Tag Archives: Palestine

Day of Atonement 5785

I’m an American Jew, and this year the High Holy Days of my religion have a special, and terrible, meaning for me. Another year of violence in the Middle East has brought tragedy to millions, and contributed to a surge in anti-semitism around the world. Last Monday, I found some comfort in the company of others who feel, as I do, that our community should mark this Day of Atonement with more than personal acknowledgement of what we have done wrong.

A year after a vicious Hamas attack on Israeli civilians turned long-simmering violence into open warfare, a couple of thousand non-Zionist Jews and our allies gathered in the Boston Garden. We met to grieve — not only for the more than 1200 Israelis killed on that day, and the hundreds kidnapped, but for the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in the bloody year since then, and for the Lebanese who are now also under Israeli attack. The event was organized by IfNotNow, a group devoted to ending American support for Israeli apartheid and aggression toward Palestinians.

Late on the damp Monday afternoon of that sad anniversary, before most of the crowd showed up, a young rabbinical student led us through an ancient Jewish ritual called Tashlikh. This ceremony is performed during the “Days of Awe” between Rosh HaShanah – the Jewish New Year – and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. One symbolically casts off one’s sins by throwing something in flowing water to be washed away. Usually people throw bread crumbs, but out of concern for the fish in the pond, we threw pebbles or dead leaves instead. The pond water wasn’t washing anything away, which also seemed symbolic to me.

The theme of the main event was “Every life is a universe”. Speakers included Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rabbi Toba Spitzer, Imam Ahmad Barry, and Rakeea Chesick Gordis. That young woman gave eloquent testimony to losing close friends and family members during the Gaza war, including both Israelis and Palestinians. She spoke of drowning in grief, feeling overwhelmed by waves of it. Again and again, the speakers insisted: Jews cannot be safe if Palestinians are not free.

After an hour of speeches, prayers, and songs, rain began to drip through the trees. Mosquitos emerged from the mist over the pond to ensure our discomfort. Considering the suffering we were there to commemorate, nobody complained. At one point, volunteers handed out small strips of cloth we were to rip, as a sign of mourning, and attach to our clothes.

October 12 is the Day of Atonement in the current year 5785 of the Hebrew calendar. I believe that American Jews have a lot to atone for. I am not refering to personal sins; Jews are no more or less hateful, thoughtless, or selfish than anybody else. I mean the Jewish community as a whole. For the most part, we have supported Israel for the 76 years of its existence, no matter what it did. We have pressured the US to continue sending more than $3 billion a year in military assistance to Israel, and ignored what Israel did with all those weapons.

Ever since the Holocaust killed six million Jews in Europe and the Nakba displaced three-quarters of a million Palestinians in Israel, both sides have committed too many atrocities to list. The difference is that American weapons have turned the Jewish state from David into Goliath. Israel has become a paragon of military might. Nearly all of its people are or have been soldiers. They believe they are fighting for survival, which excuses all their violence as self-defense.

According to the United Nations, from 2008 through 2020, 5590 Palestinians were killed in the ongoing hostilities, compared to 251 Israelis. There are many conflicting estimates of the casualties since the founding of Israel in 1948, but on one thing they all agree. Far more Palestinians have died than Israelis. This conflict is deeply lopsided, and not only in lives lost. The longer it goes on, the more territory originally set aside for a Palestinian state disappears into Israeli hands. Even the rubble that was Gaza is likely to get rebuilt into beach towns for Jewish tourists.

Now it seems that many American Jews have decided to drop their indifference to religion and rejoin the Jewish community. During most wars, previously apolitical people tend to rally around the flag. This is “my country, right or wrong” time. Jews everywhere have been taught to believe that Israel, and not the Torah, is the central element of our religion. In many ways, Israel has become our religion.

After 9/11, the US squandered the world’s sympathy by starting two completely unnecessary and unprovoked wars. Instead of hunting down the gang of Saudi terrorists that bombed the World Trade Center, we invaded and occupied Afghanistan and then Iraq. We killed hundreds of thousands, and made millions homeless. Now Israel has squandered the sympathy it garnered after the Hamas attack by bombing the millions of Palestinians it holds captive behind walls and military checkpoints in Gaza and the West Bank. Most of those who survive are now homeless, and many are starving.

Zionist Jews, and most Israelis, believe that this violence is justified because it’s the only way to destroy the criminal gang that is Hamas. Yet this policy is doomed to fail. Violence begets violence. Every time an Israeli bomb kills someone, Hamas can recruit more members from among the people who loved them. Zionists blame Hamas for all the destruction on both sides, just as the most extreme pro-Palestinians blame it entirely on Israel’s decades of oppression and occupation.

The truth is that there is plenty of blame to go around. So long as we find war acceptable, we all must share the blame for the loss of so many irreplaceable universes. I am grateful to IfNotNow for giving us a chance to start the new year by acknowledging our part in the ongoing crime of mass murder. May the year to come bring a ceasefire, and healing to all who suffer. We must make peace. If not now, then when?

