Huwaida Arraf, the activist who sees Gaza as a political problem, not a humanitarian one

“If Mom dies, I shouldn’t be sad because she is trying to help people?” Huwaida Arraf’s youngest daughter, just 10 years old, asked her father last May. At the time, Arraf was in Istanbul, leading the Freedom Flotilla’s mission to deliver 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza by sea. She was set to be accompanied by a thousand activists, including former Barcelona mayor Ada Colau, but the mission was abruptly canceled the night before departure due to diplomatic reasons — several countries involved withdrew their flags from the ships.

Huwaida Arraf has dedicated her life to advocating for Palestinian human rights in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to fighting nonviolently against a system she believes perpetuates injustice and impunity. She is not afraid of dying. Nor does she see any other solution but to continue her work. “We cannot give up,” she says via video call.

At the age of 25, in 2001, she co-founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) with other activists, including her husband, which was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (2003 and 2004). They invited international volunteers to protest in defense of Palestinian rights and trained them to respond nonviolently in the face of extreme violence.

The aim, Arraz explains, was to make the situation of oppression, violence and abuse against Palestinians visible to the international community. And also to try to prevent further harm: they operated under the belief that the presence of international citizens on the ground would make the Israeli army more hesitant to carry out attacks.

However, in 2003, three ISM volunteers were killed. “The first to be killed was the American Rachel Corrie, who was run over by an Israeli bulldozer while she was opposing the demolition of houses in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip. It was considered an unfortunate accident and served as a precedent for killing international citizens with total impunity,” laments Arraf. “A few weeks after that, a 21-year-old British volunteer was shot while trying to move Palestinian children out of the line of fire. The situation is worse than apartheid in South Africa.”

She welcomes the impact the ISM had in raising awareness about the situation and inspiring other initiatives. However, she admits that they were naive in believing that simply making the violence endured by Palestinians visible would bring about change.

Arraf was born a month after her parents, both Palestinians, settled in the United States. She was the eldest of five siblings in a humble family where for many years (until her mother graduated again in Nursing, as she could not certify her studies) they lived on the salary of her father, who worked as an operator at General Motors.

Conscious of their financial limitations, Arraf got her first job at Dunkin' Donuts when she was 12 and continued her higher education thanks to scholarships and grants. She specialized in political science at the University of Michigan, as well as in Arabic and Judaic studies, because she believed that speaking both languages was essential to contribute to establishing peace. She then moved to Jerusalem, where she worked as a program coordinator for Seeds of Peace, an organization dedicated to strengthening relations between Israeli and Palestinian children.

There she met her now husband, Adam Shapiro, an American from a Jewish family who worked as a director of Seeds for Peace. They married a year later in 2002, and a month after their wedding, Shapiro was arrested during a peaceful protest. Despite there being no evidence against him, he was deported and banned from re-entering Israel.

However, he encouraged Huwaida to stay, which she did for two more years. “Huwaida’s life is intrinsically linked to the struggle for Palestinian freedom. This intensifies her internal struggle over how to exist in this world during this genocide. She is a woman of action, impatient for change,” Shapiro explains by email.

Arraf graduated and returned to Jerusalem in 2007 to set up the Arab world’s first legal consultancy education program at Al-Quds University. By then, tensions had escalated, Arraf says: “The second intifada — between 2000 and 2005 — happened because, during the years of the so-called peace process, Israel continued to seize land, expand checkpoints and increasingly restrict Palestinians’ freedom of movement. They continued to colonize under the guise of a peace process, and people revolted.” Arraf explains that by 2007, people were dying because they could not leave Gaza to receive essential treatments like chemotherapy or oxygen.

In this context, she co-founded Free Gaza with other activists in 2006, a movement she led and through which they managed to charter boats to enter Gaza through international waters. “At first, we did not bring humanitarian aid because we did not want Gaza to be seen as a humanitarian problem, when it’s a political problem. We are not a humanitarian organization but rather we fight for human rights,” Arraf explains.

They entered and left Gaza five times. “We did it as a form of resistance to confront a country that controls the food and medicine that Palestinians receive and allows children to suffer amputations without anesthesia.”

In 2010, Arraf — who says she has been detained more than 24 times — set up the Freedom Flotilla, recruiting 750 volunteers from 35 countries to cross to Gaza on seven ships. One of them, the Mavi Marmara, carrying 10 tons of aid to the Gaza Strip, was attacked by the Israelis. Ten volunteers were killed when they were fired upon from a helicopter, in what then-U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called a “bloodbath.”

Ann Wright, a former U.S. colonel, diplomat, and activist who was among the volunteers on board, recalls Arraf’s determination and bravery at the time. “Huwaida was on the railing screaming and trying to stop the IDF soldiers from coming on board.” Wright highlights the activist’s tireless efforts over more than 15 years in countering the Israeli narrative. “I greatly admire and appreciate what Huwaida has done to keep us informed and mobilized about the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and now the West Bank.”

Arraf returns to Jerusalem again and again, even though it is dangerous. In fact, she chose to give birth to her two children there without her husband, so that they could have Israeli citizenship like her. Her U.S. passport and Israeli citizenship have protected her on many occasions. “The only distraction she occasionally allows herself is crossword puzzles and jigsaw puzzles. She used to draw, but has put all that aside to devote herself obsessively (and creatively) to finding ways to achieve justice,” says her husband.

“Now that I am a mother, I can’t do the same things I did before, but even when I was pregnant, I continued to take delegations to Palestine and I continue to fight from the United States,” says Arraf. “I left the law firm where I worked to go to Istanbul and try to cross into Gaza. When Palestine calls, I drop everything.”

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