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“One of the Worst Weeks at Harvard I’ve Ever Experienced”: The Targeting of Campus Activists [1]
['Rebecca Cadenhead', 'Joan Walsh', 'Vincent Bevins', 'Ross Barkan', 'Elie Mystal', 'Rob Rogers', 'Hunter Buchheit', 'Andrea Arroyo', 'Sarah Johnson', 'Brad Lander']
Date: 2023-10-17 09:00:00+00:00
Activism / StudentNation / “One of the Worst Weeks at Harvard I’ve Ever Experienced”: The Targeting of Campus Activists How a letter from the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee became an international news story.
Students gather at Harvard University to show their support for Palestinians in Gaza. (Joseph Prezioso / Getty)
This story was produced for StudentNation, a program of the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism , which is dedicated to highlighting the best of student journalism. For more Student Nation, check out our archive or learn more about the program here . StudentNation is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation . If you’re a student and you have an article idea, please send pitches and questions to [email protected] .
At around 7 pm on Tuesday, October 10, an NBC Boston reporter and cameraman stood outside Harvard’s Science Center. A few steps away sat an agitated-looking middle-aged man, dressed in a zip-up, jeans, and Nike sneakers, holding the leash of a labrador with an Israeli flag tucked into its collar. “They can send all of them to Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard,” he muttered.
This was the planned location of a vigil for Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, but there were few students in sight. The event had been canceled due to threats against the organizing group, Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. In its stead, organizers had placed a whiteboard in the plaza, illuminated by electric candles, with a message: solidarity vigil postponed.
Two students passed by, heading home from a nearby dining hall. “Excuse me, were you planning on attending tonight’s vigil?” The reporter asked. The students looked at her warily and continued walking. “Just doing my job,” the reporter murmured. She turned to her cameraman. “Do you think we should interview him?” she said, pointing to the middle-aged man sitting nearby.
The next morning, a small white truck equipped with a digital display on three sides began circling Harvard Square. Students had seen the truck before; in September, it was driving around with a message that declared Harvard “America’s worst university” for free speech. But this time, it displayed alternating names and faces of students, calling them “Harvard’s Leading Anti-Semites.”
In a way, these scenes represent a delayed reaction. Days earlier, on October 7, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee published a letter in response to Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians and the retaliatory Israeli attacks on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. It was cosigned by 33 student organizations.
“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” the letter began.
Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.
The letter was immediately criticized for its timing, its assertion that the Israeli government was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” and its lack of sympathy for Israeli deaths. But that weekend, discussion was mostly confined to the university. “Initially, I saw it being passed around on social media,” says Phoebe Barr, a senior involved in a few Harvard activist groups. Barr noticed that it was being discussed on Sidechat, an anonymous social media platform popular at the university. “People started posting things like, ‘Oh, my God, PSC released this statement, isn’t it so horrible?’ And then some people were defending it, saying [the PSC] weren’t condoning violence and that it was just a statement about the origins of conflict in the region and the way that governments can provoke violent attacks.”
By October 9, discussion of the letter left the university entirely. That afternoon, Larry Summers, a former Harvard president, issued a condemnation of the letter on Twitter, now known as X, which he said it was “morally unconscionable” and displayed a “lack of clarity regarding terrorism.” “In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today,” he wrote.
By the end of the day, Summers was joined by a litany of Harvard professors, students, business leaders, and politicians, including Senator Ted Cruz and Representatives Ritchie Torres and Elise Stefanik. Most argued that the letter implicitly or explicitly condoned terrorism; Stefanik wrote that the letter excused the “slaughter of innocent women and children.”
In a statement to The Harvard Crimson, a representative from the PSC wrote that the organization rejects “the accusation that our previous statement could be read as supportive of civilian deaths.” Instead, “the statement aims to contextualize the apartheid and colonial system while explicitly lamenting ‘the devastating and rising civilian toll.’”
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[1] Url:
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/harvard-university-palestine-solidarity-committee-letter/
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