Harvard Protest, part 5

The campers take their tents down a week before graduation, or Commencement in Harvard-speak. They believe there has been a peaceful resolution to their protest: no harm, no foul. They remove the tents without fuss so the University can proceed to set up its formal events. In return, their suspensions will be reversed so the seniors can graduate, and the rest can return to campus in the fall. President Garber has promised leniency, or so they think.

But has the University negotiated in bad faith? Although Garber’s May 14 email promises to expedite the protesters’ disciplinary cases, and he says he will ask all the Harvard schools to begin the reinstatement process for those put on involuntary leave, he never explicitly promises that they will be reinstated. And they are not. Instead, the Administrative Board — the College disciplinary body — suspends five students and puts more than 20 others on probation for participating in the 20-day encampment. This means that 13 seniors will not get their diplomas, including several Rhodes Scholars.

More than 1100 undergraduates sign a petition urging the College to overturn the sanctions. A majority of the professors present at a May 20 meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences vote to overturn the sanctions, claiming that according to University statutes, the Administrative Board is “subject to the authority” of the Faculty. The next day, more than 500 faculty and staff sign an open letter asking for the sanctions to be reversed.

During the actual Commencement ceremony on May 23, more than 1,000 people stand up and walk out. Most walk across the Cambridge Common to the Harvard-Epworth Church for an alternative graduation ceremony.

At the formal ceremony, two student speakers go off-script to condemn the sanctions. The Senior English Address speaker, Shruthi Kumar, tells the audience she is “deeply disappointed by the intolerance for freedom of speech and the right to civil disobedience on campus.” But the Ad Board, led by College Dean Rakesh Khurana, refuses to change its decisions, and the University backs it up. Or perhaps the University sticks to its decisions and the Ad Board backs it up.

Harvard Yard has hosted protest encampments many times before. The most famous occurred in 1969, when the University called in city police to arrest students occupying University Hall to protest the Vietnam War. The brutality of those arrests prompted a University-wide student strike. In 1986, students built a “shantytown” protesting Harvard’s investments in apartheid South Africa. For three weeks in 2001, as part of the Living Wage campaign, students camped in around 100 tents in the Yard to support others occupying Massachusetts Hall, where the University President’s office is located. In 2011, tents went up for Occupy Harvard. In 2014 and 2015, students blockaded Mass Hall demanding divestment from fossil fuels. In 2016, they held a sit-in supporting a dining hall workers strike.

Since the 1969 catastrophe, aside from one arrest in 2014 and some three-week probations, no serious sanctions were imposed on such demonstrations until this protest. Protesters and their sympathizers call this unprecedented degree of punishment “the Palestine exception”.

On Friday, May 31, the University holds the last of its large end-of-year events, Alumni Day. Hundreds of alumni used to form a procession on Commencement Day and march before the graduating seniors, but since COVID, alumni get our own day, a week after the students have all gone home. It’s a little odd to have such a grand procession with hardly anyone in the audience, a parade with no bystanders. Alumni are seated as we march in, filling the front rows and leaving most of the back rows nearly empty.

A friend says someone asked him why the alumni are having such trouble getting themselves into line. He answered, “Because everyone wants to be in front.”

Tiny bright green aphids rain out of the trees onto a multitude of crimson hats and gray heads. People wave red plastic clappers and flags, hold giant helium balloons, and wear red headbands with glittery pompoms on top, as though they had never worried about microplastics. My friend calls the excess of shields, banners, top hats and tails “Anglophilia”; a royal wedding would not seem out of place.

Just before President Garber stands up to speak, there is a commotion onstage. A young woman pours a vial of gold glitter onto his head, shouting “For the baby monkeys!” She is a member of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), unaffiliated with the University. She is arrested for assault and battery, trespassing, and disturbing a public assembly. Her cause has no connection to the movement against the Gaza War, except that it is also a cry against captivity, cruelty, and needless killing. When he begins to speak, Garber graciously tells the audience “I could use a little glitter,” and reaffirms the University’s commitment to free speech.

After that incident, the incursion of a couple of dozen pro-Palestine demonstrators is a bit anticlimactic. They walk up and down the aisles with banners and posters, but do not attempt to get on stage. They get loud boos and a scattering of applause. Nobody makes a move against them as they leave the Yard. I wonder if this demonstration was negotiated with the administration in advance, or if the security guards and admins simply know this group well enough by now to trust its commitment to nonviolence.

I run to catch up with the protesters. They stand in front of the Science Center for a while handing out pamphlets about the Gaza war and why Harvard should divest. Then they disperse. Nothing else seems to be happening. More student demonstrations will have to wait for this fall.

I go back to the Yard to get the free lunch.

Harvard Protest, part 4

Yesterday, Mother’s Day Sunday, was the last move-out date for freshmen. Now the campus is eerily quiet. The only noise comes from riding lawn mowers, and a supporter of the protest – not obliged to follow its policies – who is standing outside the gates with a megaphone, shouting Free, free Palestine! He calls out the University for its complicity in war, fossil fuels, and Big Pharma. Spread out on the lawns near Johnston Gate are at least five very long scrolls of canvas with the names of the dead in Gaza.

