Harvard Welcomes Saeb Erekat, Chief Palestinian Rejectionist & Israel-basher

With the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still unresolved, Harvard recently announced four new fellows for the school’s Future of Diplomacy Project. Saeb Erekat, Chief Palestinian negotiator and Secretary General of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization is joining the school for the 2020-2021 academic year. 

The Harvard Kennedy School of Government is among the most prestigious graduate schools for public and social policy in the world. Its international relations program is consistently ranked among the best on the planet, with alumni including prime ministers, parliamentarians, members of congress and city councils, mayors, and advisers to global leaders. 

Faculty Chair Nicholas Burns proudly boasted that the new fellows “will strengthen our capacity to learn the lessons of effective diplomacy and statecraft.” The fellows are going to be speaking in virtual seminars, holding office hours with students, and leading study groups.  

However, this announcement has called into question the very legitimacy of the Future of Diplomacy Project. The fact that Harvard has chosen Erekat as a fellow regarding “the future of diplomacy” and that he will share his “expertise” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is nothing short of a travesty and perhaps even a deliberate decision to sway university students against Israel.

Therefore, we the public, hereby ask all relevant media outlets to cover this story completely, responsibly and with full context: so that students, parents and philanthropists can make fully informed decisions about which educational institutions they wish to attend and support, and which they would prefer to avoid.

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An Early Erekat Diplomatic Success? The Second Intifada 

Erekat’s record speaks for itself. He was at Yasser Arafat’s side during the Camp David negotiations in 2000. During those meetings and the months following the summit, Israel agreed to give the Palestinians up to 96% of the West Bank with land swaps to make up for most of the difference. 

Had they accepted this deal, the Palestinians would have wound up with sovereignty over the Temple Mount with its capital in eastern Jerusalem. In addition, there would have been an international effort made to compensate Palestinian refugees.  

If diplomacy is “the art of compromise,” then a great Palestinian diplomat — one who is equipped to teach others — would certainly have accepted this deal. But while Israel agreed, Erekat and the Palestinian team rejected the offer. Instead, they unleashed the Second Intifada on Israel in which hundreds of Palestinian terrorists murdered and maimed thousands of Israelis in suicide bombings in restaurants, cafes, malls and on buses.

Erekat also participated in the 2007 Annapolis Conference, which led to then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert to offer the Palestinians even more than what was on the table at Camp David. The Palestinian side never bothered to answer Olmert.

Recommended Reading: Misleading Palestinian Maps Twist the Truth

Erekat’s Claims About Jenin, Arafat’s Death, Temple Mount

The criticism of Erekat being chosen to teach future leaders about diplomacy is not limited to his failures in this arena. His history of spreading falsehoods should also invalidate him from such a position.

Just to give a few examples: 

• During the Second Intifada, following the March 27, 2002 suicide bombing in a Netanya hotel during a Passover celebration that killed 30 people and injured 140 others, Israel had no choice but to send the military into the Palestinian city of Jenin. That was where many of the terrorists came from, and the IDF had to neutralize those planning future attacks . Erekat harshly criticized the Jenin operation, telling the world that Israel was committing a massacre, claiming that the army had killed 500 innocent Palestinians. In truth, there were 56 killed and most were terrorists.

• During a 2014 interview with Al Jazeera television, Erekat made the outrageously false and outright libelous claim that Israel assassinated Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

• In a November 2015 document that Erekat released to the media called “Key Points to Remember when Reporting on Occupied Palestine,” he wrote: “The main issue is the Israeli occupation” and that “Israel occupies the State of Palestine.” However, Israel only began its “occupation” of the West Bank after the Six Day War in 1967. If that occupation is the reason for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict then why was the Palestinian Liberation Organization which Erekat represents established in 1964, three years before? Furthermore, the West Bank was not “the State of Palestine” when Israel acquired it in a defensive war. The territory at the time was controlled by Jordan.

• In that same media guide, Erekat wrote that, “The Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound is under Israeli occupation” and “Israel has effectively changed the Al-Aqsa Status Quo.” Once again, these are falsehoods that he fed to the media. Israel does have security control over the site, which Jews refer to as the Temple Mount given that the two biblical temples once stood there. But the Jordanian Waqf has control over the day to day operations of the compound. Moreover, Israel has not changed the status quo there — Jews and Christians are not even allowed to pray at the location.

Recommended Reading: Jewish Ties to the Temple Mount – What’s the Story?

Again, a complete distortion of the truth was perpetrated by Erekat in order to persuade the media to be more supportive of the Palestinians.

Erekat: Molder of Young Minds?

How can someone who has repeatedly gone on record with outright lies be trusted by Harvard to teach the truth to the “best and brightest?” Why would Harvard entrust Erekat with shaping the minds of these future leaders? 

And finally, while Erekat cloaks himself as a diplomat and is treated by the media as a moderate Palestinian voice — having appeared on the BBC, CNN and even the more conservative Fox News — he is, by contrast, an extremist who said in a 2014 Al Jazeera interview that violence against Israelis is a Palestinian “right” and that he “cannot accept Israel as a Jewish state.”

Perhaps Harvard was influenced by the media’s embrace of Saeb Erekat. Accordingly, news outlets should seriously begin considering the consequences of giving Erekat a platform. At the very least, they should call him out for the litany of lies and anti-Zionism that he has disseminated. 

Journalistic integrity hinges on Saeb Erekat no longer being portrayed by the media as a moderate .

Given his history of lies, rejectionism, and extremism, the Kennedy School of Government should either rescind their offer for Erekat to serve as one of its fellows for this year, or at the very least balance his ideology with another fellow representing the pro-Israel camp.

Tomorrow’s leaders should be presented with a true, fair and balanced perspective about conflicts so that they may develop their own opinions. 

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