The website of the Harvard University Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights describes the program as “an academic hub engaging in a broadly collaborative justice and rights-based approach” that “utilizes a decolonial framework in program development, leadership and engagement” to “dismantle power dynamics and structures that perpetuate inequities in knowledge production.”
“We are currently not accepting applications for the 2025 Palestine Social Medicine Course,” it adds.
The university suspended a partnership between its François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights and Birzeit University, a Palestinian university in Samaria near Ramallah, reported The Harvard Crimson, a student paper.
JNS has reported that Birzeit has ties to Palestinian terror.
Harvard’s public health school did not renew a memorandum of understanding with Birzeit after the agreement expired, per the Crimson. (JNS sought comment from Harvard.)
Andrea Baccarelli, the dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health, told an official university publication that he had “relaunched periodic reviews of our centers and programs to ensure the highest quality of scholarship and teaching excellence.”
“While this review is ongoing, we have halted the formal collaboration between the FXB Center and Birzeit University,” he said. “This allows the panel to objectively evaluate partnerships and collaborations and ensure the center exemplifies academic excellence in alignment with our mission. We will conduct similar periodic reviews of all our centers and programs.”
Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard, wrote that “even after egregious delay since it was pointed up right after Oct. 7, I am very glad that Harvard is curbing its institutional support for antisemitism.”
“The university at last did the right thing by suspending its partnership with terrorist-supporting Birzeit University and by moving to replacing the leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies,” he added.
In July 2024, 28 Republican members of Congress penned a letter to Alan Garber, then Harvard’s interim president, condemning the “inadequacy” of the university’s implementation changes to combat antisemitism and calling on the school to “immediately end Harvard’s relationship with Birzeit University.”
“We find Harvard’s relationship with Birzeit University, whose student government openly supports Hamas and names buildings after convicted terrorists, to be extremely concerning,” the members of Congress stated. “The university also has had a policy of barring Israeli Jews from campus.”
“Shockingly, following the Oct. 7 attack, Birzeit University posted, ‘Glory for martyrs, recovery for wounded ones and freedom for the captives,’” the lawmakers added. “This type of behavior stands in direct opposition to the values Harvard claims to uphold.”
