Last month my participation in a local Michigan high school diversity assembly set off a firestorm. What did I do that was so controversial? I spoke candidly about my experience dealing with oppression in Palestine and silencing campaigns in the United States.
Unsurprisingly, the same special interest groups that have worked so tirelessly for decades to silence Palestinian voices were at the forefront of the attacks on me, the student organizers, and the school administration for hosting me.
What is disappointing and deeply concerning is that the Bloomfield Hills school administration, the school board, and the mainstream media that reported the story have gone along with these vicious, defamatory attacks intended to detract from my message.
Mondoweiss was one of the few publications willing to provide fair coverage of the real story, the systematic efforts to censor Palestinian advocates with the trope that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.
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The student organizers, all women of color, invited me to speak, alongside four other people about my experiences confronting racism and discrimination. The organizers were particularly interested in my history of campaigning for Palestinian rights, which I told them I would talk about.
I shared about my parents leaving Palestine because they wanted their children to grow up knowing freedom and having rights and opportunities denied to Palestinians. I recounted how, years later, I decided to move to Palestine with the hopes of making a difference. And how witnessing firsthand injustice and repression led me to co-found the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led, nonviolent resistance movement nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. ISM calls on people from all over the world, including Jewish volunteers, to stand with Palestinians in their struggle for freedom.
Following the assembly, Zionist organizations launched a campaign to pressure the school to apologize for allowing me to speak to students, calling me “hateful” and “antisemitic,” and claiming that my talk made Jewish students feel unsafe. The school board hosted a special meeting where multiple individuals used racist tropes and falsehoods to malign my character and argue that a Palestinian narrative does not belong in our schools. Meanwhile, the students who spoke up to debunk the lies, including Arab and Muslim students, who described being harassed and receiving death threats, were marginalized. The school board promised to take steps to ensure that “mistakes like this,” i.e., allowing a Palestinian to talk about what is happening in Palestine, “do not happen again,” and the school’s principal, who is African American, has been put on administrative leave pending further action.
If it weren’t for independent news sites like Mondoweiss, there wouldn’t be accurate coverage of heinous attacks on me and many others who dare to stand for our rights to free speech when it comes to Palestine. Can you ensure they continue providing critical coverage by becoming a recurring donor today? All contributions to the campaign will be matched up to $25,000.
We mustn’t allow this silencing campaign to prevail, in Michigan or anywhere else. Please sign the statement issued by Jewish Voice for Peace-Detroit that garnered the support of over 185 organizations, dozens of religious and political leaders, and over 1000 other community leaders and activists.
Israel apologists put incredible pressure on communities to shut down Palestinian rights advocacy by falsely crying “antisemitism.” Fair coverage of these bogus and often vicious attacks is crucial to inform communities unfamiliar with these smear campaigns (and media complicity) that these are recurring tactics to censor activists, professors, journalists, and anybody who dares to call out Israel’s human rights violations. We continue to pressure mainstream media for fair coverage and count on Mondoweiss for accurate reporting and essential context and analysis.
What is happening to Palestinians is a crime against humanity, and we — Jews, Palestinians, and all people of conscience – cannot be silenced.
Thank you for raising your voice.
“What did I do that was so controversial?”
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Perhaps Mondoweiss could publish a transcript of the speech, detail the controversial lines, or provide a link. There is something to be learned here.
Huwaida, I have tremendous respect for your work, but you begin this article with a reference to your “participation in a local Michigan high school diversity assembly“. What is a “diversity assembly“? I’m pretty sure that almost all Mondoweiss readers have attended a high school, and probably most of us remember having assemblies there, but “diversity” assemblies? Is this label intended to be sarcastic or euphemistic?
So this was an assembly that was organized by students. By the way, I know enough about Bloomfield Hills to know that a group that is “all women of color” is very unrepresentative of the demographic diversity of the town.
You don’t actually say what the four other people alongside you were there to speak about, but we are led to infer that they were also there to speak about their own experiences confronting racism and discrimination, as you were. That sounds like a worthy idea, but I don’t know why you would want to (mis)label such an event as a “diversity assembly“, which I would have guessed would be showcasing something like food and folk dance.
I’m with the other commenters here who would like to know more about what you said, and also how the Zionist organizations distorted it. I’d be very surprised if “a Palestinian narrative does not belong in our schools” (your emphasis) is a direct quote from any of them.
There are two separate things you’re saying about the students who were “marginalized” at the school board meeting: (1) they spoke up to debunk the lies, and (2) they described being harassed and receiving death threats.
How exactly were they marginalized? If high school students come to a school board meeting and describe being harassed and receiving death threats, then that’s pretty serious. It would be very helpful to spread a video showing the students speaking about harassment and death threats, and then showing them being marginalized by the school board.
