The shift was startling even to those who welcomed it.
In the space of just a few years, pro-Palestinian advocacy at Harvard University had transformed from a niche campus pursuit into something that felt like a cause célèbre within the student body.
When Hossam Nasr Mabed, a 2021 graduate, visited a fair for student groups as a freshman, he recalled, the booth for the Palestine Solidarity Committee was a lonely outpost flying a solitary Palestinian flag.
By the time he graduated, PSC was one of the most visible student groups at Harvard. “Now, for Keffiyeh Thursdays, they fill the Widener Library steps,” he said, referring to a weekly event where students wear Palestinian scarves as a show of solidarity at Harvard’s biggest library. “It’s crazy.”
Like pro-Palestinian groups on many elite campuses, PSC is at the center of a controversy that has consumed Harvard since Hamas attacked Israel, Israel started striking Gaza, and PSC quickly issued a statement holding the Israeli government “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
The statement, which some saw as a justification for terrorism, provoked a scandal that has not yet relented. In the six weeks since the Oct. 7 attack, students have accused each other of bigotry, donors have said they halted contributions while lambasting Harvard’s leadership, hundreds of students have protested Israel’s war in Gaza in Harvard Yard, and outside groups compiled blacklists of students who voiced pro-Palestinian views.
The saga at Harvard mirrors conflagrations at other elite campuses that laid bare a stark generational divide. It separates alumni who tend to be more sympathetic to Israel — and more familiar with its post-Holocaust roots and existential struggles — and today’s undergraduates, many of whom see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a contest between a white oppressor, the Israeli state, and a long-suffering people of color, the Palestinians.
The controversies ignited last month over disputes about how to talk about the Hamas attack, which included the murder of families in their homes, kidnapping of children, and a mass slaughter of civilians at a music festival.
Some student groups issued inflammatory statements about the attack, even offering open praise in the most extreme cases, which enraged many alumni. In the days after, university leaders came under intense pressure to denounce the Hamas attack, or Israel, or both, or neither, or students who spoke about the conflict.
As Israel pummeled Gaza to go after Hamas — killing thousands of civilians, burying children under rubble, and displacing cities’ worth of people — tensions ratcheted even further at American universities. There have been physical attacks on Jewish students, arrests at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and student takeovers of university buildings, in an escalating cycle of campus unrest not seen since the Vietnam War.
The campus conflicts of recent weeks have been extraordinary, and extraordinarily public, but the bitter disagreements at their root are not new, according to recent interviews with more than 50 university leaders, student activists, professors, and alumni, among others.
The turmoil can be seen as the culmination of years of building tensions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Harvard and other top schools. University leaders have found themselves in an ever-tightening vise, trying and often failing to strike a balance between core values: inclusion, safety, and free expression.
Students have been left, by and large, to fight it out themselves.
The growth in support for the Palestinian cause accelerated, students from both sides of the debate agree, after students returned to campus from the pandemic energized by the 2020 racial justice movement. “People saw for their own eyes, or in many cases experienced firsthand, this severe repression, police brutality” and connected it with conditions for Palestinians, Mabed, a former Harvard PSC member, said.
The 2020 movement “was a radicalizing experience for a lot of people,” he said.
It also came more than a decade into the tenure of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has supported and implemented a succession of policies that have undermined the chances for a peaceful two-state solution to the conflict.
One student from New England recalled starting at Harvard last year and being impressed by how effective PSC seemed, and also moved by the group’s advocacy. “I felt empowered that students at Harvard were using their voices to speak up for Palestine,” she said. “I wanted to join that group.” (She requested anonymity because she fears being publicly identified as pro-Palestinian.)
As PSC’s ranks swelled, some Jewish students felt their classmates’ activist fervor sometimes crossed a line and created a hostile campus climate.
During the spring 2022 semester, Ellie Green, then a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, took a seminar about Israeli national security led by Amos Yadlin, a former intelligence chief for the Israel Defense Forces, then a visiting fellow at Harvard Kennedy School.
The class became a weekly target of PSC protests. According to Green, demonstrators stood by the classroom’s door and windows shouting slogans. One of them was “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a phrase embraced by Hamas that some Jews hear as a call for Israel’s violent destruction. Some pro-Palestinian activists say the slogan is a call for the political enfranchisement of Palestinians in a new, secular state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
In a March 2022 email to the dean of the Kennedy School, Green, who is Jewish, wrote that protestors had blocked the classroom’s door while chanting the slogan. On at least one occasion, Yadlin had ended class early because “the chants were so loud we could no longer hear him,” she wrote.
