Inside the Partnership Between Harvard Researchers and a Palestinian University

For months, Harvard alumni, politicians, and right-wing media outlets have falsely described research collaboration between scholars at the Harvard School of Public Health and at Birzeit University as a link between Harvard and Hamas.

Former University President Lawrence H. Summers wrote in a July 22 post on X that Harvard’s leadership should “discuss divorcing Birzeit.” That same month, Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.) led a letter to University leadership calling on Harvard to “immediately end” its relationship with the West Bank university.

But for researchers at Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, who often work closely with scholars at Birzeit — the oldest university in the West Bank — the criticism is nothing new.

“In this period, there has been a lot of noise, and that’s not conducive to this work,” said Yara M. Asi, a visiting scholar at the FXB Center’s Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights. “But as people studying Palestine, to some extent that noise has always existed.”

Asi, who runs the Palestine Program along with Harvard colleagues and faculty from Birzeit’s Institute of Community and Public Health, said she sees calls to cut ties with Birzeit as a threat to academic freedom.

But opposition from American critics is not the only threat the Palestine Program faces. Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, heightened violence and movement restrictions in the West Bank have forced the program’s faculty to cancel planned research trips and move its three-week summer course from the West Bank to Amman, Jordan.

Amid escalating conflict in the Middle East — and scrutiny in the American media — the Palestine Program’s faculty have done their best to continue research that they say is more urgent than ever.

“We just kind of put our head down and kept focusing on the work that we were trying to do,” Asi said.

A New Kind of International Collaboration

In March 2023, then-Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow met privately with then-Birzeit President Beshara B. Doumani during a spring break trip to Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, where he spoke with Harvard alumni and university leaders in all three countries.

The meeting in Ramallah was a rare visit between the president of Harvard and the head of a Palestinian university.

But Harvard and Birzeit are largely intertwined through the work of their researchers — like those at the FXB Center. For its leaders at the two institutions, the Palestine Program is a chance to model a new kind of international cooperation.

“We really wanted to adopt a more genuinely collaborative approach, where the program is really centered around local Palestinian institutions, as well as within Harvard, so that we’re not just another Western institution dictating to this population,” Asi said.

Doumani declined to be interviewed for this article. Bacow did not respond to an interview request.

In summer 2023, the Palestine Program launched its flagship initiative: the Palestine Social Medicine Course. The three-week class brought 30 students from the United States, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip together on Birzeit’s campus.

Beyond the course’s curriculum — which included site visits across Israel and the West Bank, and lectures from medical experts, activists, and humanitarian leaders — the instructors hoped its students would learn from each other’s experiences.

Former Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow, above, and former Birzeit President Beshara B. Doumani began the partnership. By Marina Qu

Emy P. Takinami, an instructor at another FXB Center program, and Meena N. Hasan, a primary care physician from Michigan studying for a master’s degree at HSPH, were students in the Palestine Social Medicine Course’s inaugural year.

Hasan and Takinami both recalled traveling through a territory riddled with checkpoints and blocked roads — including an encounter from the group’s trip to Hebron on July 16.

A soldier stopped them at a checkpoint giving access to Al Shuhada Street, which runs through the city’s Israeli-controlled H2 sector. Palestinian and Muslim students were not allowed beyond the barrier.

Takinami could pass. Hasan stayed behind.

Hasan described the moment as “jarring.”

“In our minds, we’re equal — and then we go to this place, and then we’re separated on divisions based on who we are,” she said.

‘Unpredictable But Steady’

The Palestine Social Medicine Course would not return to the West Bank for a second year.

In late October, the program’s leaders had begun to consider backup sites including Amman and Beirut, Lebanon.

By Oct. 31, 2023, more than twice as many people had been killed in confrontations in the West Bank than in 2022, previously the deadliest year since the United Nations Office on Humanitarian Affairs began reporting data in 2008. As reports of Israeli airstrikes and settler attacks poured in, Asi and her colleagues feared the war in Gaza would spill into the West Bank.

By early February, they made the call to hold the course in Amman.

“Ultimately, looking at how the West Bank is right now, we couldn’t have held the course as we did the first year, simply because the violence is so unpredictable but steady,” Asi said.

The violence that disrupted the FXB Center’s programming has been a constant for its partners in the West Bank.

Rita Giacaman, a Birzeit professor who founded the Institute of Community and Public Health in 1978, and has collaborated with FXB Center researchers for more than a decade, is used to working through conflict.

During the first and second intifadas — Palestinian uprisings against Israel — Giacaman brought her biology lab equipment from Birzeit to her apartment’s kitchen. She continued teaching remotely.

“We learned to use faxes at first, then email, now Zoom,” Giacaman said. “Life goes on.”

“We continue the teaching, we continue the research from afar,” she added. “But it’s not been easy.”

