Why Is a Harvard Center Celebrating a Man Israel Convicted of Murder?

An Israeli district court sentenced Nasser Abu Srour to life imprisonment in 1993 on charges that he and an accomplice killed Israeli police officer Chaim Nachmani, whom a news report from the time described as having been “stabbed and bludgeoned to death.”

And yet Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies will on Oct. 1 co-sponsor a book talk on Abu Srour’s memoir, The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom. The online event listing lauds his “extraordinary writings” and “exceptional memoir,” and calls his book a “work of art that transcends his pain.”

All of this may very well be true. Abu Srour may indeed be an exceptional writer; his writing could prove inspiring to many. But platforming and celebrating him without even describing to potential attendees the crimes he’s alleged of committing is wrong — and provides yet another indication of anti-Israel bias at CMES.

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with celebrating the work and stories of inmates. Just look at Piper Kerman’s Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, which inspired the hit Netflix series of the same name.

But Abu Srour’s case is radically different. For one thing, he has propagated inflammatory calls to action.

“As long as there is no diplomatic horizon, the intifadas will continue, there will be a third, fourth and fifth intifada,” Abu Srour said in an interview with an Israeli news network in 2013.

Assuming he is not imagining a third intifada radically different from the bloody second one, his statements present as calls for violence against Israeli civilians.

I also take issue with CMES’s blatantly one-sided framing of the author’s history. The event page does not mention the fact that he was found to have participated in a murder — not by some military junta, but in a standard, civilian Israeli district court — instead stating that his life sentence stemmed from a “forced confession” for an unspecified crime.

It’s akin to scheduling a talk on the writings of would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh and calling it a discussion on the “manifesto of a radical revolutionary.”

While CMES’s decision to platform Abu Srour is disappointing, it isn’t exactly surprising. Based on the talks it has hosted and sponsored since Oct. 7, it seems to me that the Center is not quite a neutral forum for understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

CMES has in the past year offered an abundance of events with well-known pro-Palestine speakers, including “Gaza: A Colonial War?” with Columbia University professor Rashid I. Khalidi, “We Charge Genocide: The Potential and Limits of International Law” with Rutgers University professor Noura Erakat, and a book talk on “Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba.”

Even though I disagree with the criticisms of Israel these events appear to offer, it is not their very occurrence that is necessarily problematic. Rather, it’s the glaring underrepresentation of mainstream pro-Israel, Zionist speakers in its events since Oct. 7. There has not been a remotely adequate attempt to tell both sides of the story.

To repeat an overused adage, a university’s job is to teach its students how to think, not what to think. On the hot-button issue of the war between Israel and Hamas, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies should be at the forefront of offering students a wide variety of perspectives on the conflict and its roots. But by largely ignoring the Israeli perspective on what is often called the world’s most complex conflict, CMES has failed to give students and other event attendees the full range of evidence they need to reach their own conclusions.

Sadly, CMES’s behavior is not new. Back in 2021, at the outbreak of a previous round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, CMES sent out a list of “readings and digital resources” produced by faculty members with expertise in the area, the stated purpose of which was to “situate the current struggle as part of the ongoing Nakba of 1948 and in relation to the Naksa of 1967.” The first reading on the list came from the Palestine Liberation Organization’s research center — a source it is hard to imagine would offer a balanced view of the conflict.

As the war in the Middle East continues to sit at the forefront of our collective consciousness, it is incumbent upon CMES to do better. It has a responsibility to choose education, not indoctrination.

Charles M. Covit ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Lowell House.