Mohsen Mahdawi’s Statement in Support of Divestment from Israeli Apartheid
By Mohsen Mahdawi
January 25, 2026
Creating an Apartheid Free Community is a moral obligation not only to the Palestinian people, but to humanity itself, to the Upper Valley community, and to the ideals America claims to stand for. This is an act of love that strengthens our nonviolent struggle.
For more than seventy seven years, Israel has subjected the Palestinian people to military occupation, dispossession, and a system of apartheid. This system enforces segregation, unequal rights, and collective punishment, while denying Palestinian refugees their fundamental right to return to their homes for four generations. Americans understand what institutionalized discrimination looks like. Americans have lived through Jim Crow, and we know that injustice justified by law is still injustice.
My own family was forcibly removed from our homeland Em Khalid (Natanya) which is now within Israel, by the Israeli army. They remain refugees in the West Bank, living under daily hardship, persecution, and fear. Over the years, we have lost more than a dozen members of our family. The ongoing genocide in Gaza is not an isolated tragedy or a sudden rupture. It is the inevitable result of decades of dehumanization, apartheid, and the systematic denial of Palestinian life and dignity.
We are living in a moment when we cannot turn our eyes away. This genocide is live streamed before our eyes. The occupation and the violence that sustain it are funded by American tax dollars and politically protected by American leaders. As Dr. King reminded us, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Silence in the face of this reality is not neutrality. It is complicity.
To divest is to stand for truth. To divest is to stand for human rights. To divest is to practice moral agency. This struggle is inseparable from the Black freedom movement in the United States and from the global fight against apartheid in South Africa. History does not judge us by our intentions, but by the choices we make when injustice is undeniable.
I have lived in the Upper Valley for the past eleven years, and I have known nothing but goodness from this community. When I was homeless, you welcomed me and gave me home. When I was traumatized, you helped me heal. When I was hopeless, you gave me so much hope. When I was imprisoned by ICE, you freed me.
I trust that you will make the right decision, because you have shown me, through action, what a beloved community can look like. To create an Apartheid Free Community is to make the world a better place by loving justice and sanctioning unjust systems. This is how we make peace. This is how we renew the faith in humanity. This is how we uphold democracy.