Harvard Cannot Treat Palestine as an Afterthought

When we read an advertisement for a Harvard-sponsored training on antisemitism and Islamophobia last month, we each felt a familiar unease.

As a visibly Muslim woman in post-9/11 America, I, Alisa, was uncomfortable with the tokenism inherent in a panel featuring one “Muslim/Arab” speaker and the implication that the two identities are interchangeable. As an Israeli-American, I, Eben, was concerned about the potential for criticism of Israel to be conflated with antisemitism. I have experienced antisemitism, and I have witnessed Israeli forces raze olive trees, bomb archaeological sites, and exert disproportionate force on Palestinian civilians.

Against the backdrop of a year in which the University has routinely opposed and suppressed protest about Palestine, we were both skeptical of any sort of training on antisemitism — a concern some Harvard groups have weaponized to silence discussion of Palestine — and Islamophobia, which the University has failed to properly address.

Project Shema, one of the workshop’s hosts, has worked extensively with the Anti-Defamation League, which has a history of maligning social justice movements and aligning itself with police and right-wing leaders under the guise of civil rights.

In past trainings, Project Shema has deemed claims like “Zionism is racism” and “Israel is a genocidal state” as examples of “anti-Jewish harm.” These concerns prompted petitions across Massachusetts against Shema trainings. We followed suit at Harvard, launching a petition that garnered nearly 500 signatures from students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

At the training, we heard Zionism justified as a centuries-old movement borne out of trauma. This was alarming because such discourse ignores the historical context of Zionism as rooted in European settler-colonialism and the rising Jewish critique of Zionism. It allows Jewish trauma to be weaponized to defend Israel’s illegal occupation and the ongoing, 76-year-long Nakba which displaced 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 and killed 44,000 Palestinians and displaced 1.9 million more in the past year.

The most striking aspect of last month’s training was learning the two of us represented the silent majority of attendees. The Israel-Palestine conflict was presented as an afterthought in advertising for the training, and it certainly felt like the elephant in the room.

Ultimately, it was the attendees who taught one another by sharing their experiences from the past year: of silencing, institutional hypocrisy, and anguished complicity over Harvard’s investments in what countless scholars and human rights groups have deemed a genocide in Gaza.

After one attendee spoke up, a chorus of others offered their own thoughts in response. They were met with snaps and applause during the session and were given discreet expressions of gratitude for speaking up afterwards. It became clear that many in our community hold deep pain about what is happening in Palestine and their inability to have honest conversations about it here.

Attendees were able to shape the training into a glimpse of what a liberated campus could look like. There was palpable solidarity in the room, a visceral sense of understanding intersectional oppression that transcends religion, ethnicity, or culture. After a year of suppression of conversations about Palestine, including the last-minute cancellation of a Lowell House panel on Islamophobia and antisemitism, such solidarity was — is — sorely needed.

Last month’s training was insufficient, but its imperfections illuminated several important lessons.

First, the value of open discussion: Harvard students, faculty, and staff can and must speak openly about Palestine. The University must embrace dissent, encouraging regular community-wide discussions on Palestine, Israel, and their reverberations on our campus.

As part of these discussions, Harvard should also sponsor dedicated anti-Palestinian bias training, and not as an afterthought or hidden away in a catch-all training. Having difficult conversations and taking interpersonal risks are hallmarks of a healthy workplace, a standard that should apply to an institution of higher learning.

Second, the power of a trauma-informed approach that calls us to hold in mind the intricacies of each other’s traumas — from the Holocaust and Nakba to a livestreamed genocide in Gaza — while avoiding weaponizing or harming others with our own.

Third, the importance of learning from past mistakes. Like Harvard’s legacy of slavery initiative, its moral and financial complicity in Israel’s occupation and murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly women and children, engenders deep moral distress among our community and will not stand the test of time.

Fourth, the urgency of centering human rights. Everyone deserves safety, empathy, advocacy, education, and healthcare. There are no universities left in Gaza, only a “lost generation” of children who have been stripped of years of learning and forced to endure agonizing traumas.

We must speak openly at Harvard-affiliated hospitals and Harvard Medical School about how Israel has decimated Gaza’s healthcare system and targeted, killed, and tortured healthcare workers. We must hold accountable organizations like our own that advocate to address humanitarian crises but remain mostly silent about Palestine. Standing on the side of human rights should neither be deemed controversial nor considered a violation of Harvard’s institutional neutrality policy.

Harvard has the potential to lead the discourse on Palestine, Israel, and human rights. We must begin by stopping the silence, suppression, and double standards — Palestine must be spoken about openly, not as an afterthought.

Alisa Khan ’05 is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Eben P. Philbin is a research assistant at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.