In response to the barbaric Hamas attack on Israel over the weekend, 31 Harvard University student organizations signed a statement blaming the Jewish state for the murders, abductions, mass rapes, and terroristic atrocities it has experienced over the past few days.
The groups, which include those with such disparate purposes as the Harvard Middle Eastern and North African Law Student Association, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Palestine Caucus, and Harvard South Asians for Forward-Thinking Advocacy and Research, joined a letter calling on “the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”
The statement is clear in its finding of fault, saying the “apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” It goes on to accuse Israel of forcing Palestinians “to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden,” saying that “for the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison” and that “massacres in Gaza have already commenced.”
Nowhere in the statement do these organizations address the actions of Hamas, though they do “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
Since the letter’s publication, a large number of commentators and public officials have condemned the Harvard organizations’ posture. Ian Bremmer, president and founder of the geopolitical risk consultancy firm Eurasia Group and a foreign-affairs writer, said he “can’t imagine who would want to identify with such a group.” Princeton University professor Robert P. George posted on X (formerly Twitter) that “something is deeply, deeply wrong in academia.”
Organizations that signed the letter include the African American Resistance Organization, Amnesty International at Harvard, and the Harvard Islamic Society.
Addressing the statement, Representative Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.) wrote that “demonizing Israel — to the point of denying the humanity of Israeli victims and the inhumanity of their perpetrators — is moral confusion masquerading as moral clarity.” Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), who attended Harvard for her undergraduate studies, urged the university to condemn the sentiments these organizations expressed.
Former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers posted a thread on X Monday afternoon in which he said that, in his 50 years of affiliation with the university, he has “never been as disillusioned and alienated” as he is today, given that Harvard has yet to disavow the student organizations’ words, allowing itself to be “defined by the morally unconscionable statement . . . blaming all the violence on Israel.”
“I cannot fathom the Administration’s failure to disassociate the University and condemn this statement,” Summers wrote.