Harvard became directly implicated on Oct. 8, 2023, when the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee issued a statement endorsed by more than 30 student groups that asserted “the Israeli regime” was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Students for Justice in Palestine declared Oct. 12 a “day of resistance” and had a “toolkit” ready for the encampments and demonstrations that spread beyond campus. SJP declared that Palestinian students were “PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement.” In 2001 there were no such support groups for Islamists at Harvard.
Harvard was a soft target for foreign penetration, having developed an adversarial relationship to the American government and increasingly to the country itself. Veterans of the antiwar movement banished the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps from Harvard in the 1970s and kept it off campus for 40 years. When memories of Vietnam faded, the military’s exclusion of open homosexuals became the high-minded excuse for shutting out recruiters—but not government funding. This selective antigovernment policy was reflected in the curriculum, which took an increasingly critical approach to America and Western civilization.
All these demonstrators lacked a common cause until they united around the handiest target in the history of civilization under the guise of liberating the Palestinians. Students who had been kept from marching for their country and warned against insulting every other minority jumped at the chance to attack a politically approved target. In a letter to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber acknowledges valid concerns about rising antisemitism and pledges that Harvard will continue to fight “hate” with the urgency it demands and federal law requires. Harvard’s record provides ample evidence against this claim. Campus coalitions for jihad count on liberal administrators to accommodate their assault.
The most useful of many political functions of anti-Zionism—as with antisemitism before Jews returned to their homeland—is building coalitions of grievance and blame against a small nation with a universally inflated and mostly negative image. This galvanizing enmity has united the pan-Arab and Islamist alliance against Israel since 1948. It powered the red-green coalition at the United Nations and seeds anti-Israel campus coalitions that are anti-American in all but name. Attacking only the Jews—now only Israel—is its key to becoming the world’s most powerful antidemocratic ideology.
