Harvard pro-Palestinian protesters must stop weakening their cause

If there is a saying that could capture the logic of the pro-Palestinian camp at Harvard, it is this: all press is good press.

So imagine my confusion when I went to The Crimson’s website on Saturday and saw that protesters had decided to boycott the only publication that offered them consistent coverage.

For what? Largely because The Crimson chose to report the name of an adult who gave a speech in a public place calling the university protest movement a “Student Intifada” – a term worth publishing because, Rightly or wrongly, many see it as an invocation. a wave of terrorist violence that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians.

The boycott is hardly logical. The speaker in question had already been clearly identified as a pro-Palestinian activist by the Boston Globe and WGBH and was giving a speech in a public venue.

But that’s not my problem. My problem is that, on a campus where a significant proportion of faculty and students – myself included – believe that Israel is committing atrocities in Gaza, the pro-Palestinian coalition has managed to make itself incredibly difficult to support.

After a terrorist attack that, per capita, killed about 15 times as many people as 9/11, the government issued a statement holding Israel “fully responsible” for the bloodshed. Then, in the months following the bloodiest day in Israel’s history, he chose to chant language widely understood as a call for violence against Israel’s Jews. Then, after months of being discredited, unfairly or otherwise, as anti-Semitic by critics across the country, he posted an Instagram post featuring a drawing so blatantly anti-Semitic that it was featured in a book about subject.

I have listened to pro-Palestinian activists at Harvard respond to these critiques so often that I can practically hear them now: “Israel East solely responsible. » “That’s not the Intifada In fact means.” “We must recover ‘from the river to the sea.'” “The cartoon was an accident.”

Every time I just want to scream: if you think you can help stop a war, you can’t afford abstractions and excuses.

When it comes to mass movements, image is reality. It doesn’t matter what the Harvard activists actually meant by their words or actions – what matters is what the millions of people whose attention they attracted believe.

Whatever the reality – whatever the real meaning of “Intifada” or “from the river to the sea”, whatever really happened with the anti-Semitic caricature – the image of the pro-Palestinian movement at Harvard is insensitive , anti-Semitic and radical. He gave cause for criticism to defame him, using language that neither convinces nor mobilizes a single person who was not already convinced and mobilized.

Of course, this doesn’t have to be the case. The overwhelming majority of protesters are honest and well-intentioned, and there is nothing inherently radical about protesting the indiscriminate violence Israel inflicts on the Palestinian people. It is in fact the opposite: it would be difficult to find a clearer, more immediately compelling injustice than the mass deaths of more than 13,000 children, broadcast live and on air.

If protesters simply and directly told people that something disgusting is happening in Gaza, they would gain broad support on this campus and begin to gain that of the nation. They could chant about the scale of the violence, print leaflets with photos of it, project videos of it on buildings, take interviews dismantling the flimsy and bad faith arguments made by many of their opponents.

While many of the Harvard protesters attempted to do just that, they were defined by the most extremist in their coalition. Before the eyes of the world, they shout slogans that many consider anti-Semitic, boycott the student press because it does its job, shout that the dean of the university, Rakesh Khurana, is “financing the genocide” (he is almost (about as involved as I am in staffing decisions). ), and issue ultimatums which are obviously empty threats.

Zadie Smith recently wrote an essay that made at least one good point: “Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at a young person willing to put their own future in jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments. .”

TRUE. I write about protest, I don’t engage in it. But I am not writing to question the content of their ethical commitments, nor to find out whether they are sincere – I am writing to ask them to take measures capable of implementing them.

It is not enough to act at his expense with righteous intentions – to die on the cross, to fall on the sword. The task of activism is to advance the cause, and just because of the personal cost it incurs or the attention it attracts does not imply that it does good.

Many in this movement consider themselves descendants of a lineage of college protesters who ended the Vietnam War and dismantled apartheid in South Africa. But this is not an argument by analogy – it is an article of faith, a prayer repeated in the hope that scattered indignation can end a war.

That the students who protested the Vietnam War and apartheid found a policy that succeeded – itself an under-examined historical axiom – says little about the effectiveness of this university protest movement. What we can see is by far a better test, and what I see is a movement with a lot of passion and absolutely no plan.

As the semester draws to a close and Harvard’s pro-Palestinian camp dwindles in size, I urge its protesters to find a policy that actually helps their cause.

Without this, this movement will be remembered as a costly flight of fancy and not as a story.

Tommy Barone ’25, Crimson Editorial Chair, is a social studies concentrator at Currier House.