On Sunday, Huwaida Arraf was at sea in the eastern Mediterranean aboard the Challenger 1, an American-flagged passenger vessel taking part in the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza. Monday she was in an Israeli prison. Yesterday, fresh out of detention, she was featured in the lead segment on NPR’s All Things Considered (audio archive and transcript here). Arraf is a Palestinian-American attorney and an activist extraordinaire: she co-founded the International Solidarity Movement in 2001, and now she’s chairperson of the Free Gaza Movement, one of the organizations that played a key role in putting together the flotilla. Not surprisingly, she did a great job explaining it.
(Huwaida is also the star of the YouTube classic "Israel Soldier _Palestine Girl." If you’re not among the 1,249,233 people who have already watched it, do it now – it’s an extraordinary profile in courage.)
The segment that followed on All Things Considered, in which host Robert Siegel questioned Israeli mouthpiece Mark Regev, was also interesting, mainly because Siegel, uncharacteristically, actually challenged several of Regev’s assertions.
