Harvard is undoubtedly one of America’s most esteemed and famous universities. Its alumni include no fewer than eight US Presidents, more than 100 Nobel laureates and at least two dozen billionaires.
Prominent Jews who have graduated from the Massachusetts-based university are innumerable. The institution has a long history of welcoming Jewish scholars, with Jews having comprised a quarter of the student body in 1925. While the proportion of Jewish students has dwindled since then, in 2020 they still accounted for 6 percent of the incoming Harvard class.
Yet, recent years have seen a number of troubling incidents on campus that point to a disturbing tendency toward antisemitism among the student and staff body – one that is largely promoted under the guise of pro-Palestinian ‘advocacy’ or support for ‘woke’ causes such as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
In the first of a series of articles examining this phenomenon at Ivy League universities, HonestReporting looks at Harvard University and some recent events that illustrate this worrying trend.
Statement Condemning Israel – May 2021
In May 2021, amid the outbreak of hostilities between US-designated terrorist group Hamas and Israel, a letter condemning the Jewish state was signed by 89 Harvard-based student groups and hundreds of pupils. Using language that insinuated an undercurrent of antisemitism, the petition called on students to “take action” against alleged “years of systematic oppression and ethnic cleansing committed by the State of Israel.”
There are numerous ways the contents of this statement can be criticized. For example, it describes Palestinians in Gaza as “living under siege in the world’s largest open air prison,” while ignoring the fact that Israel does not govern the Gaza Strip – Hamas does. It also fails to mention the barrage of rockets that were fired at towns and cities in Israel by the terrorist group that prompted the retaliatory “aerial bombardments of Gaza” earlier this year.
Omissions and distortions aside, perhaps the most egregious element of this letter is its furthering of antisemitic ideas that are camouflaged in language most frequently used by proponents of BDS. While the statement does not explicitly mention the anti-Israel movement, it encourages Harvard to divest from companies that are “involved in the illegal Israeli settlement enterprise” and criticizes the United States for being an “active participant” in “colonial violence” by providing billions of dollars in military funding to the Jewish state.
The BDS movement is an undeniably antisemitic cause. Its primary motive is to dismantle the Jewish state via economic warfare and the so-called “Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees and generations of their descendants. BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti has previously said he supports a one-state solution under which Jews would be a minority in their ancestral homeland and has admitted he will not work with or cooperate with Israelis, even if they are sympathetic to his cause.
Barghouti, who despite his ostensible hatred for Israeli institutions received a PhD from Tel Aviv University, was last year invited to address Harvard students via Skype for an event that was organized by a pro-Palestinian student group.
Related Reading: Hiding Behind Buzzwords: How BDS Spreads its Anti-Israel Agenda
Cornel West Tenure Controversy – February 2021
Former Harvard professor Cornel West lambasted his employer and, incredibly, suggested Israel was to blame when he was denied tenure earlier this year. On Twitter, West pushed the antisemitic conspiracy theory that the university’s decision was based on his condemnation of Israel.
As student groups rallied in support of West and started a petition claiming he was denied tenure based on his opposition to “the settler colonial violence of Israel’s occupation of Palestine,” Harvard’s Hillel’s executive director, Rabbi Jonah C. Steinberg, was compelled to respond. In an email to students, he hit out at West for exacerbating a situation in which “scapegoating and demonizing” Jewish people was the goal, and criticized West for promoting the anti-Jewish libel.
West, in response to Steinberg, doubled down on his absurd suggestion in an interview with the student-run Crimson newspaper. “I don’t think my support of brother Bernie Sanders would have been that controversial. I don’t think my support of Black Lives Matter would have been that controversial,” he said. “I do think the support of this critique of Israeli occupation is a plausible hypothesis, given what I know about earlier candidates who have been denied [tenure].”
West did eventually quit his role as Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at the Harvard Divinity School, highlighting that the university leadership’s “hostility to the Palestinian cause” was to blame for his position being untenable.
This is my candid letter of resignation to my Harvard Dean. I try to tell the unvarnished truth about the decadence in our market-driven universities! Let us bear witness against this spiritual rot! pic.twitter.com/hCLAuNSWDu
— Cornel West (@CornelWest) July 13, 2021
Erekat Affair – August 2020
Last year, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government announced that Saeb Erekat would be one of four new fellows for its Future of Diplomacy Project. Erekat, who recently passed away, for decades served as a chief Palestinian negotiator and also as secretary-general of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
The decision to award Erekat with a position to help students “learn the lessons of effective diplomacy and statecraft” was decried by many, given that his boss Yasser Arafat in 2000 rejected a peace deal during the Camp David negotiations that would have paved the way for the creation of a Palestinian state. Thereafter, Arafat launched the Second Intifada, which saw Palestinian terrorists perpetrate numerous deadly suicide bombings on Israelis.
Furthermore, Erekat had a well-documented history of spreading falsehoods designed to stir up hatred for the Jewish state and encourage terrorism against its citizens, such as his absurd claim that Israel assassinated Arafat.
Related Video: Harvard Hires Palestinian Leader Saeb Erekat: Here’s Why it Matters
What is alarming is how the media covered these incidents. For example, while Cornel West’s resignation from Harvard was widely reported on (see here, here and here) few of the articles mentioned his furthering of an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Similarly, when Saeb Erekat was given the high-profile fellow position, much of the media was suspiciously silent, except for pieces in The New York Post and The Algemeiner, a Jewish news site. These two publications quite rightly criticized Harvard for exactly what it had done – offered a “terror apologist” and “serial liar” a position teaching impressionable students.
This fervid and seemingly new anti-Jewish sentiment among large swaths of the student body demonstrates a disturbing zeitgeist among those who might one day take over the reins of power in the United States, Israel’s foremost ally.
