Harvard Students Erect Tents to Protest Israel–Hamas War

A sign is seen on a gate to Harvard University to prevent encampments from being set up on their property in Cambridge, Mass., on April 22, 2024, as protests against Israel's military campaign against Hamas in Gaza grow on university campuses. JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images

Pro-Palestinian students have set up camp at Harvard University to protest against the institution’s involvement with companies that sell weapons to Israel and the April 22 suspension of the undergraduate group Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee.

The group was suspended after violating protest guidelines during a campus demonstration in Harvard Yard last week, according to The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper.

The university is “closely monitoring the situation” and “prioritizing the safety and security of the campus community,” Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton has said in a statement.

At the same time, the protesters have called for the university to drop disciplinary action against student organizers “and commit to ending the weaponization of disciplinary policy.”

“In the past seven months, our protests against the intensifying genocidal campaign in Gaza have been met with repression, administrative targeting, willfully racist attacks, including from politicians and faculty members, and arbitrary policy changes designed to silence our voices,” the protesters said.

Hundreds of college students have since reportedly convened in Harvard Yard and set up the encampment. Some Harvard faculty members, including Vijay Iyer, an arts professor, joined the protest to support the group’s broader demands: disclosure of Harvard’s financial ties to Israel and the severing of those ties.

According to The Harvard Crimson, Harvard President Alan M. Garber has said that he would not rule out a police response but has set a “very, very high bar” before resorting to calling law enforcement.

“If our policies were violated, particularly, if we had concerns about violence or there were any threats to safety, we would not eliminate any option from consideration,” he said.

Protesters Challenged by Jewish Student Organization

Members of Harvard Chabad, a Jewish student organization at Harvard, have pushed back against the message of the protest, saying it’s anti-Semitic. According to an April 24 post on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi and Chaplains Jackie and Omri Dahan claim to have received distressed calls from first-year students who “are being confronted with terrifying chants of globalize the Intifada—a call for the murder of Jews.”

“I’m now receiving calls from their parents who are frightened to learn that Hamas supporters are being allowed to camp out in Harvard Yard—in brazen defiance to the university’s explicit guidelines—and are chanting in support of terrorism and call for the murder of Jews,” the post reads.

“We call on University leadership to remove these Jew haters and Hamas lovers who are continuously and brazenly violating University code of conduct, not to mention their own humanity.”

Protests have swept across college campuses in the United States and around the world since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in a bloody massacre and since Israel responded by saying it would launch a military campaign to neutralize Hamas’s military capabilities in Gaza that were responsible for the attack.

Hamas’s attack killed about 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians. According to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza, about 34,000 Gazans have been killed since the fighting began. The ministry does not distinguish between combatants and noncombatants in its death counts, but international criticism has mounted given the high death toll in Gaza.

Pro-Palestinian protests have recently led to crackdowns at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and New York University. The students are demanding that their schools condemn Israel’s assault on Gaza and stop doing business with companies that sell weapons to Israel. Israel’s supporters have criticized protesters for not calling on Hamas to release its hostages, which would go a long way to pressuring Israel into a cease-fire. Jewish students have expressed concern that the criticism of Israel’s handling of the war with Hamas has veered into anti-Semitism and made them feel unsafe.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the ongoing protests “horrific” and compared them to the early days of Nazi influence in German universities in the 1930s. In an April 24 post on X, the prime minister said the violence against Jewish people needs to end immediately.

“What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty,” he said.

“It’s unconscionable. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally.”