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Every Friday, we choose an alum who has been making headlines—for better or for worse.
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11/18/11: Sari Bashi ’97, ’03JD

By the staff | 2:02pm January 03 2012

In a week when Yale students staged mock Israeli checkpoints on campus to dramatize their support for Palestinian freedom of movement, Sari Bashi ’97, ’03JD, was continuing her legal battle against the real thing. Bashi used a Yale Law School fellowship in human rights to establish Gisha, an Israeli organization that advocates for freedom of movement for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This week landed her in the news on several fronts: endorsing a protest by Palestinian “Freedom Riders” who were arrested for trying to take a public bus from the West Bank to Jerusalem without a permit; criticizing as too little an Israeli decision to loosen some restrictions on materials coming into Gaza; and noting that a proposal to ban funding of political groups by foreign governments “is narrowly targeted to groups that the [Israeli] government does not support or appreciate.”

That would include Gisha. In a speech early this year, Israel’s foreign minister named the rights group among a list of agencies that “help terrorists.”

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