Harvard’s Hyperfixation on Israel Is Academically Unserious

Harvard’s obsession with Israel isn’t just politically fraught — it’s intellectually embarrassing.

As it stares down the barrel of a potential $8 billion dollar funding cut, Harvard is rightly contending with the obvious incidents of antisemitism, like vitriolic chants at protests or last spring’s encampment. But Harvard is also suffering from an academic hyperfixation on Israel — a challenge to both its internal commitment to intellectual vitality and its effort to counter allegations of antisemitism.

It is sensible and necessary for Harvard to mount a spirited defense of viewpoint diversity, critical research projects, and academic freedom. Harvard can and should reject instances of federal overreach, but it can only credibly do so if it demonstrates a genuine commitment to academic freedom.

That starts with acknowledging that, overt antisemitism aside, a pernicious obsession with Israel exists across different pockets of the University, running counter to academic rigor and Harvard’s purported commitment to intellectual vitality.

The examples are numerous. In this week’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy newsletter, I counted at least four events and articles directly or indirectly relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

They include one featuring former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth, who has said Israel is committing genocide in Gaza “as a means, not an end;” a talk on “Power and privilege: Interrogating the roots of the health crisis in Gaza, occupied Palestine,”and perhaps most disconcertingly, a John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum on the war with Peter Beinart.

Beinart, a prominent advocate of the idea that the Jewish state should not exist, recently wrote an article criticizing how Jews celebrate Purim, a holiday marking the defeat of Haman, who sought the destruction of the Jews. “With the blood of their foes barely dry, the Jews feast and make merry,” Beinart writes. He compares that with how “establishment Jewish discourse sanitizes Israeli behavior in much the same way many Jews sanitize the book of Esther,” a book of “blood-soaked verses.”

This week’s Carr Center newsletter makes not one mention of the wars in Ukraine, the Congo, or Myanmar.

Unfortunately, this issue extends well beyond the Carr Center. Of the nearly two dozen publicly listed events the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights has hosted in the last year, nine center on Gaza or the Palestinians. How many discuss Ukraine, the Congo, and Myanmar combined? One.

While it is theoretically possible these talks offer balanced perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is reason to be skeptical. One of them features Sawsan H. Abdulrahim, a visiting scientist at the FXB Center who shared an image of a paraglider on X on Oct. 8, 2023. (On the preceding day, many terrorists invaded Israel on paragliders). Another speaker shared a post calling that dark day “natives breaking free.”

The situation is perhaps most egregious at Harvard Divinity School, where even a commencement speech delivered by Divinity School Dean Marla F. Frederick was marred by the Israel obsession. Immediately after discussing the horrors of the Holocaust’s gas chambers, Dean Frederick turned her attention to the displacement of Palestinians in 1948, declaring, “Again, hopelessness.” The Nakba was a tragedy. Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine Dean Frederick could conceive of no other point of comparison to the murder of six million Jews.

What starts with a school’s dean seldom ends there. In the school’s 2023 Religion and Public Life photo competition, more than half of the portrayed photos are of Israeli “apartheid,” “settlers,” and occupation; one features a drawing of a man with a bloodied Star and David and elongated nose hoarding water as a Palestinian man looks on. Meanwhile, photos unrelated to Israel featured a waterfall, flowers, and a communal Sikh meal.

The same HDS program has also held or co-sponsored over a dozen events touching on Israel and Palestine in the last year, featuring titles like ​“Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza” and “Decolonizing Palestine.” And again, the number of events held on Ukraine, the Congo, and Myanmar total to zero.

The obsession is obvious.

As Harvard wages the necessary battle to defend what truly matters in its looming battle with the administration — the billions of dollars Harvard receives for critical education and research — it will need to be able to make an honest case that, as University President Alan M. Garber ’76 has claimed, it is committed to the fight against antisemitism.

But when numerous Harvard centers and schools hyperfixate on the Jewish state, the veracity of that assertion is called into question.

Harvard, as the world’s top university, claims to be committed to fostering authentic intellectual vitality and diversity – it argues that academic freedom is at stake in the showdown with President Donald Trump. But the seemingly relentless portrayals of Israel as the ultimate pariah by FXB, RPL, and the Carr Center fly in the face of that. Endless, one-sided portrayals of an extraordinarily complex conflict are not academically rigorous; they are dogmatic and vitriolic.

If Harvard wants to demonstrate that intellectual vitality is more than just a buzzword, it will need to fix that. This is about more than just antisemitism.

Charles M. Covit ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Economics and Modern Middle Eastern Studies in Lowell House.