The Ken Roth scandal lasted two weeks before Harvard’s Kennedy School capitulated in the face of a public relations disaster and on January 19 reversed a decision not to give the former director of Human Rights Watch a fellowship because he was critical of Israel. The reaction from the Israel lobby was swift. “Harvard surrenders to the antisemites,” said the Jewish News Service.
The good news here is that the withdrawal of the fellowship became a scandal when The Nation‘s Michael Massing broke the news of Roth’s rejection, six months after the fact. The story was all over the press, including NPR and public television, and Harvard looked terrible in every telling. We’ve never seen such an outpouring of concern for a victim of the Israel lobby. Steven Salaita and Valentina Azarova and Norman Finkelstein all lost bigger jobs at universities and had their reputations smeared with barely a peep from the mainstream press.
It’s true that Ken Roth is a suitable victim for the mainstream press. A member in good standing of the establishment, the son of a Holocaust survivor, Roth is not in the Palestinian activist community.
All the same, Roth insisted on bearing witness to Palestinian human rights abuses, and his rejection and reinstatement represent a watershed moment in the politics of Israel in the United States. The fascistic new Israeli government is waking up Americans, including many Jews, to what Israel has become. The atrocities of Jewish supremacy go on and on, with American support. The two-state solution is a cruel joke that even the State Department admits requires “triage.”
Still there was a sense this week that Americans were watching the Israel lobby overplay its hand by smearing Ken Roth, and were not falling for it. The ADL now has to go to greater lengths than ever to try to equate criticisms of Israel with antisemitism, because it sees that those criticisms are widespread, and not just on the ADL’s whipping boy, “social media.” In covering the Roth case, the New York Times finally publicized the Human Rights Watch report of 2021 calling Israel an apartheid state. That report has been outside a red line in the establishment– a line the Harvard decision is helping to erase.
And Ken Roth appears to be personally determined to expose the role of pro-Israel donors at major institutions.
There was a sense this week that the American establishment is at last facing the death of the two-state solution and Israel’s violations of international law. So this is a moment to celebrate that progress– and express pride in our role in reporting the unpleasant reality.
Could Kenneth Roth really accept the fellowship while Elmendorf remains dean of the KSG? I wonder whether Claudine Gay was involved in the KSG reversal and whether Harvard is giving Elmendorf a decent interval to submit his resignation.