Summers Distorts Issue of Divestment

To the editors:

As an alumnus and parent of an Harvard Business School alumnus, I was proud to see a segment of the Harvard community argue for an end to investment in firms that help maintain violence and racism in Israel.

I am appalled that the president of Harvard tried to dismiss a political argument by branding its proponents as racists—without justification. Furthermore, calling their position “anti-Semitic” corrupts the meaning of that term.

The remarks last week by Rudolf A. Scharping, the former defense minister under German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, about Jewish influence in American foreign policy was an all-too-familiar example of anti-Semitism. Similarly, if anyone in the divestment debate is saying, “Harvard supports Israel because Harvard is controlled by Jews,” that would be an example of anti-Semitism, and patently false.

However, to say that the actions of Israelis toward Palestinians over half a century have led to the violent, unresolvable conflict that country finds itself in today is an opinion with which one may agree or disagree—but it was outrageous to dismiss the argument as “anti-Semitic.” Financial support from the American government, private Americans both Jewish and Christian, the American armaments industry and American Jewish “settlers” of the West Bank have all enabled Israel’s defiant persistence with policies such as the bulldozing of Palestinian villages, closing off water supplies, denial of internationally established human rights and aggressive, escalating retaliation. Our whole world pays a devastating price (because of Islamic extremists’ rhetoric about the American-Israeli alliance) for Israel’s failure to make peace with the Palestinian people. Yes, that rhetoric is anti-Semitic; but the campaign on campuses to withhold financial support from Israel, as an inducement for change, is not. It is an exercise of free speech and the wish to apply deeply held American principles—a culture rooted in Judeo-Christian ethics—to our own institutions.

One hopes that the president and Board of Overseers will at least respect the arguments and motives of all those in Cambridge and elsewhere, racially and religiously diverse, who call for an end to knee-jerk financial support of a regime with a shameful record of racism and official terrorism toward impoverished, displaced people. The latter, by the way, deserve human rights regardless what views they themselves have come to hold toward Jews, Israelis or Americans.

Kenneth Kaye ’66

Evanston, Ill.

Sept. 21, 2002