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Massive Harvard University reports demolish “campus anti-Semitism” myth; anti-Palestine bias is real [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-12
The 533 pages of interviews and analysis show “campus anti-Semitism” really means pro-Israel Zionists and megadonors “feel” offended by Palestine activism. However, anti-Palestinian hatred is violent and serious. (Originally appeared in different form in LA Progressive)
As President Donald Trump threatens to withhold federal funding and congressional Republicans joined by Atlantic magazine and established commentators crusade against Harvard University’s supposed “anti-Semitism,” the university’s exhaustive compilation of facts on all sides shows a dramatically opposite reality.
“The report was compiled and published in response to widespread pressure from donors and pro-Israel advocacy groups,” writes Jewish religion professor Atalia Omer. “It claims to document a crisis of antisemitism on campus. But what it actually reveals is Harvard’s willingness to redefine Jewish identity in narrow, ideological terms: to exclude and erase Jews who dissent from Zionism.”
In an outstanding collaboration, Harvard’s two presidential task forces on Combating Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Bias and Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias produced two massive, evidence-packed reports with startling findings – exactly what university scholarship is supposed to yield.
Task force members ranging from ardent pro-Israel Zionists to anti-Zionist Jews to pro-Palestine activists’ provide stunning insights to enable a robust (as opposed to today’s shallow, cliché-stuffed) debate. The clarity of the findings should reinforce Harvard officials’ defiance toward Trump’s and congressional bullying.
One major accomplishment was a survey of 2,295 students, faculty, and staff (Table 1) that challenges who really feels unsafe on campus.
Table 1. Student/faculty feelings about Harvard by religious affiliation
Source: Harvard task forces.
Contrary to politician, pundit, and news media deceptions, nearly four-fifths of Jewish students feel “physically safe on campus,” a far higher proportion than for Muslim students (just over half). In every case, Muslim students/faculty report considerably less safety and more negative experiences at Harvard than Jews, with Christians reporting by far the most favorable experiences.
What do Zionist students/faculty mean by “anti-Semitism”?
Politicians and commentators, indulging quips and out-of-context anecdotes, relentlessly misrepresent Jewish students as terrorized by “Jew hatred” and “appalling” bigotries inflicted by pro-Palestine activists. That grossly distorts even what Harvard Zionists themselves allege.
The Anti-Semitism task force’s 311-page report includes a detailed history of Jews’ legacy at Harvard, showing why Zionists traditionally regarded the campus as safe, friendly territory. Today, half of Harvard’s students and faculty declare no religious affiliation; of those who do, 50% are Christians, 40% are Jews, and 8% are Muslim.
The task force details the old guard’s big-donor entitlement. Following the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, “the Harvard Club of Israel addressed a letter to President [Claudine] Gay, condemning the Harvard administration’s lackluster response to the October 7th attacks and ensuing events on campus. ‘Anything less than full support for Israel’s right to defend itself and its citizens and unequivocal denunciation of this terrorism is unacceptable.’”
That is, Harvard’s pro-Israel megadonors were ordering officials to go even further than the president’s, provost’s, deans’, and 200 affiliates’ full-throated denunciation of October 7, which included a candlelight vigil, and numerous meetings with student groups.
This history also explains why Harvard’s powerful pro-Israel donors (many of whom are not Jewish) were shocked by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee’s statement that “staunchly opposes all violence against all innocent life” while holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence … The apartheid regime is the only one to blame … We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”
The PSC’s unheard-of denunciation of Israel appears to have caught Harvard’s pro-Israel legacists by surprise. Adding to their outrage and panic was the visibly massive size of Harvard’s pro-Palestine movement, augmented by hundreds of anti-Zionist Jewish students and faculty.
Certainly, Harvard’s pro-Israel and pro-Palestine statements fell well within the bounds of free speech and legitimately debatable university discourse. However, big donors, mainly billionaire Bill Ackman – invoking what critics call “the Palestine exception” – demanded that university officials shut down all debate and publicly release the names of pro-Palestine students to prevent their future employment.
“I’m not comfortable”
This history creates the setting for the task force’s remarkably coherent finding on the current situation: What politicians and pundits call “anti-Semitism” is really Harvard Zionists feeling offended.
“Many Jewish students felt doubly traumatized,” the Anti-Semitism report began, “first by the massacre of Israelis on October 7th and subsequently by the rapid transformation of the Harvard campus, especially after Israel’s military response to the massacre, into what appeared to be a space for the unfettered expression of pro-Palestinian solidarity and rage at Israel — a rage that many Jewish and especially Israeli students felt was directed against them as well.”
