The School of Public Health’s Palestine Program is Complicit in Discrimination

The Crimson’s Oct. 11 report about the controversy over the Harvard School of Public Health’s collaboration with Birzeit University, a Palestinian university located in the West Bank, missed the central aspect of the dilemma.

The article referred mostly to the concern that Birzeit is associated with the terror organization Hamas. While many students there do express their support of Hamas, and over the years, Israel has arrested numerous students from the university for suspected involvement in terror attacks, I share the position that this troubling reality does not justify cutting academic ties with Birzeit. The university is not responsible for the appalling positions and terrible actions of some of its students. As long as Birzeit does not endorse terror, Harvard is justified in collaborating with it.

The concern, which The Crimson chose to largely ignore, is Birzeit’s official policy of academic boycott, under which it refuses any academic contact with Israeli universities or non-Palestinian Israeli scholars and calls on other universities, including Harvard, to follow suit. A letter published by Birzeit on Oct. 15, 2023 — just a week after the October 7th massacre — argues that Israeli universities “must be shunned by the international academic community.”

The real dilemma Harvard should address is whether it should collaborate with an institution that completely boycotts Israel. As an Israeli scholar who serves on a task force at my home institution, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, aimed at preventing academic boycott, I believe the proper response to calls for boycott is not counter-boycott. What is needed from Harvard is to use its collaboration with Birzeit to establish a constructive dialogue.

Harvard should insist that its academic collaboration with Birzeit will include the participation of Israeli scholars, and that the students and academics who participate in the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights do not rely only on the frameworks of “settler colonialism and structural racism,” as The Crimson reports they often do. Members of the program should also study other models, especially those capable of contributing to peace and understanding in the region rather than presenting the conflict as necessarily good-versus-evil.

It is possibly in violation of federal regulations for the University to collaborate with an institution that discriminates on the basis of national origin by boycotting Israelis. Harvard cannot turn a blind eye to this issue.

Barak Medina is a senior visiting fellow in the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School, a professor in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s faculty of law, and a member of the Hebrew University’s Initiative Against Academic Boycott.