An encampment of pro-Palestinian students have set up camp at the Ivy League research university Harvard to protest against the institution’s involvement with companies that sell weapons to Israel and the Monday suspension of the undergraduate group Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee.
According to the university’s student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, the group was suspended after violating protest guidelines during a campus demonstration in the Harvard Yard last week.
Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton has said in a media statement that the university is “closely monitoring the situation and are prioritizing the safety and security of the campus community.”
At the same time, the protestors have called for the university to drop disciplinary action against student organizers “and commit to ending the weaponization of disciplinary policy.”
“In the past seven months, our protests against the intensifying genocidal campaign in Gaza have been met with repression, administrative targeting, willfully racist attacks, including from politicians and faculty members, and arbitrary policy changes designed to silence our voices,” the protestors said.
Hundreds of college students have since reportedly convened in the Harvard Yard and set up the encampment. Some Harvard faculty members, including Vijay Iyer, an arts professor, joined the protest to support the group’s broader demands: disclosure of Harvard’s financial ties to Israel and a severing of those ties.
According to The Harvard Crimson, University President Alan M. Garber has said he would not rule out a police response but has set a “very, very high bar” before resorting to calling law enforcement.
“If our policies were violated, particularly, if we had concerns about violence or there were any threats to safety, we would not eliminate any option from consideration,” he said.
Protestors Challenged by Jewish Student Organization
Members of Harvard Chabad, a Jewish student organization at Harvard, have pushed back against the message of the protest as anti Semitic. According to an April 24 post on social media platform X, Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, and Chaplain’s Jackie and Omri Dahan claim to have received distressed calls from first-year students who “are being confronted with terrifying chants of globalize the Intifada—a call for the murder of Jews.”
“I’m now receiving calls from their parents who are frightened to learn that Hamas supporters are being allowed to camp out in Harvard Yard—in brazen defiance to the university’s explicit guidelines—and are chanting in support of terrorism and call for the murder of Jews,” the post said.
“We call on University leadership to remove these Jew haters and Hamas lovers who are continuously and brazenly violating University code of conduct, not to mention their own humanity.”
Protests have swept across college campuses in the United States and around the world since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 in a bloody massacre, and Israel responded by saying it would launch a military campaign to neutralize Hamas’s military capabilities in Gaza that were responsible for the attack.
On Oct. 7, Hamas killed about 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians. According to the Hamas-backed health ministry in Gaza, around 34,000 Gazans have been killed since the fighting began. The ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in its death counts, but international criticism has mounted given the high death toll in Gaza.
Pro-Palestinian protests have recently led to crackdowns at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and New York. The students are demanding their schools condemn Israel’s assault on Gaza and stop doing business with companies that sell weapons to Israel. Israel’s supporters have criticized protesters for not calling on Hamas to release its hostages, which would go a long way to pressuring Israel into a ceasefire. Jewish students have expressed concern that the criticism of Israel’s handling of the war with Hamas has veered into anti-Semitism and made them feel unsafe.
Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, has called the ongoing protests “horrific” and compared them to the early days of Nazi influence in German universities in the 1930s. In an April 24 post to X, the prime minister said the violence against Jewish people needs to end immediately.
“What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty,” he said.
“It’s unconscionable. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally.”
From The Epoch Times
