My sister was standing with a couple of different college students beneath the dim glow of Harvard Yard’s outdated lampposts, casually smoking and chatting. “Oh, you’re Palestinian?” one in all them requested as he leaned in to mild his cigarette from hers. “My cousin is within the IDF [Israeli army].”
Then he positioned the cigarette in his mouth backwards, the lit finish burning between his tooth. “That is how my cousin smoked whereas taking pictures Palestinians on the border,” he mentioned. “So these idiots couldn’t see the flame.”
That night, shaken, my sister known as our dad and mom and later reported the incident to her resident tutor. She looked for a approach to file a proper grievance however discovered none. Arabs weren’t thought-about a “protected class”. Within the charged political local weather of late 2001, hate speech like this wasn’t simply tolerated – it was invisible.
Greater than twenty years later, little has modified. A report launched in April 2025 by the Harvard Presidential Process Drive on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias described a “deep-seated sense of concern” amongst Muslim and Arab college students, college and workers. The campus local weather, the report famous, was marked by “uncertainty, abandonment, risk, and isolation”. Practically half of Muslim college students surveyed mentioned they felt bodily unsafe at Harvard whereas an amazing 92 p.c of all Muslim college students, college and workers revealed that they feared skilled or educational penalties for expressing their private or political beliefs.
Harvard has normal itself as a free-speech warrior on the nationwide stage for refusing to barter with the Trump administration on its sweeping calls for for the college to drop its variety, fairness and inclusion measures and punish pupil protesters.
Nevertheless, inside Harvard’s campus partitions, we have now seen President Alan Garber oversee a scientific erasure of instructing, analysis and scholarship about Palestine, at a time when greater than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed, and a whole bunch of 1000’s extra have been forcefully displaced and are dealing with hunger beneath a relentless Israeli siege. Lengthy earlier than Harvard evaded a hostile takeover from our billionaire president, it capitulated to the calls for of its billionaire donors in issues of pupil self-discipline, campus speech and educational freedom.
To please its right-wing donors, Harvard adopted a one-sided conceptualisation of campus security, wherein talking up in opposition to Israeli state violence in the direction of Palestinians is taken into account threatening. Because of this, college directors rush to deal with anti-Semitism on campus, as they need to, however in addition they censor and get rid of speech and scholarship which is vital of Israel within the title of preventing antisemitism. In the meantime, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia are lower than an afterthought. College directors stay silent as college students, college and workers expertise doxxing, harassment and demise threats for talking up about Palestinian human rights. They’ve shared international students’ information with the Division of Homeland Safety, as college students on close by campuses have been kidnapped by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, detained and deported for objecting to Israel’s worldwide regulation violations.
Past turning a blind eye to intimidation and abuse, the college’s leaders additionally routinely take motion to erase Palestinian speech, scholarship, advocacy and views.
Final 12 months, the Harvard Company, the college’s unelected governing physique, overruled the school and barred 13 seniors from graduating for protesting the genocide in Gaza, breaking with a long time of disciplinary precedent. The college has banned the one undergraduate Palestine advocacy group twice, by inconsistent enforcement of the college’s ambiguous and “ever-evolving” occasion co-sponsorship coverage, which, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warned, “elevate[s] the specter of viewpoint discrimination”. In a little-publicised Title VI settlement from January, the US Division of Training discovered that Harvard did not meaningfully examine or sufficiently reply to 125 circumstances of discrimination and harassment reported by its nameless reporting hotline, significantly these “primarily based on Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim shared ancestry”. Though President Garber has mentioned Harvard ought to condemn “hateful speech” beneath the institutional voice coverage, this didn’t apply to the ugly “jokes” former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett made about giving college students exploding pagers for interrupting his speech at Harvard Enterprise Faculty in March 2025.
The handful of instructing and analysis packages the place college examine Palestine at Harvard have been censored, eradicated, or are beneath risk of elimination. In a matter of months, Harvard cancelled a panel that includes Palestinian kids from Gaza at Harvard Medical Faculty, ended its solely partnership with a Palestinian college, and eradicated the Faith and Public Life program on the Harvard Divinity Faculty, which addressed Israel/Palestine as a case examine. Harvard additionally dismissed the management of the Middle for Center East Research, as an “providing of types to its critics”, based on The New York Instances.
