in global atrocities.
I thought, “well maybe you really don’t know how grave the situation is.” After all, our media and politicians do not tell us the truth. Perhaps you’re not seeing and hearing what your students are, what university students across the country are, what the global majority is. So, I decided to use my time to make sure that you cannot ever say that you didn’t know. I’ve submitted a 150 page document online with more information on everything I’m going to say.
* Gaza is the size of Detroit, where over 2.3 million people have been imprisoned for two decades; denied basic human rights;
* Conservatively, Israel has killed 45,000 Palestinians in the last 14 months; that’s only those who we have names for; thousands more are buried under the rubble of their homes; more are disappeared, and many, many more will die in the coming days and weeks. Over 70% of those killed are women and children. Put in terms of the US population, that would be about 8.5 million killed in a little over a year. In reality, the numbers are much higher, with medical journals and experts predicting over 200,000 and that number will climb.
* At least 17,000 children have been killed; 99 American doctors who volunteered in Gaza attest to a deliberate policy of Israeli soldiers shooting children, having seen countless children with clean shots to their heart and heads. Those children who are still alive are without shelter or adequate clothing and suffer from hunger and disease. Thousands are missing one or more limbs, amputated without anesthesia (Gaza now has the largest number of child amputees per capita in the world); and approximately 20K children have become orphans. Imagine, being a 5 or 8-year-old child who has lost one or more limbs as well as your entire family.
* Israel has killed more kids in Gaza in the last year than kids killed in all other world conflicts combined over the last 4 years. A former UN official called Gaza an open-air death camp and the UN Secretary General called Gaza a graveyard for children;
* Over 190 journalists have been killed; over 200 UN workers; 1000 medical workers killed, and many more tortured, including Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, a beloved orthopedic surgeon who was reportedly raped to death in Israeli custody.
Last week, Amnesty International released a 296-page report concluding that Israel is committing genocide. In doing so, it joined a long list of organizations and experts in that have made the same conclusion, including over a thousand legal and genocide scholars, among them Jewish and Israeli Holocaust scholars; one of them a former Israeli diplomat and government advisor.
But even if you don’t want to believe any of this, on January 26, 202, the world’s highest court , the International Court of Justice, found it plausible that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and ordered provisional measures to protect the civilian population, all of which Israel has ignored.
Once on notice that a genocide is potentially taking place, the world has an obligation to do all it can to stop it. Indeed, that is the essence of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which we marked the 76th anniversary of this past Monday… a global commitment not only to punish genocide, but to prevent it… to stop it.
In the past 14 months, an estimated 85,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on Gaza – exceeding that which was used in all of WWII – dropped on an enclave the size of Detroit, where people are caged, with nowhere to run. GAZA IS BEING OBLITERATED. There is no way for the population to recover in our lifetime.
All of this, and I haven’t even touched on what’s happening in the West Bank, where I lived and worked for many years, witnessing horrific crimes against humanity. In 2021, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and the Israeli human rights organization, Btselem, issued separate factual and legal reports all concluding that Israel was committing the crime of apartheid.
Don’t believe me; do your own research and after you have, if you still decide to do nothing to withdraw complicity in these atrocities – to stop funding apartheid and genocide, what does this say about you and this institution? And what will you say when future generations ask you what you did to prevent the extermination of the Palestinian people.
You won’t be able to say you didn’t know.