I’m an Israeli Professor at Harvard. It Has Never Been Harder.

This piece belongs to a series of op-eds and columns to be published throughout this week reflecting on the one-year anniversary of October 7th.

—Tommy Barone ’25 and Jacob M. Miller ’25, Crimson Editorial Chairs

On the morning of Saturday, October 7th, 2023, I texted my friend Yohai to check on his family in Kibbutz Be’eri. He replied “My sister has been locked with her kids in a safe room for 9 hours. There were terrorists inside her house, but she is OK. My mother is also locked in her safe room and also had terrorists inside her house. We do not know where my dad is.”

Yohai’s sister, mom, and nephews were evacuated safely. Yohai’s dad was considered missing for two weeks until his body was identified.

Being an Israeli-American faculty member at Harvard has been complicated since then.

For starters, up to this year, I did not think of myself as a “Zionist” any more than my U.S.-born daughter is an “Americanist.” I did not consider the existence of my birth country as being up for debate.

Yet apparently, at Harvard, it is.

In an anonymous letter self-attributed to “Harvard Students” and emailed to me and over 400 other faculty members, the authors admit that some activists in their movement “will accept nothing less than total reconquest, total evacuation, or total eradication of the Jews.” Thankfully, they also included that there are some “who still believe a two-state solution could somehow work.”

On Sidechat, one Harvard student said to another that Hamas “can do whatever they can to those hostages” and that “i hope your relatives were kidnapped.”

The situation in the Middle East is complicated, yet the chants on campus have been simple. Pro-Palestine protesters argue that any offense or discomfort felt by Jewish students pales in comparison with what Gazans are experiencing.

They are right.

You don’t have to be a Palestinian to be horrified at the news from Gaza, with more than 40,000 Palestinians killed, the majority of them innocent civilians. On the other hand, even if Israel conducted itself better — as it must — this war, brought on by Hamas’ attack, was never going to be free of civilian casualties.

“Pro-Israel” activists often portray all protestors as antisemites or “pro-Hamas.” While some such elements exist, this did not match my experience when I visited the Harvard encampment. The protestors I talked to were chiefly motivated by empathy and a desire for justice. To be honest, as much as I detest the “intifada” chants, if I believed that they could help with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, I might have joined in.

But there is a troubling disconnect between the urgency of the situation and the protestors’ focus on demands such as divestment, which, even if granted, will make zero practical difference. I visited the encampment during a particularly fraught period in the ceasefire negotiations. Yet the (non-Palestinian) students I talked to did not seem to follow the news.

Afterward, I could not shake the feeling that some protestors care more about expressing their righteousness than about making an actual difference for the Palestinian people.

One manifestation of this is the calls to boycott the 2024 election or vote for third-party candidates, despite the fact that a win by former President Donald Trump — who denounced President Joe Biden for not letting Israel “finish the job” and uses “Palestinian” as a slur — will have dire consequences for Palestinians.

To make it worse, there is a new wave of support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which is notoriously explicit in its opposition to any normalization between Israelis and Arabs.

Portions of BDS have even boycotted organizations such as Standing Together, a joint Arab-Jewish peace movement that has been protesting the war and protecting humanitarian aid convoys.

Jewish settlers and Islamic militants both believe it is divinely ordained that they will eventually win the entire territory “from the river to the sea.” At Harvard, activists believe it is ordained by being “on the right side of history.”

This secular determinism is no more rational than the religious one. As I have previously written, there are about seven million Jews and seven million Arabs between the river and the sea, and neither is going anywhere. The only way for a peaceful resolution is through exactly the sort of work that the BDS movement is boycotting.

So why are intelligent and well-meaning students making demands that will have little practical impact on the people they purport to help? I worry that it is a symptom of a broader issue. Students — and, I’m sorry to say, some faculty as well — struggle to distinguish between what they want to be true and what is actually true. They put (their vision of) justice ahead of their critical faculties and accept without question assertions by those they view as representing oppressed groups.

Pursuing truth and justice are both crucially important, but as a university we should be dedicated to the former, lest we lose sight of the latter. A year after October 7th, much of Harvard is not living up to that standard.

For example, one section of a required course at the Harvard Graduate School of Education titled “Equity and Opportunity” featured a “Pyramid of White Supremacy,” which lists the Anti-Defamation League and “anti-BDS” as “coded” white supremacy, more explicit than hiring discrimination and on par with redlining, confederate symbols, and the War on Drugs.

Shortly after October 7th, 2023, a leading Harvard activist (who later decried their treatment by the University) described the massacre as “palestinian efforts to reclaim land” and was aghast that they had “read frantz fanon in no less than four classes here” but their peers “side with the colonizer.”

If this is the conclusion they came to after taking four classes on the topic, Harvard must be doing something wrong.

As any reader might have gleaned, I have taken to heart the events of October 7th and their aftermath. I have written open letters and op-eds, organized a visit by families of hostages, talked to activists on both sides and joined Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias.

But one thing I did not do was talk about it in my class. Students take my “Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science” course to learn about computer science, not my political opinions, as just as I believe these opinions to be. The best way I can teach them integrity is to just do my job.

Boaz Barak is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science.