The protesters have planted an olive tree outside Harvard Hall, surrounded by placards bearing photos of people killed in Gaza, their names and ages, and the phrase “Martyred by the IDF” (Israeli Defense Forces). The placards bearing photos, names, and ages of people martyred in the October 7 Hamas attack that were in this area last week are no longer in view.

All the campers but one are talking inside a gazebo-style tent with one wall covered by the sign “Harvard Jews for Palestine.” A supporter tells me they are taking a “wellness day”. They’re discussing what to do next. The University is sure to dismantle the camp before Commencement, Harvard-speak for Graduation, which is coming up in ten days.

I missed a lot of excitement on Saturday. There were marches and rallies as scheduled, with about 200 people attending. There were also unplanned events. Some marchers sat down in Peabody Street, blocking traffic for ten minutes. They spent two minutes in silent meditation.

During all that commotion, somebody broke the big padlock on the main gate into the Yard. Evidently they decided to open up the Yard to outsiders with a bolt cutter. This too was not something the group had agreed upon. Nobody managed to get in, however, before security people installed a wire lock to close the gate again.

Now, while the students talk in the gazebo, about a dozen faculty and staff supporters form a circle outside the camp perimeter. A camper wanders by on his way to the tent. “Cookies? There are cookies?” A supporter has baked them in quantity. “Everyone needs cookies,” she says, with authority, “all the time.”

A student tells the group that Saturday was supposed to be more like a party, with music and food. But somehow, he says, “the plan ended up shifting for reasons I don’t know.” I think of the Paul Simon song “Peace Like a River,” about anti-Vietnam War protests: “And I remember misinformation followed us like a plague. Nobody knew from time to time if the plans had changed.”

The student also says that there has been a lot of struggle within the encampment, a lot of dissension, which has been exhausting for them all to deal with. The protesters include both Jews and Palestinians. I imagine that some are pushing for compromise and some for more radical action. However they continue to co-exist peacefully and collaborate in running a clean, quiet, protocol-following camp.

I read a few Crimson articles on recent developments. Wednesday night, protest representatives met with College Dean Khurana and HU President Garber, among others. The University offered to hold further conversations with the protesters and let them avoid disciplinary action if they disbanded the camp, an offer they declined. They had offered a lower bar than divestment from Israel, such as the establishment of a center for Palestine studies, but they felt the University had not come close to meeting it.

Then Garber met with the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, to discuss anti-semitism. Greenblatt conflates anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, and praises Harvard for its unwillingness to entertain the protesters’ demands. Shortly after this meeting, the first round of 20 students were placed on involuntary leave. By now, more than 60 students are facing disciplinary action. The Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine Instagram page said this showed that Harvard had capitulated to outside agitators.

I sit in dappled shade with the faculty and staff group. One of them has made bookmarks with space for messages to the protesters. She says some could use a little “parental love,” since they’ve been having difficult conversations with their families. They’re stressed, unsurprisingly, and not sleeping well. A camper asks if anybody could help them charge some of their small generators. “We need power,” he says, to laughter.

Around 3:30, seven Harvard police and security guards circle and enter the camp, filming the students. One camper tells supporters on the steps, “They’re taking pictures without our consent. Hide your faces!” I don’t need to hide mine, so I smile and flash the peace sign.

I start to leave for the day, but then I hear a commotion outside the gates. It’s a pro-Israel demonstration; tonight is the start of Israel’s Independence Day. A wild-eyed man speaks to the small crowd through a megaphone. I learn later that this man is a Columbia Business School professor, Shai Davidai. He says, “What’s at stake here is American values, which are also Israeli values. Freedom, democracy, peace. Five US citizens are being held by Hamas, the same people that they [nodding toward the encampment] are cheering on.”

This is where I lose my self-control. I letter a sign on a leaf of my notebook: “Protest does NOT cheer on Hamas. We mourn all these needless deaths.” I stick it through the bars of the iron fence. Alex, from CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), holds a small Israeli flag in front of my sign, trying to hide it. He says I’m delusional. Some pro-Palestine protesters are standing on the curb, waving Palestinian flags and chanting. When the Israeli speaker starts to list names of Hamas victims, I wish they would stop chanting for a few minutes, but they probably don’t even hear what’s going on.

The pro-Israel group sings the Israeli and American national anthems. They wave Israeli and American flags. The speaker taunts the pro-Palestine group, which is chanting “USA, USA, how many kids did you kill today?” Why don’t you honor your own country’s flag, he asks. One student turns around and snaps a smart, ironic salute.

After the rally, Davidai speaks at length to a Crimson reporter, Frank Zhou. I hear him claim that Jews and Israelis are not safe around the encampment. I try to tell Frank that I have photos of a dozen pro-Israel demonstrators entering the middle of the camp, singing songs and chanting. Nobody bothered them. Frank seems distracted since Davidai does not stop talking at him. When his article appears in the Crimson, it reports what Davidai said, without investigating or refuting any of his claims. I certainly believe Jews have been experiencing anti-semitism on campus; unfortunately it is as endemic to our society as any other form of racism. The encampment, however, has not been practicing it.