The words “feel” or “felt” appear 384 times in the Anti-Semitism report, while incidents of actual violence, threats, and deliberate intimidation don’t appear at all. The word “censor,” which appears 20 times, is instructive, referring solely to the “self-censorship” some Zionist students and faculty “felt” they had to impose on themselves (as opposed to overt official censorship the reports document was imposed on pro-Palestine views). Of the report’s eight specific problem areas, none involve violence or threats against Jewish students.
Numerous summaries of Zionists’ views of their treatment on campus follow. “Many of the students we spoke with described experiences of being bullied or shunned by fellow students, singled out for negative attention by instructors, and feeling ignored by administrators,” report authors concluded. “Other students reported few or no hostile encounters, but a segment still admitted to a degree of self-censorship and self-concealment about their Jewish identity and views on Israel to avoid what they perceived as potentially unpleasant situations with their classmates.”
Students’ own discomfort was seen as proof of a threat, even when they suffered nothing overt. “One student said, a group of five guys lived in a suite. The door was usually unlocked, but they had to lock it due to feelings of tension and a lack of safety in their own home.”
Said a pro-Israel faculty member: “I want to document my experience around the encampment in case it is useful to shed light on how these ‘peaceful’ protests may have impact in ways they don’t realize or intend. I don’t feel safe going into the yard at this time, not because I fear physical violence, but because I’m not comfortable being surveilled and targeted as a ‘Zionist’ by protestors using the label to be denigrating and derogatory.”
“Several Jewish students felt uncomfortable around the pro-Palestine protests,” the report summarized. In the worst case cited: “‘For almost eight months Jews living in the Yard have been yelled at, or around them, things like ‘globalize intifada.’ I experienced the second intifada in Israel, in which suicide bombers kept blowing up in civilians centers, buses, coffee shops, night clubs — murdering over a thousand children, elderly, just people. Having that chanted daily without any repercussion, recourse, or help from the University has been a complete failure of the University to protect one of its smallest minority groups.”
For the record, Muslims (a much smaller minority at Harvard than Jews) clarified that “intifada” means to “shake off,” which can have both peaceful and armed resistance connotations. Both reports note that Israel was and remains an occupying power in Gaza and is funded by Harvard investments, which provides context for use of the term. Similarly, while both Palestine rights and pro-Israeli advocates (i.e., its ruling Likud Party’s charter) describe their territory as spanning “the river to the sea,” only Palestinian use of the phrase is condemned.
The only case remotely involving physicality involved pro-Palestine students attempting to stop a Zionist student from taking pictures of protesters without permission. This incident was wildly hyped in news reports as proof of “anti-Semitic” violence and exclusion.
However, the Task Force report again provided vital context. Zionist megadonor Ackman had created a site posting a “list of student organizations” dubbed pro-Palestine while “expressing hope that employers would take note of these organizations and ensure that they do not hire any of the students involved with these organizations in the future.” Then, “a billboard truck sponsored by Accuracy in Media (AIM) drove around Harvard Square” displaying “names and photos of students alleged to be… ‘Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.’ … Reportedly over 100 students had their profiles uploaded to the aforementioned site, including contact information and social media links… Students reported such information was internal to Harvard and expressed concerns that it may have been leaked by fellow students who had access to such personal information. Moreover, they expressed concerns that when students tried to prevent other students from taking videos or photographs of protestors for fear of them being doxxed, such students in turn were threatened and at times faced threats of legal action. One especially salient case resulted in students who identified as pro-Palestinian being charged with hate crimes for attempting to stop another student from filming and potentially then doxxing protestors.”
“If there were anti-Semitic trucks driving around campus and planes flying over with anti-Semitic slogans,” one pro-Palestine student said, “I cannot help but believe Harvard would have done more to stop it.”
Anti-Zionist Jews
The task force report also included lengthy accounts of a completely ignored group: “Many Jewish students who identified as anti-Zionist reported to us that they felt the main source of hostile behavior against them was other Jewish students.” Said one: “The largest form of antisemitism I have experienced has been from other Jewish students who are interested in policing the bounds of Jewish identity one way or the other. They’ve called me a kapo [a taboo term for a Jewish collaborator with German Nazi prison camp guards and “the worst insult a Jew can give another Jew,” the Jewish Chronicle reports] or a useful idiot to Hamas or a non-Jew.”
Noted another student: The “President’s Office, administration, and [Jewish organizations] Hillel, and Chabad” all banned “anti-Zionist and Zionist-questioning people, making them feel excluded from Jewish spaces. Using the label antisemitism to take down movements or student organizers is a real misuse of antisemitism. As a result, it’s challenging to combat real forms of antisemitism that exist all over the world.”