“This chant and others . . . creates an extremely intimidating atmosphere,” she wrote.
Nadine Bahour, a recent Harvard graduate who works with the PSC, characterized the protests differently. “A very small group of students would go and peacefully protest outside” the classroom, she said, “not disrupting it, but holding signs and asking people to drop out of the” seminar.
The Kennedy School sent at least one security guard to keep the protesters farther from the study group, which was moved to a higher floor in the building.
Bahour, who is from the West Bank, viewed that response as part of a long-running institutional bias at Harvard against pro-Palestinian advocacy.
The weekly protest was one of a series of incidents last year that left students arguing about the boundaries of acceptable political speech.
In April, PSC installed a “Wall of Resistance” in Harvard Yard. Its 12 painted panels equated Zionism with “white supremacy” and used black-and-white imagery that seemed to evoke the Holocaust — including a train of boxcars, a propeller plane, and soldiers under an Israeli flag menacing people — to call attention to Palestinians’ plight.
It caused an uproar from some Jewish students who regarded the wall as antisemitic propaganda.
Rabbi Jonah Steinberg, then the director of Harvard Hillel, denounced the wall as a “demonizing display” that would not likely be “tolerated were such caricature and malice directed at any other ethnic, national, or religious minority represented in the Harvard community.”
Natalie Kahn, then the student president of Hillel, told the Harvard Crimson student newspaper that equating Zionism with white supremacy “is something deeply, deeply offensive to the Jewish people who, by the way, [have] been targeted by white supremacists throughout [the] years.”
Steinberg added, in an email he sent to the Hillel community: “One may take issue with various aspects of Israeli policy and society — heaven knows Israelis do!” But equating Zionism with white supremacy was an absurdity, he wrote.
“Israel is a racially diverse country,” Steinberg, now the head of the Anti-Defamation League in New England, said in a recent interview, noting that less than half the Jewish population of Israel is of European descent. “So many college students presume Israel to be a European colony wedged as a foreign body into the Middle East,” he said.
PSC leaders didn’t think it was absurd at all to describe Israel as a white supremacist state. Although Israel is multiethnic, Arab citizens of Israel face discrimination, just as people of color in the United States do, Bahour said. And the people with the most power in the Israeli government, whose policies oppress Palestinians, are of European descent, she said.
At the center of the dispute over the wall was a contentious disagreement over where to draw the line between deeply felt anti-Israel beliefs and blatant antisemitism.
“I can’t even fathom the idea that anyone would assume that these students would put up racist tropes on the panels,” Bahour said.
A couple of weeks later, the Crimson’s editorial board praised the wall and PSC’s activism. It also reversed a previous position it had taken just two years earlier. Now, it endorsed the controversial Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, a campaign to isolate Israel for its alleged human rights abuses, which some Jews and advocacy groups view as antisemitic.
“When oppression strikes anywhere in the world, resistance movements reverberate globally,” the board wrote.
The editorial provoked a backlash from Harvard alumni. And then-Harvard President Lawrence Bacow criticized the editorial at a May 2022 faculty meeting, saying, “Any suggestion of targeting or boycotting a particular group because of disagreements over the policies pursued by their governments is antithetical to what we stand for as a university,” according to the university.
The editorial proved, to some, that a realignment of student opinion had taken place. It was “evidence of a larger shift in the political climate on campus and beyond,” PSC wrote in a celebratory July 2022 essay.
On a clear August afternoon that year, Bacow stood behind a lectern on Harvard Yard and welcomed students at the convocation ceremony. “Our motto is ‘veritas,’ ” he said. “It’s the reason we exist, to seek the truth. But truth needs to be tested, needs to be revealed. And that can only happen on the anvil of competing ideas.”
After remarks by Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana, a small group of students wearing Palestinian keffiyehs interrupted the event with chants of “Free Palestine” while holding a banner that read: “Veritas? Here’s the real truth: Harvard supports Israeli Apartheid.”
The protest caused yet another dustup. For some students, the display was an inappropriate trespass at an event meant to be welcoming and inclusive.
“I found the demonstration upsetting and in all respects contrary to the spirit of Convocation,” Isaac Ohrenstein, then a freshman, told Harvard’s student weekly. “Students want to feel safe at university-wide events.”
But some new students saw the demonstration as something entirely different: a call to action.