When I go back to rest on the steps of University Hall with other camp supporters, a student comes over and delivers the gentlest possible rebuke, reminding us (not looking at me especially) not to engage with counter demonstrators. I am embarrassed. The students have shown tremendous discipline and self-restraint. I failed to show equal maturity, and egregiously violated camp protocol. I think most of them agree with what my sign said, but I had no right to speak for them.

Now I hear on the news that the students have agreed to dismantle their camp immediately, and the University has agreed to rescind their punishments. I feel proud of both the protesters and the University. Protests won’t end so long as the misery of Gaza continues. But Harvard and its students have managed to close this phase with a degree of dignity and mutual respect that few other universities have achieved. To this, I can only say, Shukran, and Mazel tov.

Harvard Protest part 3

Friday, May 10, is a cool, sunny day. Rising sophomores who lived in the Yard this year are carrying mattresses, couches, and huge cardboard boxes from their dorms. Parents have only 20 minutes to park in the Yard to receive them. The protest tents are not in the way, though so many gates are closed that there is some level of inconvenience for cars coming and going.

A few pro-Israel counter protesters play pop music on a radio very loudly, right next to the encampment, which is deep in discussion as usual. I don’t know why the music stops after a few minutes.

A protester asks friends on the steps of University Hall to help clean up the wet, dirty tarps on the “event space” next to the tents. Another remarks, laughing, “I haven’t had a shower in a week.”

People I knew from my campus labor union tell me that students who have been suspended or put on involuntary leave seem to have been chosen almost at random. They aren’t leaders or organizers, or even necessarily people who slept in the tents overnight. It’s more a matter of someone in the administration happening to see and recognize them, in spite of the masks or scarves many have been wearing.

Another press conference is scheduled for 2 pm. Most protesters go all the way around through the Science Center gates to get outside Johnston Gate where the press is gathering. I don’t want to walk that far, and I can’t hear the speakers anyway. Yard security and campus police are present, though not in great numbers; the tall bald guy who looks the most serious squats on his heels on a nearby path. The University’s president Garber comes out of Massachusetts Hall now and then, accompanied by a guard. I haven’t seen anyone else approach him.

Outside the gate, the crowd is chanting “Free free Palestine! Long live Palestine!” The Harvard protesters appear to have decided not to use the inflammatory chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or to call for an intifada, which means uprising or resistance.

I hear one woman, annoyed at not being allowed in, ask a guard about Askwith Hall, which is blocks away from the Yard at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is not happy with his answer, and says to her companion, “Okay, let’s go to the media.”

My union friends and a rainbow-haired woman from the Business School think Harvard is treating this protest more harshly than previous encampments. They call it “the Palestine exception.” A student worker wonders if they lose ID access to buildings because of the disciplinary process, will that be grievable through the union.

About 25 people attend a Muslim service in the “event space.” The young man leading the service often lapses into Arabic, but from what I can understand, he’s mostly talking about how we will return to the Creator after death. He talks about how many lives have been lost, and how many hospitals, homes, and schools turned to dust. He talks about “the dead earth” left behind, and “the will to destroy.” He says of the Israelis, “They built upon the imaginary [sic] that there was no one living in the land, that it was empty earth.”

The speaker says, “Somebody has taken the desires of their own heart as God,” taking for themselves the powers that should only belong to Allah. He notes that an Israeli real estate company is already trying to sell land for housing and luxury hotels in Gaza.

The most aggressive counter protester stands next to me. “Do you believe in this?” No, I say, I’m just listening. “You see they separate the women from the men.” So do orthodox Jews, I respond. “But this is 2024!” he says. Yes, I reply, and I don’t like it either, in any religion.

A helicopter hovers low overhead, evidently trying to disrupt the service. When the sermon ends and people bow and pray, I notice it sounds a lot like the davening during a Jewish service.

Supportive faculty and staff form a circle and hand out identifying pins, with the watermelon logo of these protests, and orange vests saying Faculty and Staff so they’re not taken for camp marshals. They expect the University to take the tents down soon, in the middle of the night.

A student who says he’s going to be “Ad Boarded” in a few minutes tells us about a supposedly secret meeting with President Garber. All the president did was tell the protesters how the endowment works. The student says 10 to 15 students were put on involuntary leave during the first raid this morning. Some never had their IDs checked at the protest, but most had been highly visible.

A student marshal in an orange vest speaks to a circle of others. “Don’t engage with police. Our job is to de-escalate.” She says some things I don’t understand. What is a stretchie, and how does it crack?

Later in the afternoon there’s a march and rally, attended by many more people than hang out in the camp. They go all around the Yard after surrounding Mass Hall for a while. I don’t go with them. I hate chants, and I’m tired.