The elimination of Harvard programmes about Palestine is very chilling given that each one of Gaza’s universities have been demolished, greater than 80 p.c of its faculties have been destroyed or broken, and professors, lecturers and college students in Gaza have been systematically attacked. The UN calls this “scholasticide” – the systemic obliteration of schooling by the destruction of academic infrastructure and arrest, detention, or killing of scholars, workers, and lecturers.
The erasure and elimination of information manufacturing by Palestinians and about Palestine at Harvard and different universities chills speech in defence of Palestinian human rights within the US, and thus materially impacts the security of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Financial institution.
Presently final 12 months, campuses throughout the US skilled an unprecedented mobilisation in assist of Palestinian freedom, which put a highlight on the overwhelming public opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza. Ultimately, the opposition to Israel’s conduct in opposition to Palestinians grew to become so vocal that then-President Joe Biden – an ardent supporter of Israel – threatened an arms embargo in opposition to Israel if the humanitarian state of affairs in Gaza didn’t enhance.
At this time, after Harvard and different universities suppressed protests in opposition to Israel’s complete warfare on Gaza, Palestinian struggling and demise are met with rising silence within the US. As public and media consideration drifts away from Gaza, the stress on American leaders to intervene – and even acknowledge the size of the disaster – has all however disappeared.
The United Nations Workplace for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) not too long ago declared that “the humanitarian state of affairs in Gaza is now possible the worst it has been within the 18 months because the outbreak of hostilities.” Jonathan Whittall, the native head of OCHA, careworn that what’s unfolding in Gaza not resembles typical warfare. “Individuals in Gaza are telling me they really feel prefer it’s the deliberate dismantling of Palestinian life in plain sight,” he mentioned. Malnutrition is surging as Israel has sealed the borders to meals, drugs, and all humanitarian help for over two months. In the meantime, scenes that ought to shock the world – kids’s our bodies thrown into the air by explosions, households burned alive – have turn into what Whittall known as “on a regular basis atrocities”.
Each the Trump administration and Harvard’s billionaire donors clearly perceive the essential function universities play in shaping US society and public opinion. As Harvard leaders proclaim their dedication to “viewpoint variety”, we are able to relaxation assured that we are going to hear extra from audio system like Jared Kushner, who spoke on the Harvard Kennedy Faculty final 12 months about his plan to “end the job” and develop Gaza’s “beneficial waterfront property”, as an alternative of Palestinian baby amputees whose plight may make us really feel uncomfortable or complicit.
It’s heartening that a whole bunch of college presidents signed a letter opposing President Trump’s tried takeover of US larger schooling. However for many years, their establishments have eagerly bent to the desire of billionaire donors. In simply the previous 12 months and a half, these donors have formed all the pieces from campus speech to pupil self-discipline – even course syllabi. On this corrupt discount, the idea of “campus security” has been weaponised to suppress speech on what the UN and different human rights organisations have known as genocide. The language of anti-discrimination has been twisted to dismantle variety, fairness, and inclusion packages – Harvard’s personal DEI workplace now quietly renamed the “Workplace of Group and Campus Life”.
This second can’t be separated from a broader historical past. It echoes the 1971 Lewis Powell memo, which outlined how companies may infiltrate US establishments – particularly universities – to align them with company pursuits. At this time, the “Palestine exception” has turn into a key entry level for an ideological seize of upper schooling, a long time within the making.
For Harvard and its friends to withstand federal overreach whereas yielding to oligarchic donors will not be resistance in any respect – it’s give up. If we don’t struggle each forces collectively, we might quickly be unable to struggle in any respect. If, as President Garber wrote, “the fearless and unfettered pursuit of reality liberates humanity,” then he – and all of us – should demand that liberation with out exceptions, caveats, or concern. For each single one in all us.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
