Harvard students rallied for a pro-Palestinian protest on Friday, only three days after the college’s fall semester began.
“I don’t know what you guys did this summer, but I stayed angry,” one protester shouted in the university’s Science Center Plaza, according to the Boston Globe.
Keffiyeh-wearing students responded by yelling pro-Palestinian slogans and chants of “Free, free, free Palestine, from the river to the sea.”
The demonstration was led by a student group named Harvard Out of Palestine, which held a meeting with Harvard President Alan Garber, Harvard Corporation Fellow Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Harvard Management Company staff in the Smith Campus Center, the Harvard Crimson reported.
The group raised the issue of Harvard’s endowment, demanding it divest from Israeli companies or organizations that cooperate with the Jewish state.
Harvard officials stressed that the fact of the meeting does not imply that concessions would be made. The university’s administration held a meeting on Thursday with a Jewish group of students.
Garber was appointed to lead the university until at least 2027, after filling in as the interim president following Claudine Gay’s resignation in January.
Gay presided over the Ivy League institution during seething tensions on campus over the war in Gaza.
She submitted her resignation following her remarks on antisemitism that caused a public fury. Testifying in front of Congress, the former president said that whether calls to commit genocide against Jews violated Harvard conduct were “context dependent.”
Shortly after she stepped down in January, Garber announced the formation of a university task force to tackle bias and hate against Jews and Israelis, coupled with a task force to combat “Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias.”
On-campus tensions intensified with a pro-Palestinian encampment that lasted for 20 days in April and May.
The encampment was peacefully dispersed in the wake of an agreement between the university and the rebels.
In July, 28 members of Congress sent out a letter to President Garber, citing the “inadequacy” of the Ivy League school’s antisemitism task force.
“Harvard has a serious problem with antisemitism on its campus, including ‘derision and exclusion’ of Israeli students, discrimination and harassment of students by faculty and teaching fellows, and political litmus tests in extracurricular student life,” the letter stated.
“The task force took six months to reinvent the wheel and offer an inferior set of recommendations [to fight antisemitism],” the lawmakers added. They went on to state that Harvard’s relationship with Birzeit University, located near Ramallah, “whose student government openly supports Hamas, and names buildings after convicted terrorists,” is “extremely concerning.”
Despite the introduction of new Harvard rules aimed to lower friction on campus, Garber sent out a letter in the beginning of the year stating that “We expect tension among individuals who hold opposing positions. We will surely be tested again this term.”