A counter protester accuses one of the protesters of removing his sign from the foot of the John Harvard statue. “Not cool!” he says. A protester points out that the sign is still there; the wind blew it over. “You’re just not looking.” The wind has strengthened so that while workers try to lower the big American flag over the statue, it twists around the pole so they have to raise it, shake it, and try lowering it again several times before they get it down.

As I leave the Yard, I hear a brass band. Has somebody taken protest music to the next level? Then I spot a tuba over the head of a joyful line of people snaking down the Holyoke Street sidewalk, waving white kerchiefs. It’s not a protest. It’s a wedding. In the middle of all this difficulty and angst, life goes on.

Harvard Protest part 2

It’s Monday, May 6. At the Harvard Square T station, around 200 excited kids carrying signs, wearing kaffiyehs, or bearing small Palestinian flags are heading for a high school demonstration on Boston Commons. A girl with a megaphone reminds them, “This is NOT a confrontation. If you are approached by counter-protesters, DO NOT ENGAGE.”

The Yard entry gates are very busy. Parents are driving in to pick up freshmen who have finished final exams. Other students are rushing back and forth from their dorms to the libraries, or to take their finals. Students wait in line to get past the security personnel who are checking IDs. I thank Ali, a high-ranking member of the security staff, for their good work in keeping students safe. I’ve known him for years as sweet-tempered, friendly, but alert. He acknowledges the praise with a big smile.

The mood in the camp is much more tense than when I visited last week. Vague threats have been exchanged between the Administration and the protesters. Few campers are available to speak with the (Harvard-affiliated) public; most sit in a circle in the middle of the tents, deep in conversation for hours.

I walk the perimeter of the encampment with M, a small woman in a headscarf. I ask her if the camp would like more alumni to show up as protection, liaisons, or just moral support. She texts the organizers, but says she thinks they would appreciate it.

Students not involved with the protest are ignoring it. A few are playing frisbee in a roped-off area that only contains a few tents in one corner. I hear a girl say, “I’ve got a 20 page paper due tonight. I’d better stop putting it off.” It’s a lovely warm day. The temptation to put that paper off must be pretty severe.

Some protesters or supporters are sitting on the steps of University Hall. The doors at the top of the stairs have been locked since the protest started. I overhear a discussion of the legal ramifications of Harvard’s threatened actions. Some protesters can’t afford to lose their housing. One says she only spent three nights in the tents, worried about the consequences. There are rumors of hunger strikes.

Rakesh Khurana, the Dean of the College, won’t meet my eyes or talk with me, even though (or because) I worked for him for several years. I spot him talking with a well-dressed man in late middle age, though, or rather listening while the man speaks emphatically, gesturing toward the camp. Rakesh looks unhappy but meek, as though he’s being reprimanded by his superior. The man says “I walk through here several times a day and I’ve never seen any kind of disruption.” I wonder if the man is a professor, an alum, or a donor. Rakesh asks him, “Do you have a generous interpretation of what they’re doing?” I can’t hear his answer.

I have an unexpectedly pleasant conversation with Gid’on, the counter-demonstrator I walked rounds with last week. He says he’s a leftie on most issues. We talk about Venn diagrams of our opinions. We are both frustrated with the lack of real dialogue between moderates on both sides. I say, can’t we agree we all want the killing to stop? He says, maybe we argue and you raise three points. On the first, I’m secure in my opinion. On the second, I think, that’s interesting. The third is persuasive and I think, maybe I have to reconsider.

Gid’on is hopeful that there will be real campus discussions this fall. I suggest round tables where we can get past shouting “Nakba” and “Holocaust” at one another, where we can just talk. Gid’on says that would be a good name for a series: Let’s Just Talk. Since it’s Harvard, we’d need an acronym: LJT. We laugh and go our separate ways.

I eavesdrop on a young person in an Ironmaiden tee shirt, who I think is Israeli and trans, talking to a beautiful and sympathetic middle-aged woman. They tell her that the militarization of Israeli culture starts when kids are ten years old: chanting, marching, and singing patriotic songs. If Israelis refuse to serve in the army, it hurts their career chances. This person’s younger brother is in prison for defecting. Once his term is over he’ll go back on trial and get another 100 days. “He’ll end his puberty in prison.” His job was coordinating night-time raids on people’s homes. He soon found out he’d been lied to about what the soldiers were doing and why. “Israeli kids don’t imagine that they have counterparts on the other side of the fence. It’s all so absurd…” they say.

They go on: “If you’re forced to commit atrocities for your country, you find ways to justify it…Israel is basically a military outpost of the United States.” Their sister is a Major in aerial defense. “We disagree…I love my family, but they’ve been sold so hard on these lies…My father grew up in Toronto. His synagogue had molotov cocktails thrown through its windows.”

The camp liaisons are wearing pink vests. A passerby asks one what he can do to help. “Tell people we’re not being violent.”

M tells me there’s going to be a press conference at the Johnston Gate at 5pm. I head over there a few minutes early. Two chairs are set up near the unoccupied guardhouse, and I sit in one to rest my aging bones. I figure I’ll get up when asked, but nobody ever asks.

