Arwa Elrayess, a politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE) student and the first Palestinian to serve as president of the Oxford Union debating society, is facing backlash after saying Hamas will one day be “lauded as heroes.”
Elrayess made the remarks, which recently came to light, in a student WhatsApp group of about 100 incoming freshmen in September 2025, the Daily Mail reported on Wednesday.
She also described the terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of the northwestern Negev as “proportional,” claiming that after “decades” of mistreatment of Palestinians by Israel, “You can’t be surprised [by the events of Oct. 7.]”
“Proportional does not mean ‘right’ by the way. Just that you can’t be shocked that it happened,” she added.
“Any resistance group will inevitably be deemed a ‘terrorist’ organization by the West until they achieve their liberation (by which time, they’ll be lauded as heroes, as history has proven),” Elrayess said. She cited the Irish Republican Army and Palestine Liberation Organization as examples.
Some members of the WhatsApp group challenged her comments, saying Hamas’s massacres had been “too severe and bad” to consider them freedom fighters.
“I think the severity of resistance is often proportional to the severity of oppression,” she said, according to the Daily Mail.
“It’d be laughable if any Palestinian group tried to gain their freedom through, for example, chaining themselves to the gates of the borders. There were various, more peaceful forms of resistance in the past that ended with nothing but massacres.
“This is not to justify anything, but just to point out that it’s quite rich to allow for decades of systematic oppression and massacres, only to act shocked when the resistance movement responds with proportional severity,” Elrayess said.
Oxford Students Against Discrimination said it was “appalled” by Elrayess’s messages “at a time when Jewish students at Oxford have faced an unprecedented rise in harassment, intimidation, and fear.
“This is not political debate. It is a failure of basic humanity, and a betrayal of every Jewish student who has had to navigate this university under her leadership,” the group said. “We call for her to resign.”
A former Oxford Union committee member told the Daily Mail, “This isn’t student radicalism; it is the explicit normalization of terror.”
A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism, a British NGO established by the Anglo-Jewish community, said the messages were “absolutely sickening.”
“The [Oct. 7] attacks came during a prolonged ceasefire and involved wanton rape and medieval torture, butchery and murder of civilians,” the spokesperson said.
“Any effort to excuse or explain it away should disqualify someone not only from being the president of the Oxford Union—one of the most prestigious positions at one of the U.K.’s most elite institutions—but also should render them unfit from holding any position at all.
“The University of Oxford must take action to protect its students from extremists and the police should investigate some of these comments, which we are raising with our lawyers.”
