Arwa Elrayess, the first Palestinian president of the Oxford Union, said she is not resigning after facing a vote of no confidence at the prestigious debating society last week.
The motion was filed after screenshots of text messages from Elrayess were quoted in outlets including The Telegraph and the BBC as saying that the Hamas-led incursion into southern Israel on October 7, 2023 was "proportional" and that groups branded as terrorists were often later "lauded as heroes."
At the forum, student Ben Ashworth, 20, accused Elrayess of contributing to "an atmosphere of hostility and harassment." Elrayess, standing in a green sequinned dress before a room full of onlookers, replied: "Not just in my career within the union but in my existence as a Palestinian, there seems to always be this post-mortem vilification of Palestinians."
She added: "Palestinians, when they talk, are for some reason a danger. Our very existence is something that is scary."
Elrayess told Al Jazeera the messages were taken from a group chat of students discussing politics, nine months before she became president. She said the conversation involved broader analysis of resistance groups, not a statement of support for Hamas.
The full quote in question from the group chat read: "Any resistance group will inevitably be deemed a terrorist organisation by the West until they achieve their liberation, by which time they'll be lauded as heroes as history has historically proven."
Elrayess said the context was stripped away when the messages were reported. "Analysing something is not giving it moral legitimacy," she told Al Jazeera. "Even though I described explicitly in all the messages that I'm not describing this as legitimate or morally justified, I'm just providing analysis; all of this was stripped away when it was reported in The Telegraph or the Daily News."
She said it was "entirely misquoted" and that she believes the framing was intentional. Ashworth cited the Sunday Telegraph directly, a paper whose political editor's father serves as chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, according to Al Jazeera's reporting.
Elrayess became head of the Oxford Union late last year.