The press are already crowding outside the gate, photographers grimacing as they try to fit their lenses between the bars. One reporter calls out to me, “Would you open the gate?” Nope. I take a picture of them, which seems to amuse a few. “Are you with the Gazette?” one asks. “I’m not with anybody,” I say.

Now the counter-protesters show up. I agree with some of their (professionally printed) signs. “Free Israelis and Palestinians from Hamas terrorists.” If only. A reporter calls out, “Did Bill Ackman pay for those signs?” One responds, “No, George Soros. We scammed him.”

Someone outside the gates yells, “Shame on you! Are you Jewish? Shame on you for defending genocide!” This guy says he’s not Jewish, but he has friends whose parents survived the Warsaw ghetto.

When the pro-Palestinian protesters arrive, there is some jostling while the counter protesters try to hold their signs in front. Nobody goes as far as actual shoving. I see people trying to be courteous about sharing the space. A papermache missile that must be eight feet long reading “Paid for by Harvard” gets held over my head, with apologies. One girl stands on a guy’s shoulders and leans against the iron railings to hold up her Free Palestine sign.

I imagine what the reporters are seeing: photos of Israeli hostages and children killed in the Hamas raid; photos of starving Palestinian children. This jumble of imagery seems only appropriate. Why is it that we can’t mourn all this suffering together?

I leave the camp while a camp spokesperson is still addressing the press. I hear they will not take questions. Outside the gate, some policemen are hanging around. Asked if they’re Harvard police, they say, “No, we’re not as cool, but we try.” One mishears me and thinks I said something about ice cream. Another says that might help the situation, if everybody got some. I say, Good idea, let’s have a party and just talk! They laugh and tell me to stay safe.

Harvard Protest part 1

When I left Medford, it was a warm sunny day. In Harvard Square, it was chilly, damp, windy, and overcast. The mood of the encampment was equally gray. The students had just received a warning from the Ad Board that if they continued to camp outside University Hall they would face serious consequences. They were busy texting their family and friends, and possibly lawyers and media as well. I was there most of the afternoon from around noon until past 4 pm, and nobody was shouting, chanting, or using a bullhorn. There was one very interesting session on Palestinian textiles, especially the kaffiyeh and embroidery (tatreez), attended by half a dozen women.

If people are concerned about a kaffiyeh being draped over the John Harvard statue, I would remind them that it is an ancient Harvard custom for frat boys to piss on it.

I tried to respect the community norms. First I spoke with a nice young woman who was patrolling the perimeter of the camp, to find out with whom I should speak, as a friend of the camp and not a member of the media. She promised to find me a member of the outreach committee. Meanwhile I took photos, careful not to include anyone’s face.

The signs outside the tents were hardly combative. Demands were posted, for HU to disclose and divest from its investments in Israel, and to drop all charges against students for their activism. I doubt any of the protesters expect these demands to be met. Other signs said: While you read, Gaza bleeds; Nationalism is Chametz (Hebrew for food prohibited on Passover); No Justice, No Peace, Palestine will never walk alone; Harvard invests in Palestinian death; and a big banner saying Harvard Jews for Palestine.

As for the slogan “From the river to the sea,” it first appeared in the original charter of Israel’s Likud party, where it did not refer to a hoped-for multi-ethnic democracy.

I chatted up several people while I waited. I asked if any administrators had opened a dialogue with them; they said not yet, but they were trying to negotiate something.

The students are risking their academic careers, and probably the wrath of their parents. As always with student protests, they are among the University’s most thoughtful, serious, and conscientious affiliates. They have a lot to lose and nothing to gain, on a personal level. What is the administration afraid of? Losing Zionist donations; and losing even more face than it has since it bumped its first Black president over…not much. Looks like somebody could go out with a handheld mic and just let people talk.

Finally I got to speak with one of the organizers, a Palestinian freshman named Mahmoud. He and many others have been protesting since Israel began its crazy over-reaction to the brutal Hamas attack in October. He said “The administration doesn’t understand that repression fuels us to fight harder.” The community is committed to non-violence, he told me.

As I started to leave, a man approached the camp wearing a kippah and a scarf with Stars of David on it. The perimeter-walker I first met was tailing him, much to his annoyance. She wouldn’t talk to him, which he thought was rude; I agreed, but I pointed out she was probably following camp protocol, and the idea was certainly to protect both him and the protesters. I made four or five rounds of the camp with this guy and the very determined young woman. She had probably never been called rude in her life. She couldn’t talk to the guy; he refused to tell me anything about himself or his opinions since he thought she was recording him; so I talked to him. As usual in such discussions, we got nowhere, but we parted on friendly terms. I walked him out the library gate.

5.2.2024

An old colleague of mine was gracious enough to meet with me for half an hour yesterday. She’s a very sweet, thoughtful person, and we were glad to see each other again. I asked her if the administration had established any dialog with the protesters. She couldn’t tell me details but said there were talks going on quietly in the background. She told me some students were feeling a lot of pressure from both peers and outside forces, and were afraid to speak out. We agreed on the nature of the encampment – nonviolent, disciplined, and committed – and on the need for the students to come up with some achievable goals.