The news was horrendous, even by the standards of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
One Israeli Harvard student awoke on Oct. 7, 2023, to countless text messages from friends and relatives trying to account for their loved ones. A close friend’s cousin was missing after attending the music festival that was attacked. A kibbutz where the student’s relatives lived had been decimated, and her family members only escaped because they had been out of town.
The student, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she fears for her safety on campus, was not the only Israeli at Harvard receiving such reports from home.
Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian students, some of them Palestinian themselves, were bracing for what they were certain would come next as Netanyahu declared war on Hamas and vowed to exact an “unprecedented price.”
Students affiliated with PSC spent much of the day on video calls drafting a statement, Bahour said.
In the evening, PSC published it on social media, and listed more than 30 other student groups that co-signed the statement. “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,” the statement said, referring to the nearly 20-year blockade of Gaza, by Israel and Egypt, that severely restricts Gazans’ freedom of movement.
“The apartheid regime is the only one to blame,” they wrote.
The statement’s purpose was “to contextualize the situation and reality in Palestine and Gaza,” Bahour said. “History did not begin on October 7.”
Whatever the students’ intentions, much of the public, and certainly a large share of Harvard alumni, viewed the statement as a justification of Hamas’s attack.
The reaction was swift and furious. Congressmen condemned the statement, scores of alumni wrote to Harvard with complaints, and former Harvard president Lawrence Summers went public with his disapprobation. “In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today,” he wrote on social media on Oct. 9.
Later that day, Harvard President Claudine Gay issued a joint statement with other Harvard leaders that mourned the “death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas . . . and by the war in Israel and Gaza now under way,” but did not label the attack as terrorism and did not distance Harvard from the student groups’ statement.
Under pressure, Gay issued another statement, on Oct. 10, that condemned the “terrorist atrocities” and said “no student group — not even 30 student groups — speaks for Harvard University.”
Still, some donors cut ties with the university and lambasted Gay for not condemning the student statement more forcefully, and more quickly. Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and Harvard alumnus, as well as other business leaders, said the names of all students who were members of groups that signed the statement should be made public so companies could avoid hiring them.
On Oct. 11, trucks drove through Harvard Square plastered with the names and faces of students purportedly linked to the controversial statement beneath the words “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” In the following days, the trucks also drove to some students’ hometowns.
On campus, some Jewish students looked on in horror as some of their classmates spoke approvingly of the Hamas attack. A Harvard undergraduate called the attack “a revolutionary breakthrough” on social media. Another said, at an Oct. 14 campus rally organized by PSC, that the Hamas militants were not terrorists and that a student group she led was “in full support of the Palestine resistance against the settler colonial apartheid regime that is Israel.”
(In a statement to the Crimson after the event, a PSC spokesperson said the group “in no way endorse[s] any message that condones, tacitly or explicitly, violence against civilians. That’s a red line. . . ”)
For both sides, the events after Oct. 7 seemed like vindication of long-held grievances. “Antisemitic rhetoric continue[s] to pervade campus,” Jacob Miller, the student president of Harvard Hillel, wrote in an email to the Harvard Corporation, which oversees the school, on Oct. 27.
That evening, in a speech she delivered at Harvard Hillel, Gay said, “The ancient specter of antisemitism, that persistent and corrosive hatred, has returned with renewed force.”
She added: “For years, this university has done too little to confront its continuing presence. No longer.”
On Nov. 9, Gay wrote in a universitywide message that she had begun examining with an advisory board “how antisemitism manifests within our community.” She also condemned the slogan, “From the river to the sea,” a move that was soon criticized by Harvard professors concerned about free expression.
(Harvard declined to comment for this story.)
Gay’s remarks reassured some Jewish students. But they left some Muslim, Arab, and pro-Palestinian students feeling ignored — further evidence, they said, that Harvard is more responsive to the concerns of Jewish students than to theirs.
“I think the inability to voice the same thing for all students is just a clear in-your-face message that you can’t ignore,” Bahour said.
On Nov. 13, as the civilian death toll in Gaza mounted, protesters gathered around the John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard and chanted, “Globalize the intifada.”
Like so much else in this conflict, the chant was like a Rorschach test. Intifada seemed to be a reference to past Palestinian uprisings that included violent protests, Hamas terrorists suicide bombing Israelis, and Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians.
On campus, the chant was heard as either a call for global unity with a righteous Palestinian resistance or an endorsement of violence against Jews in Israel and abroad.
Students could not agree.
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com.