‘Harvard Crimson’ gets backlash over endorsing BDS — though this time it feels different

Last week in a landmark for the nonviolent BDS campaign to boycott Israel, the student newspaper at Harvard endorsed it in an editorial, calling BDS a “living breathing movement of great promise” to “liberate” Palestinians.

Now the Harvard Crimson reports that it is facing “backlash” over its endorsement, including statements from 69 former editors and from 70 Harvard faculty saying the newspaper has endangered Jewish students. The BDS campaign is “quite simply an accelerant of antisemitism,” and endorsing it “is seriously damaging to a newspaper we love,” says a letter from another six former editors, including Linda Greenhouse, a former New York Times correspondent.

I’ll review some of the criticism in a moment, but what strikes me is that the Harvard Narrative seems different this time.

Harvard is of course quite a hilltop to capture in the U.S. discourse; and in the past, pro-Palestine progressives at Harvard have repeatedly been beaten back.

In 2002, Harvard and MIT professors abandoned a proposal to divest-from-Israel’s-military after Harvard President Lawrence Summers said that the move was antisemitic in effect if not intent. As Summers himself wrote, the profs “did not want to go near anything where they could be seen as anti-Semitic.”

Then in 2006, when the famous paper “The Israel Lobby” was published, pro-Israel Harvard faculty succeeded in stripping the Harvard Kennedy School logo from its publication as a “working paper” at the school; and Alan Dershowitz was granted the privilege of publishing a rebuttal.

More recently Cornel West was denied tenure at Harvard, and said it was because his pro-Palestinian views disturbed “donors” and the school’s “elite.” The pro-Israel figure Marty Peretz once invoked that donor power himself, saying that Summers had resigned as president in 2007 over anti-Israel sentiment– and his departure put at risk three $100 million gifts to the school. Yes and Jeffrey Epstein gave a lot of money to Harvard and pushed the Israel cause there…

This time around many of the attacks seem familiar. They’ve lost some of their bite.

Larry Summers and Alan Dershowitz are trotting out arguments they made years before, like the one that Israel enriches the world. The faculty/editors statements attacking the Crimson editorial are absent any consideration of Palestinian conditions that gave rise to the boycott movement, even as they speak of Jewish students feeling alienated on campus.

It’s like watching an old class marching into commencement, their numbers dwindling by the year. And yes, I want to say the pushback won’t succeed.

Consider that just a few weeks ago the Human Rights Clinic at the Harvard Law School teamed up with Addameer, the Palestinian prisoners’ organization, to issue a report condemning Israel for the crime of apartheid. That was also a landmark, and a sign of greater ethnic inclusion at Harvard. (Or the “decentering” of the privileged by the left; I’ll return to this theme at the end of the article.)

Here are some of the criticisms of the editorial. Many call it a threat to Jewish life.

Some 70 Harvard faculty have signed a letter saying they are “saddened,” “disheartened,” and “dismayed” by the editorial. The faculty say the editorial is antisemitic, causing Jewish students to feel alienated.

We are deeply concerned about the long-term impact of this recent staff editorial on the morale and well-being of Jewish and Zionist students at Harvard, some of whom have already reported that they have become alienated from the newspaper on account of the inhospitable culture that prevails there….In seeking to delegitimize Israel through diplomatic, economic, academic, and cultural isolation, and by opposing the very notions of Jewish peoplehood and self-determination, BDS is disrespectful of Jews, the vast majority of whom view an attachment to Israel as central to their faith identity. 

Note the claim that the “vast majority” of Jews see “an attachment to Israel” as “central to their faith identity.” Batya Ungar-Sargon put that majority at 95 percent. But if that’s true, why did only 70 faculty sign on to the statement? I suspect that there are a lot of Jewish faculty who are in some agony about what Israel has become these days, and even reject it as an element of their identity.

Sixty-nine current and former editors of the Crimson have signed an open letter decrying the editorial, “in support of Harvard’s Jewish community.”

This letter also has an old-school Zionist tone. Zionism is the “belief in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in its historic homeland… [the] Jewish iteration of an essential aspiration welcomed and cheered on when expressed by every other people on our planet.” And the BDS movement — and therefore the editorial — “lies about Jewish history.”

But the former editors never mention Israel’s occupation; and while they express solidarity with 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries, they don’t reference Palestinian refugees and the Nakba, the period of ethnic cleansing that established Israel.

(Most of the 69 former editors graduated before 2000. All six former editors signing the Greenhouse letter graduated in 1985 or earlier. But here’s a Crimson president from that era celebrating the editorial.)

The American Jewish Committee is alarmed: “Harvard’s Student Newspaper Endorses Antisemitic BDS Movement Signaling the rising tide of anti-Israel sentiments on college campuses…”

The AJC goes on to call the allegation that Israel is an apartheid state a “toxic canard” and says that two human rights groups’ reports saying as much and cited by the Crimson “have been debunked as libelous.”

Can you libel a state? Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have stood by their reports, and many in progressive circles are paying attention. Though yes, the Democratic Party says the reports besmirch Israel.

Alan Dershowitz wrote a letter to the Crimson bewailing the new mood on campus.

“The megaphone of the Crimson will increase the high rate of anti-Semitism on campuses…. It takes no courage on campuses to oppose Israel’s existence.”

Then he cites the cultural superiority of Israel, a theme among Zionists:

No country has contributed more to humanity—medically, agriculturally, scientifically, artistically – than Israel in the less than 75 years of its existence. 

In a similar vein, former Crimson president Ira Stoll wrote a letter to the editor, extolling the material advantages of the relationship to Israel. If BDS succeeds, Harvard will be vulnerable to missile attacks!

No Pfizer coronavirus vaccine — Israeli public health data was used to validate its use here in America…

No gas-saving self-driving cars equipped with Israeli Lidar technology.

It would be a less secure Harvard. No chance of using Israeli-proven missile defense technology like the Arrow or Iron Dome to protect Cambridge from missile attacks.

Michael Koplow at Israel Policy Forum is worried by the intellectual trend, the fact that the editorial blesses a statement from the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee that Zionism is “racism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, apartheid.”

This was not opposition to the manifestation of Zionism as it has been carried out by Israel, and not opposition to Israel itself, but opposition to the notion of Jewish nationalism.

Dara Horn, author of a book on antisemitism and an advocate for Israel, has a long article saying that college campuses are now hostile to Jews, and she’s glad her daughter isn’t applying to her own alma mater, Harvard. Bari Weiss posted that article to Substack.

This seems to me an important element of the story: the Jewish presence in prestige institutions is on the wane in the age of diversity. The Crimson reports that the Harvard student body is today 5.2 percent Jewish. That is quite a drop from just a few years ago, when Jews made up 10 percent of Harvard classes. While past data are not precise, other Ivy League schools have experienced drops from about 20 percent Jewish in the early 2000s to roughly 10 percent by 2018, Tablet reports in a piece lamenting the trend.

We have all seen the push on the left to “decenter” the privileged in establishment institutions; and I venture that the era in which Jews made up a large presence of the liberal establishment is coming to an end. Jews are overall a highly privileged group— and oppose BDS by about 4 to 1 (those who know about it, anyway). There used to be three Jewish Supreme Court justices, soon there will be one. When Bari Weiss leads the fight against “wokeness” for the sake of Jews, she is surely trying to maintain a large pro-Israel presence in elite institutions. Those fighting BDS at Harvard seem defensive and demoralized.

h/t James North.