The protesters’ three current demands, set by the national movement, can and will not be met. The University certainly will not disclose, much less divest itself of, its investments in Israel. It still hasn’t divested from fossil fuels, and many of us have been working on that for decades. It took forever to divest from South Africa during Apartheid. The third demand, for amnesty for student activists, can’t be met before they even go through the disciplinary process.

So I went back to the camp to tell them the little I had gleaned from talking with my colleague.

The weather was warm and sunny, and the mood seemed lighter accordingly. My perimeter-walking friend told me everybody was happy I had talked (and talked) with the counter-protester on my first visit, since their camp has agreed not to engage with provocateurs.

I tried to convince a few protesters to have the group consider setting goals the University might actually meet. Maybe teach-ins, or listening sessions, or moderated debates could be small steps toward spreading their understanding of the war in Gaza and the history of Israel/Palestine in general. While we were talking, I noticed Dean Khurana on the outskirts of the camp. The students said he’d visited before but wouldn’t talk with them.

There are about 50 tents in the Yard, fewer than during the Living Wage campaign in 2001 but probably more than during Occupy Harvard in 2011. Like those encampments, this one is self-policing and keeps itself clean. Yesterday some clotheslines had been strung up between trees. Sleeping bags and coats were hung up to dry.

At this time, early afternoon, about a dozen counter-protesters showed up. I have to describe them as quite loud and aggressive. They marched right into the middle of the encampment, singing Hebrew songs, accompanied by a man with a guitar. Their signs quoted the very worst threats from Hamas (“October 7th was just the first time…”) and showed photos of some of the hostages. They stayed in the middle of the camp for around 15 or 20 minutes. The pro-Palestinian campers did not engage with them at all. While the singing and shouting was going on, the campers quietly rearranged the perimeter ropes so the Zionist group had its own little peninsula open to the paths.

The counter-protest moved out of the camp itself to the lawn outside Mass Hall, where it could be more easily seen and heard by the media outside the gates. One man shouted: “Jews on this campus will not be intimidated, and we will not be silent.” I noticed my walking buddy from Monday in the group, and waved to him; he smiled and waved back to me.

I overheard a counter-protester say “Stop them from using the name Harvard, it’s a violation of trademark rules. Call Meta.”

A man from CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, a decades-old pro-Israel group, told passersby that they had planted 1200 Israeli flags on the HLS campus. I didn’t go to see and can’t find any reports confirming this. He expected they would soon be taken out. He also told a Globe reporter hovering outside the gates that this encampment was an unprecedented disruption at Harvard. I joined their conversation to correct that statement. As for noise, the encampment schedule for some days lists about an hour at dinner time to “make noise for liberation.” I haven’t stayed late enough to determine just how much noise that comes to. Most of the time the camp seems extremely quiet.

The camp was treated to a show of more than 100 bare backsides late last night during the annual Primal Scream event. The Crimson asserts that the streaking was nonpartisan and nonpolitical. Nobody seems to object to the primal screaming.

The Golan Heights, 1968

(Incident that failed to appear in any newspaper or radio report: Three unarmed Arab men attempting to steal cattle were killed by an Israeli Army patrol)

Imagine you are a child with a brown crayon
and draw hills: Bump. Line. Bump. Another line.
Imagine you’re a hawk, and circle those hills,
searching for rodents in the dry grass.
Imagine you’re a bee in the busy season
probing daisies, larkspur, overwhelmed by poppies.
Here, winter is mud; spring, flowers; summer, prairie fire.

Imagine you are grown up to be a soldier
perched in a spy tower on a barren hill.
The hawk ignores you.
The flowers grow elsewhere.
The mud finds you, all right.

And now it’s fall, a chill dry season unrelieved
by the bright birds of the lowlands, when on the flat places
tired cattle forage miles for their supper.
Some hard wind of war has swept
the tan stone villages bare.  Herders of sheep and cattle,
artisans, bakers of flat breads, small traders,
people with long deep roots in the stony soil –
when war snapped them loose they blew all the way to Damascus.
There they wait, in camps behind tall wired fences,
for another great wind to blow them back again.
They wonder at how little they weigh in the world.
And their cattle – their milk and meat,
their very sandals to bear them over the rocks –
impervious to rumor, too dull to run,
after all outweigh their masters and remain at home.

But blown by the same fierce wind that tumbled the others,
new masters squat on the prairie.
Milder in the valley, gusts uprooted
only these lightweight ones, the young and thoughtless,
already halfway into the air with pride.
In the green nave of the valley, raised near the sound of waters,
surrounded by the fruit and flowers of their parents’ toil,
these sprouts were haunted.
Always they peered at the highlands, felt watched and blind.
In the pride of their imaginations it was they
who would watch from the heights.  In their hearts’ calculus
all factors faded under the edge that overlooked them,
that frozen wave of rock, a step up in the world.
Toward what, or what the next step might be,
they couldn’t see or care.  When the wind came,
they spread wings of longing and coasted up.

