Harvard’s Pro-Palestine Protesters Have to Stop Weakening Their Cause

If any saying could capture the logic of Harvard’s pro-Palestine encampment it’s this: Any press is good press.

So imagine my confusion when I went to The Crimson’s website Saturday and saw that protesters had decided to boycott the only publication that’s given them consistent coverage.

Why? In significant part, because The Crimson chose to report the name of an adult who gave a speech in a public place calling the college protest movement the “student intifada” — a term that is newsworthy because, rightly or not, many take it to invoke a wave of terrorist violence that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians.

The boycott is hardly logical. The speaker in question had already been prominently identified as a pro-Palestine activist by the Boston Globe and WGBH and was giving a speech in a public place.

But that’s not my issue. My issue is that, on a campus where a significant proportion of faculty and students — myself included — believe Israel is committing atrocities in Gaza, the pro-Palestine coalition has managed to make itself so incredibly difficult to support.

After a terrorist attack that, per capita, killed about 15 times more people than 9/11, it released a statement holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the bloodshed. Then, in the months that followed the bloodiest day in Israel’s history, it chose to chant language widely understood as calling for violence against Jews in Israel. Then, after months where it had been discredited, unfairly or not, as antisemitic by critics across the nation, it released an Instagram post featuring a cartoon so blatantly antisemitic it was featured in a book on the subject.

I have listened to Harvard’s pro-Palestine activists respond to these criticisms so many times I can practically hear them now: “Israel is solely responsible.” “That’s not what intifada actually means.” “We need to reclaim ‘from the river to the sea.’” “The cartoon was an accident.”

Every single time, I just want to scream: If you think you can help stop a war, you can’t afford abstractions and excuses.

When it comes to mass movements, image is reality. It doesn’t matter what Harvard’s activists actually intended their words or actions to mean — what matters is what the millions of people whose attention they’ve drawn come away believing.

Whatever the reality may be — whatever “intifada” or “from the river to the sea” really mean, whatever really happened with the antisemitic cartoon — the image of Harvard’s pro-Palestine movement is that it is callous, antisemitic, and radical. It has given critics fodder to smear it, using language that does not convince or mobilize a single person who wasn’t already convinced and mobilized.

Of course, this does not have to be the case. The overwhelming majority of the protesters are decent and well-intentioned, and there is nothing innately radical about protesting the indiscriminate violence Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian people. It’s the opposite, actually — you would be hard-pressed to find an injustice more unambiguous, more immediately persuasive, than the live-time, live-streamed mass death of over 13,000 children.

If the protesters would just tell people simply and directly that something disgusting is happening in Gaza, they would enjoy this campus’ widespread support and begin to earn the nation’s. They could chant about the sheer scale of the violence, print fliers with pictures of it, project videos of it onto buildings, take interviews dismantling the flimsy, bad-faith arguments made by many of their opponents.

While many of Harvard’s protesters have attempted to do just this, they have become defined by the more extreme in their coalition. Before the eyes of the world, they shout catchphrases many regard as antisemitic, boycott the student press for doing its job, scream that College Dean Rakesh Khurana is “funding genocide” (he has about as much involvement in decisions about the endowment as I do), and declare ultimatums that are obviously empty threats.

Zadie Smith wrote an essay recently that made at least one obviously good point: “Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie.”

True. I am writing about protest, not engaging in it. But I am not writing to question the content of their ethical commitments, or whether they’re sincerely held — I am writing to ask that they take action capable of making good on them.

It is not enough to act at personal cost with righteous intentions — to die on the cross, to fall on the sword. The task of activism is to advance the cause, and the mere fact of the personal cost it incurs or the attention it grabs does not entail that it will do good.

Many in this movement believe themselves to be the progeny of a lineage of college protesters that ended the war in Vietnam and dismantled Apartheid in South Africa. But this is not argument by analogy — it is an article of faith, a prayer repeated in hopes that scattershot outrage might end a war.

Whether the students who protested the Vietnam War and Apartheid found a politics that succeeded — itself a historical axiom too little interrogated — says little about whether this college protest movement has. A better test by far is what we can see, and what I see is a movement with plenty of passion and absolutely no plan.

As the semester comes to a close and Harvard’s pro-Palestine encampment dwindles in size, I would urge its protesters to find a politics that truly aids their cause.

Without one, this movement will be remembered as a costly flight of fancy — not history.

Tommy Barone ’25, a Crimson Editorial chair, is a Social Studies concentrator in Currier House.