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February 4, 2025
The college’s adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism conflates critique of Israel with antisemitic speech, immediately attacking pro-Palestine activism and tutorial freedom.

Folks march previous Harvard Yard through the college 12 months’s first Professional-Palestinian protest.
(John Tlumacki / Getty)
As universities stay materially invested in genocide, the cut up between their acceptance of violence and a scholar consciousness that challenges that dedication continues to widen.
Harvard College stays one of many extra public websites for this wrestle. As Israel violated the ceasefire in Gaza, concurrently shifting its genocidal marketing campaign to the occupied West Financial institution, Harvard introduced new insurance policies as settlements for ongoing lawsuits towards the college. They embody the adoption of the Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-semitism, which conflates critique of Israel with antisemitic speech, and plans for a partnership with an unspecified Israeli college, particulars for which stay obscure.
As latest Harvard graduates, the announcement appears like an enormous regression within the marketing campaign for divestment, characterised by among the largest scholar mobilizations in college historical past. In Could, Harvard barred us from graduating as a consequence of our involvement within the motion for Palestine, after many people confronted suspensions and evictions. Multiple thousand college students walked out of Harvard’s commencement ceremony, protesting the college’s complicity in genocide and its focusing on of scholar dissidents.
These insurance policies cement a sample of repression that Harvard has championed since October 2023 (and extra subtly, for many years), revealing the elemental disaster of the elite American college and the nation itself. Mirroring the Trump administration, Harvard too has rejected any ambiguity in its assist for Israel’s genocidal violence.
After October 2023, Harvard directors tightened protest insurance policies for the primary time in a long time, focusing on pro-Palestine teams. College directors weaponized forms to indefinitely postpone an undergraduate referendum on divestment, privately telling us that the petition had brought about “a storm” amongst college management. In April, after disregarding repeated outreach from scholar teams looking for dialogue about Harvard’s materials complicity in genocide, the college suspended the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC). This previous fall, Harvard launched a crackdown on “study-ins,” suspending college students from libraries for silently finding out whereas sporting keffiyehs. It’s not despite, however fairly, in response to the scholar motion that Harvard is taking new, dramatic steps to silence scholar voices and reaffirm its complicity in genocide.
The settlement is a obtrusive try and appease pro-Israel pursuits underneath the brand new Trump authorities, though exterior political stress existed lengthy earlier than the present administration. Since 2023, bipartisan assaults in response to pro-Palestine scholar advocacy have led the college on a long-winded strategy of placating lawmakers. Former college President Claudine Homosexual’s resignation greatest illustrates the college’s lack of ability to learn from acquiescing to right-wing calls for. Regardless of writing a sequence of statements condemning the assaults on October 7 and the pro-Palestine scholar physique—a response steered by billionaire donors—Harvard however remained the topic of legislative scrutiny. These offensives quickly reworked into racist assaults on Homosexual and the integrity of her scholarship, resulting in her untimely resignation.
Right now, we see comparable dynamics enjoying out. As an alternative of celebrating the settlement settlement, Shabbos Kestenbaum, the lead plaintiff within the College students Towards Antisemitism lawsuit, has promised further motion towards Harvard in collaboration with the Trump administration, which platformed him on the 2024 Republican Nationwide Conference. As long as Harvard college students specific dissent towards Israel and query Zionism as a racist ideology, the college will stay a goal. The college has embraced the need of Republican lawmakers, changing into the primary important instance of instructional overhaul underneath Trump. By upholding right-wing pursuits wholeheartedly, Harvard now finds itself at a crossroads.
As college students are suspended from libraries for sticking a sheet of printer paper with a divestment slogan on their laptops, or have their levels withheld for utilizing a microphone at a protest, penalizing critique of Zionism by the IHRA definition may embolden the college to actual much more disproportionate sanctions.
The college’s coverage extends to any substantive critique of Israel, making courses, panel talks, or vigils topics of scrutiny, deeply compromising fundamental tutorial freedom within the course of. Explicitly sanctioning anti-Zionism turns school rooms into websites for revisionism relating to Israel, whitewashing its racist imprints, the colonial aspirations of its founders, the massacres that enabled its institution, and the exclusionary methods that perpetuate its existence. Critiquing Netanyahu and Israeli insurance policies as divorced from the ideological moorings of Zionism isn’t just inadequate—it’s ahistorical. College students should have the language to advance this critique.
Along with the censorship enabled by the IHRA definition, Harvard’s new strategy treats Zionists as a protected class, whereas neglecting documented xenophobic assaults on Palestinian and pro-Palestine communities on campus. Doxxing web sites function directories of Arab, Muslim, Black, and brown college students at Harvard. Our faces have been paraded on billboard vehicles and our inboxes have been flooded with demise and rape threats. By providing no institutional assist, Harvard has confirmed that pro-Palestine college students are undeserving of “safety.” The brand new insurance policies codify this racist differential.
Maybe essentially the most upsetting improvement in Harvard’s settlements is the promise to determine a partnership with an Israeli college, whereas concurrently dismissing requires a Palestine Research program. To reply to one of the crucial tangible asks of the scholar motion by establishing a brand new tie with an Israeli establishment solely furthers Harvard’s isolation alongside the Israeli state, significantly in academia. Just lately, members of the American Historic Affiliation (AHA) voted overwhelmingly to sentence the scholasticide of Gaza, paralleling a number of different tutorial boycott campaigns. As Harvard’s new partnership endorses the decimation of Gaza’s training system, it concurrently annuls any purported dedication to a simply tutorial mission.
For fifteen months, we now have witnessed the depravity of elite establishments in capitulating to war-mongering lobbies. Guided by the steadfastness of the Palestinian individuals, we’re sure that the scholar motion will escalate, holding complicit establishments accountable for abetting the primary live-streamed genocide identified to humanity. Whereas Harvard might settle these lawsuits within the courtroom, it is not going to win within the eyes of historical past.
Shraddha Joshi
Shraddha Joshi is a latest graduate of Harvard College and a Harvard-UK fellow pursuing Sociology on the College of Cambridge. She is Indian-American and research transnational id and solidarity politics with an emphasis on South Asian diaspora and Palestine.
Asmer Asrar Safi
Asmer Asrar Safi is a latest graduate of Harvard College from Lahore, Pakistan and a Rhodes Scholar on the College of Oxford. His analysis focuses on the mental historical past of Muslim revolutionary traditions in Twentieth-century South Asia.