The campus also experienced “poster wars” in which signs and placards on both sides were torn down, with many defacements linked to non-campus partisans.
The Anti-Palestinian bias report
While Zionists were feeling aggrieved at hearing views not commensurate with their legacy of deference at Harvard, pro-Palestine students and faculty were facing “genuine threats to personal safety, academic progress, and career prospects,” as well as direct censorship and exclusions, the Anti-Palestinian task force’s 222-page report found.
“Palestinian and pro-Palestine members of the Harvard community are systematically silenced, bullied, and ostracized,” the task force concluded. “…In our listening sessions we heard multiple instances of community members being physically harassed and intimated… Muslim women who wear hijab and pro-Palestinian students wearing keffiyehs spoke about facing verbal harassment, being called ‘terrorists,’ and even being spat upon.”
“I’ve received death threats and rape threats. I spend a lot of time talking to the administration,” one Muslim student reported. Muslim and pro-Palestine student complaints to officials were “met with what felt to them like complete indifference.”
“I have faced harassment and discrimination from Zionist protesters on campus for displaying pro-Palestine symbols on my backpack and attending [protests],” another student said. “They have shouted at me, video recorded me walking around campus without my consent, and physically intimidated and threatened me.”
“I myself have heard slurs and insults such as ‘terrorist’, ‘baby-killer’, ‘towelhead’, and ‘antisemite’ … because of my decision to wear a keffiyeh and show my solidarity with a people experiencing the worst crime known to humanity,” said another pro-Palestine student. “One student had their face put on a doxxing truck and their phone number and other details doxxed online,” reported another. “They received calls with death and rape threats. This was not an isolated incident.”
Added an anti-Zionist Jewish student: “When a student posts videos and pictures of other students on campus, without their consent, to nearly 10,000 followers, many of whom proceed to threaten us, call us ‘terrorists,’ ‘fake Jews,’ and ‘self-hating Jews,’ then how am I meant to feel safe on campus? … At no point have we, and certainly not myself, publicly accused specific individuals of Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, or even antisemitic behavior; yet, others like [student name] feel it is entirely appropriate to do so … Does doxxing and hate speech not also constitute a violation? The disparity here is alarming, shocking, and deeply disturbing. If the administration would like to uphold a culture of accountability, then all violations should be taken seriously, not just those that are most convenient.”
In addition to faculty feeling uncomfortable raising Palestine issues, pro-Palestine voices were more systematically discouraged, the reports document. When a lecture was organized on the health implications of the war on Gaza by a renowned physician speaker, “there were multiple attempts to get it canceled. When [the organizers] moved forward with the lecture and held it virtually, the [Harvard School] department that had agreed to sponsor only a few weeks before asked for their logo to be removed from the flyer.”
Pro-Palestinian students and faculty repeatedly reported that other campus members expressed no sympathy, and even agreement, with Israel’s attack on their family members in Gaza. The university did not offer counseling, they said.
The idiocy beyond campus
The two Harvard reports mirror the larger Middle East tragedy. On campuses, officials, politicians, and established commentators privilege Zionists’ indignation at suffering any feeling of affront while ignoring the real violence and exclusions pro-Palestine students and faculty suffer. More tragically, in the Middle East, brutalization of Israelis, as on October 7, 2023, is angrily condemned while the thousands-times worse slaughter of Palestinian civilians by Israelis before and after October 7 is dismissed.
An egregious, hardly atypical example, was Atlantic magazine’s Eliot Cohen’s tirade wildly distorting Harvard’s Anti-Semitism report. Cohen crudely redefined Zionist students’ discomfort toward pro-Palestine activism as “Jew hatred,” “widespread harassment of Jews,” “appalling incidents,” and “chronic and worsening Jew-baiting.” Nowhere would readers learn from Cohen’s rant that a companion report on anti-Palestinian bias at Harvard even existed.
This heirarchical ethno-religious attitude is rampant across the pro-Israel establishment. Any criticism of Israel and Zionists by Muslims, pro-Palestine activists, and anti-Zionist Jews and any discomfort on the part of Zionists are treated as the crime to be punished. Conversely, any action by Zionists, no matter how suppressive, violent, or barbaric, against these populations is seen as acceptable, invisible, not open to discussion.
The Harvard task force reports show collaboration by even vehemently opposed interests can amass a powerful compendium providing analytical grounding for reasoned discourse. Unfortunately, powerful pro-Israel entities, brandishing the same authoritarian zeal that has historically victimized Jews and other minorities, want no part of reasoned discourse – only the invocation of power, punishment, and even violence to enforce their way.
Mike Males formerly taught sociology at the University of California and is co-director of YouthFacts.org.
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