Also, about those who spoke up, you write “including Arab and Muslim students“. How is that at all surprising?
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MAD respect … Huwaida and Palestine Legal!
Memo to the Bloomfield Hills High School (BHHS):
You’ve been played.
But don’t worry, you are not the only ones.
How were you played? Partly owing to your own naivete and partly owing to your own cowardice you were tricked into thinking that it was in your best interests to serve as a political proxy for domestic American Zionism.
It appears to me, and I invite you to correct me if you think I am misled or mistaken, that you allowed yourselves to be intimidated by the fear of being labeled “antisemitic”. BHHS surrendered its critical thinking faculties and debased its professional standards by choosing to privilege politically-driven, and unverified, accusations in direct support of an alien nation, Israel.
The JCRC and ADL have no real qualifications to evaluate Ms. Arraf’s presentation impartially. They are intrinsically biased towards Zionism and against Palestinians.
A perfect parity exists between the political rights of the people who supported Ms. Arraf’s presentation on the one hand and those who attacked it on the other. Ignoring that equivalency, or perhaps even rejecting it, BHHS took sides.
BHHS chose to use its discretionary administrative powers to advantage one group, those who support the “pro-Israel” narrative to the detriment of those who support the “pro-Palestine” narrative. By taking sides BHHS put itself on the wrong side of history.
By acting against its reputational interests it did real damage to the name and standing of the Bloomfield Hills High School (BHHS).
Thanks to its decision, BHHS has joined a lamentable list of academic, political and corporate institutions that have betrayed their obligations to serve the interests of their American communities by acting out of fear of a racist, Islamophobic and cynical definition of antisemitism – “IHRA”.
BHHS must not for a moment consider its response honorable: Quite the opposite.
BHHS may test the impartiality of its decisions in this matter very simply: Just answer a single question from the Department of Justice/Federal Bureau of Investigation’s
Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines and Training Manual and decide for itself whether or not its decision can in any way be considered fair or impartial:
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Does a historically-established animosity exist between the victim’s and the offender’s groups?
(Version 2.0, 2/27/2015 – page 6)
Because the answer is yes, BHHS was obligated to learn about those antagonisms, in depth, and incorporate them into the school’s response. BHHS did not do so. Instead, it took sides acting with bias by choosing to privilege one narrative over the other. Not a very good civics lesson to present to American high school students.
BHHS is not alone in its cowardice. Mondoweiss and Palestine Legal regularly report on numerous, almost predictably similar, anti-democratic events. Many of which, like BHHS, hide behind coy proceduralism, for example claiming that Ms. Arraf went beyond “our agreed upon parameters” when she “discussed her personal political perspective”. The DOJ/FBI questionnaire would have asked if she did so spontaneously or in reply to a question from a student.
The point of all the coverage this event received in the Zionist press is not difficult to ascertain. It is to deny the Palestinian perspective the opportunity to be normalized in the public discourse.
BHHS now shares the same self-inflicted dishonorable status as the Harvard Kennedy School owing to the now much-regretted decision of Dean Douglas Elmendorf to discriminate against a renowned Middle East scholar, Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth.
It did not have to be this way. BHHS, as an educational institution, could have chosen to turn this matter into a learning/teaching moment. Rather than smear the participants and suspend the principal, BHHS could have chosen to sponsor scholastically sound, school-based alternatives such as having: the debate society address the issues involve; the history department expand it readings; encouraging the IB program to adopt the Palestine/Israel issue as an acceptable topic; sponsoring a wider range of speakers and presenters; the art department host an art exhibit on any aspect of the matter of interest to the students. Etc.
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BHHS might also do the Jewish students who were said to have been made uncomfortable a real service by inviting them to share, in some forum of their choice – classroom discussion, writing project, Zoom, or as part of the “diversity and equity” program their interpretations of Ms. Arraf’s presentation. It would be useful to know if they were put at unease because they thought the history presented painted a false accounting of Zionist history…or an accurate one. Asking the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students how the presentation, and its reverberations, affected them would also be appropriate. No school should be in the business of protecting its charges from the truth, be it about Zionism, Palestine, slavery, women’s rights, Manifest Destiny or any other element of American or world history.
Demanding apologies, punishing the sponsoring educators, acting in secret, declaring the topic off limits, while doing all in your power to delegitimize the Palestinian narrative are the tactics of organized, political Zionism, not progressive American pedagogy.
The late Supreme Court judge, Justice Louis Brandeis, famously wrote: “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
(Whitney v. California – 1927)
There is time and BHHS should seize the opportunity to begin to right the wrong it has done to the Palestinian people. Now.
Question for Any Zionist: Is it antisemitic according to IHRA to suggest that the authentic history of political Zionism is a legitimate subject for inclusion in American high school curricula?
View here 541 Palestine posters on the subject of hasbara and Zionist propaganda