A Die-in for More Human Discourse at Harvard

Last Thursday, the Harvard Israel Initiative at Harvard Hillel took a position that pierced the delicate fabric of diverse and hopefully welcoming communities at Harvard. By inviting a commanding an officer from Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s offensive on Gaza last summer, to speak, Hillel and HII estranged the community of Harvard Palestinians, friends, and family on this campus. Beyond the realm of freedom of speech and diverse discourse, this event brought an individual who was behind the line of fire that targeted members of our community, creating an environment that is unwelcoming, exclusive, and even threatening.

This will not be the first article you see about the back-and-forth of pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli events and what they mean for our campus, but I ask this campus to consider the dimension of this particular event that should cause us to question the limits of “free discourse” on this campus while we simultaneously seek to create a safe space for our incredibly and beautifully diverse communities at Harvard.

In the summer of 2014, the Israeli military launched “Operation Protective Edge,” an offensive that ended the lives of around 2,200 people: Over 500 were children, and nearly 300 were women. Meanwhile, many Harvard students with family and friends in Gaza and the West Bank were horrified to hear the news each day, but frantic to get ahold of the most recent stories. While Gaza has been under siege for eight years and stories of the humanitarian crisis are not unfamiliar, this offensive was particularly violent.

I was a student at Harvard Summer School in Jerusalem that summer; I felt suffocated by an environment that could not face the number of deaths—and the larger number of broken families—without a political framework that merited them less weight and humanity. The politics warranted less pull on people’s consciousnesses for the deaths just 20 miles away, but when once or twice we went to bomb shelters because a siren alerted that a rocket was in the vicinity (deflected soon by an Iron Dome over our heads), the politics on this side of the geopolitical line gave us more right to be scared, express emotions, and not have our reality of danger be conditioned and exceptionalized—and not have our humanity be curtailed by politics.

No, discourse is not fair when it comes to Israel-Palestine. What else is new? They say the first victim of war is the truth. But on our campus, beyond losing truth, we cannot also lose a climate that is safe for all of its members. We cannot bring the unfair power dynamics of that conflict to this campus and call it “fair discourse.” We must represent our views to each other through speakers and scholars who are not complicit in the destruction of our peers or peers’ families and friends.

At the end of the day, the position of Hillel was to maintain that they were providing a voice that members of their community are interested in hearing. Hillel and many of its members are invested in Israel, and hearing from an Israeli soldier is a perspective they find important and necessary. However, for us Palestinians and those in solidarity, this event is not a matter of discourse on campus and hearing different perspectives—there is ample opportunity for that. Instead, Palestinians on this campus had to contend with facing someone who had a gun pointed at friends and family in another context. That is not equal footing; that is a discourse of oppressive and intimidating power dynamics. It is an expression of privilege that people at Hillel in support of this event can speak to the commander and ask questions, seeing themselves in an academic discourse or dissociated from the conditions and context of what this commanding officer represents and is. Palestinians and friends on campus cannot be expected to partake in that conversation while knowing that the person they are speaking to is actively engaged in a military operation that occupies their land and oppresses and kills their people. We should not be asked to face a soldier who, regardless of engagement in dialogue and affiliation with a member of the Harvard community, would nonetheless administer violent action against us as Palestinians.

The Palestine Solidarity Committee, of which I am a part, felt compelled to express dissent to this event because it is our role on campus to represent the voices of Palestinian students and rights of Palestinians in one of the world’s most well-known and divisive conflicts. However, we wanted to be respectful of Hillel and its importance to many students in the Harvard community and to be clear that any dissent that we expressed was explicitly against the particular event being held rather than against Hillel itself. To this end, we reached out to Dean Khurana and got in touch with Dean Lassonde, as well as with the Harvard University Police Department, to make sure that what we were planning was as respectful and unobtrusive as possible. With Dean Lassonde’s and HUPD’s approval, we decided to hold a die-in outside of Hillel and compose letters for the general Harvard community and for Hillel’s leadership to express our sincere intentions. Now, we ask the campus community to question the place of events such as these in a campus that must include and account for all of us.

The die-in represented and remembered those who died in last summer’s offensive in which Gedalia Gillis was a commanding officer. Our members and supporters laid down on the sidewalk outside of Hillel, leaving room for people to enter and exit Hillel as well as pass by, while one of us read out the names of those who died in Gaza. Others of us distributed the letters to passersby and Hillel community members explaining our position and the purpose of our event. Hillel leaders and members may contend that Gillis was the sibling of one of their members, that we may have been able to attend the event and engage in a discussion with Gillis, but to do so would have been to take part in a discourse that normalizes our vulnerability and disadvantage with the mask of “dialogue.” We believe that by respectfully expressing a dissenting perspective outside of Hillel, our die-in created a dialogue that could take place, and in fact did take place, on a more even playing field. Multiple students supportive and unsupportive of the event stopped to partake in a discussion with us, which we gratefully engaged in.

Afterwards, I stood to speak with Rabbi Jonah, as I have on a number of other occasions, including when planning Muslim-Jewish dialogue last year with my friend and the President of Hillel, Elena Hoffenberg. Rabbi Jonah has expressed that he and many others at Hillel maintain that the event played a necessary role for them and that we could have engaged with questions to the speaker. I do not expect events such as these to alter deeply entrenched perspectives on the conflict. However, I ask the campus community to answer if it would be fair to ask me and other Palestinians and allies on campus to engage in polite questioning of a military commander who led an offensive against our family and friends last summer, killing over 1,400 civilians. At that point, in honoring this soldier’s place on our campus, we would have already forgotten the broken homes and families in Gaza and outside of it. No. At least outside of Israel, Palestinians will have a place to speak free from the power dynamics that consider us less human in a political game that has displaced us and our humanity from the start. At least at Harvard we will ask for our humanity to be respected, and not eclipse recent violence or long-remembered stories of displacement that is the Palestinian narrative and reality.

Halah Ahmad ’17, a concentrator in the Comparative Study of Religion, lives in Currier House. She is part of the Palestine Solidarity Committee.