The newly elected president of the Oxford Union has claimed that candidates who ran for the post and expressed solidarity with Palestinians were subject to "disproportionate scrutiny", facing smear campaigns and attempts to remove them from office.
Speaking to Middle East Eye just days after she was elected president, Arwa Hanin Elrayess said that there have been repeated campaigns to ensure that "Arab presidents of the Union don't remain in that position, especially if they have sympathy towards the Palestinian cause."
"Reasons are found to 'justifiably' remove them from office," she told MEE.
On Thursday, Elrayess made history as the first Palestinian, first Arab woman and first Algerian to be elected president of the Oxford Union, one of the world's most influential student debating societies.
A second-year Philosophy, Politics and Economics student at St Edmund Hall and originally from Gaza, Elrayess said that whilst campaigning for the position there was an atmosphere in which speaking openly about Palestine invited institutional pushback, and that there were already attempts to delegitimise her leadership.