Years later, Birzeit is once again facing the impacts of war.

After Oct. 7, as Israel ramped up raids, airstrikes, and movement restrictions in the West Bank, Birzeit moved most of its classes online.

Since September 2023, the Israeli military has raided Birzeit’s campus at least three times, taking property from Student Council offices and arresting students. A year ago, Birzeit wrote in a public statement that more than 80 of its students were currently detained by Israel.

Giacaman estimated that it was difficult or impossible to travel to Birzeit for around one-quarter of the most recent semester. She lives in Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority and the closest major city to Birzeit. Many students come from farther away — Nablus or Jenin.

When the main arteries are blocked, students travel on dirt roads that West Bank residents built in their backyards. Sometimes, the commute takes three to four hours for students who — if they could drive freely — would live only half an hour from campus, according to Giacaman.

Under those conditions, Giacaman said, she sees education as an act of resistance.

“We resist nonviolently, positively, by building institutions, by teaching, by conducting research, and by insisting on living as much as possible our normal life,” she said.

Caught by Controversy

Like many of the FXB Center’s initiatives, the Palestine Program treads the line between research and advocacy.

Giacaman said her focus was on scholarship, not hot-button American debates — “devoid of all the political stuff that you like,” she said.

As Giacaman sees it, her work is “more so on the side of conducting research, unfolding the situation here, in the context of an occupied people.”

But that very context makes the Palestine Program’s work unavoidably political. Its research focuses on the social and economic factors affecting the health of Palestinians in Israel, the occupied territories, and the diaspora.

The Palestine Program, which works with the Harvard School of Public Health, treads the line between research and advocacy. By Zadoc I.N. Gee

Many of the Palestine Program’s papers — and a seminar it runs at the Harvard School of Public Health — use the literature of settler colonialism and structural racism to analyze health outcomes among Palestinians.

Those frameworks have become a flashpoint for critics, who see them as a poor description of Israel’s relationship to Palestinians and a major force behind pro-Palestine student protests.

At Harvard, some affiliates — including the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance — have questioned their place in Harvard’s curriculum.

“When student protesters rally for Hamas as freedom fighters and lob at Israel labels that represent the world’s worst evils, they are repeating what they are taught in classrooms and at department-sponsored events,” the HJAA wrote in a May report.

Many of the same critics have cast Harvard researchers’ work with Birzeit as, essentially, institutional support for antisemitism. Summers described it in a June speech as “a partnership with a West Bank university that supports terrorism.”

Summers and fellow critics have seized on Birzeit’s student government elections, as well as Israeli arrests of students suspected of Hamas affiliation, as evidence that the university fosters terrorist activity. Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi wrote in a statement on social media that student support for Hamas makes working with Birzeit “not only immoral but likely illegal.”

Last spring, candidates running with a Hamas-affiliated bloc won a plurality of the university’s 51 student council seats, beating out students affiliated with Fatah — the party of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas — for the second consecutive year.

HSPH spokesperson Stephanie Simon wrote in a statement that the student council was unrelated to Birzeit researchers’ partnership with Harvard.

“These student government elections are not germane to and have not affected the FXB Center’s work with the scholars and students at Birzeit’s Institute of Community and Public Health,” Simon wrote.

Birzeit itself has repeatedly condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza, describing them as an eliminationist campaign against Palestinians, and called for a boycott of Israeli universities.

An Oct. 10, 2023, post on Birzeit’s official X page — which called for “Glory for martyrs, recovery for wounded ones, and freedom for the captives” — drew particular condemnation from Stefanik and her congressional co-signatories, who hinted it was an endorsement of Hamas’ attacks. The post was part of a thread condemning the bombing of buildings at the Islamic University of Gaza.

The House letter and the HJAA also alleged that the West Bank university maintained a policy forbidding Jewish Israelis to enter its grounds — a charge stemming from a 2014 incident in which Amira Hass, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was expelled from a conference at Birzeit.

In July, HSPH spokesperson Todd Datz told The Crimson that Harvard was not aware of any such ban. Birzeit’s press office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

So far, despite public pressure, Harvard has stood by the Palestine Program. Two of its leaders, Asi and Harvard Medical School instructor Bram P. Wispelwey, said in an interview that they’ve seen no indication so far that administrators will withdraw their support.

Simon, the HSPH spokesperson, wrote in a statement that the school “is committed to rigorous research, scientific integrity, and academic freedom.”

“This commitment means we provide space for faculty to research, teach, and publish within their fields of expertise,” she added.

For her part, Giacaman said the torrent of criticism has not affected her work.

“This is the responsibility of the Harvard people, not us,” Giacaman said.

—Staff writer Tilly R. Robinson can be reached at tilly.robinson@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tillyrobin.