Now they are here.  They look down at their natal valleys,
around at stubble.  The cattle are their cattle.
It was the space they conquered.  They did not conquer
the people, never met, can’t imagine them.
One drunk old man remained, weighted by stupor.
Now he sells canned goods he found abandoned,
trades in sign language, bobs and grins.
He is granted the respect due the insane.

The new masters choose clean spaces.
They avoid the empty villages,
build tin huts or use old army barracks.
The soldiers were Russian.  Transients do not haunt.
The wind shattered all the glass in the one large town;
the streets sparkle.  A child’s rubber sandal, splintered chairs…
no one will live here again but the madman.
Of all this, the cattle only know
their new masters bully them like the old, but ineptly.
They wander farther before men track them down.

Sauntering forth at daybreak from spartan huts,
the settlement cowboys bus to the ranch for breakfast.
Their old army van’s the noisiest thing in miles,
jolting on roads built hastily by the British.
The young men hold on silently, watching
the few colors wake on the desert plains.
Breakfast is boiled black coffee, scrambled eggs,
jokes with the cook and rougher jokes with each other.
Outside, the tough little horses stamp and blow.
Then more rituals: smoothing on saddle blankets,
kicking the horses’ bellies to tighten the girth.
Now the brief sadness of going separate ways:
they are few, the cattle many, and the plains wide.

The cattle are a losing venture, too stringy to sell.
The settlement diner supports the ranch.  Every male worker
longs to be a cowboy.
In the fields and kitchens, each one waits his turn.
They go without new coats to pay for the time
Brahma bulls are imported to improve the herd.
These gallants are guarded at night like any harem,
and led at dawn in stately pearl-grey pageant
out to some waiting cows not half their size.
Things go wrong at once.  They need help mating.
As the fall chill deepens, pneumonia strikes the bulls.
The cows’ knees buckle from the growing weight in their wombs.
By spring all the bulls will die, and most of their mates.
The few survivors birth by Caesarean section
and are too weak to nurse their over-sized young.
The settlers postpone new boots to pay for the birthings
and three pet calves with humps on their small backs
reproach them: you pushed too hard, too fast.

In the villages, untended roses
have reached their splendid, fragrant bloom again.
All summer, what food the gardens volunteered
was eaten by birds and shy four-footed things
still watching for those whose loss
was their small gain.
Those gardeners have not gone far, but only receded.
They know when the army patrols.  Some nights
the old masters, sneaking up
with familiar movements, persuade the cattle
the shortest distance between square meals
lies across the border.
In the morning, the cowboys miss a dozen or thirty.
For a while, the patrols double, and the raids cease.
To the cowboys, what is being stolen
is not meat or sandals but
their mastership, the illusion of peace in war.
When raiders are caught, they learn
to expect no quarter.

Imagine you are a bee among the last roses
on a bush mulched by rubble and broken glass.
Imagine you’re a hawk, circling an old foundation.
In the end of things
there is good hunting.
Roses into wildflowers.  Houses into grass.

By Jane Collins

The Gaza War

Don’t stand with Israel. Don’t stand with Palestine. Stand for peace.

Since the inexcusable massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas, many thousands are suffering and dying on both sides. More suffering is sure to follow. Israel has trapped more than 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza strip, where Hamas uses them as human shields. Any attack on Hamas leadership is going to kill civilians. Israel seems determined to deprive that population of food, water, and electricity. Neither Israel nor Egypt has given them a way out of the trap so far.

Both sides have terrible governments, which care only about their own power and not about their people, or justice, or democracy. Horrors have been committed by both sides for decades while the rest of the world has only added fuel to the fire. Both sides have rejected nonviolent solutions. Both sides have killed leaders who worked toward peace.

Americans must push our own far-from-adequate government to send food, water, and medicine
to Gaza; establish escape routes; and use our substantial leverage with Israel to effect a ceasefire and begin peace negotiations with Palestinians who abhor the terrorist strategy of Hamas. No lasting peace can come without justice for the dispossessed.

There is much more at stake here than the fate of the Middle East. I believe human survival depends on nonviolent resistance to war. War not only ruins lives, communities, and environments, it sucks up the attention and resources we need to curb climate change.

If the US had not set a terrible precedent by occupying Iraq in an unprovoked war, or if NATO had not been so aggressive in its recent expansion, perhaps we could have prevented the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If the world had encouraged the nonviolent Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement protesting the Israeli theft of Palestinian land instead of dismissing it as anti-Semitism, perhaps we could have undermined the fury that supports Hamas.

Vigils, petitions, letters to Congress, and marches for peace and justice might not seem to have much effect. But they hearten participants, create alliances, educate, and with luck might change a vote or two. At the very least they serve to target our real enemy, which is the war machine that has made our country the world’s largest arms merchant, and continues to enrich a few while destroying the planet for the rest of us.