Harvard Anti-Zionists Dispute Survey Results on Divestment From Israel

Anti-Zionists at Harvard University, including the Harvard Crimson newspaper which endorsed boycotting Israel in 2022, are contesting the interpretation of the results of an undergraduate survey onto which the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) muscled a series of questions which asked students if they support “divesting” from the Jewish state.

On Thursday, the Crimson reported that Harvard students “report favoring divestment from Israel” while downplaying the Harvard Undergraduate Association (HUA) Election Commission’s saying that about 600 of “roughly 7,000 students in Harvard College,” or 8.4%, had “responded ‘yes’ to the question on divestment.” Slightly more of the student body, 9.3%, said they support Harvard’s disclosing “investments in Israel.”

The HUA added that over 80 percent of students either declined to answer the survey, skipped the divestment question, or registered an agnostic opinion regarding the matter. The Harvard Crimson, however, said it had obtained a partially redacted copy of the survey results showing that the majority of votes cast in the Sports Team Office Election, an unrelated vote in which respondents had to participate in order to answer the optional Israel-related questions, supported divestment.

“Based on similar calculations, a majority of students also said they thought Harvard should disclose investments in Israel,” the Crimson reported.

Nonetheless, the newspaper admitted that “the results still have a question mark hanging over them” and that “many students interviewed by the Crimson … said they were not aware of the survey questions.”

PSC later used Harvard’s reporting as the basis of its own propaganda, accusing the administration of censoring results “after the Harvard Crimson reports majority support.”

As previously reported, the PSC — a self-described revolutionary movement which issued some of the world’s first endorsements of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel — overcame objections expressed by the Harvard Undergraduate Association, a student government body, to place the idea on this academic year’s fall survey. Another group, working in concert with PSC, prevailed over the HUA as well, and added a survey question which aims to build a consensus of opposition to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.

“Should Harvard disclose its investments in companies and institutions operating in Israel?” asked PSC’s question, which was originally framed to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. “Should Harvard divest from companies and institutions operating in Israel?”

On Friday, Middle East expert and columnist Alex Joffe told The Algemeiner that the Crimson confected a story which serves its ideological bias.

“Campus media is both politicized and incompetent,” he said. “The latter is not surprising and is forgivable, as no one should expect careful reporting from teenagers, even ones at Harvard. But the manner in which activists insert themselves into campus media is obvious, and the obfuscations in this particular case indicate how students tendentiously ‘report’ results — in this case fragmentary and contradictory ones — in order to present the conclusion that Harvard students ‘support divestment.'”

He added, “Better documented and reported surveys have suggested that a hard core of students on campus do indeed support divestment and other anti-Israel measure but that a majority are uncertain or disinterested in these issues. Painting all college students as anti-Israel is certainly false but campus media, and certainly mainstream media, almost exclusively feature anti-Israel voices.”

The Crimson has since reported another, similar story including the same numbers showing that over 85 percent of students declined to take the survey. This time, however, the Harvard administration used the occasion to restate its opposition to boycotting Israel, citing a 2024 statement regarding the matter.

“Harvard leadership has made clear that it opposes calls for a policy of boycotting Israel and its academic institutions,” the university said. “In the words of [former] President Bacow responding to a 2022 editorial in the Harvard Crimson that had endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions [BDS] movement, ‘targeting or boycotting a particular group because of disagreements over the policies pursued by their governments is antithetical to what we stand for as a university,’ and ‘academic boycotts have absolutely no place at Harvard, regardless of who they target.'”

The Harvard Crimson has promoted anti-Zionism before, curating facts and quotes.

In 2022, the Crimson’s editorial board endorsed the BDS movement, which seeks to isolate the world’s lone Jewish state on the international stage as a step toward its eventual elimination.

“Palestinians, in our board’s view, deserve dignity and freedom. We support the boycott, divest, and sanctions movement as a means to achieving that goal,” the board wrote. “In the past, our board was skeptical of the movement (if not, generally speaking, of its goals), arguing that BDS as a whole did not ‘get at the nuances and particularities of the Israel-Palestine conflict.’ We reject and regret that view.”

It also pushed back against “accusations” of antisemitism over its stance, condemning “antisemitism in every and all forms, including those times when it shows up on the fringes of otherwise worthwhile movements.”

“BDS remains a blunt approach, one with the potential to backfire or prompt collateral damage in the form of economic hurt. But the weight of this moment — of Israel’s human rights and international law violates and of Palestine’s cry for freedom — demands this step. As a board, we are proud to finally lend our support to both Palestinian liberation and BDS — we call on everyone to do the same.”

Anti-Israel animus, while present at Harvard for years, exploded across campus following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

After the atrocities, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee issued a statement blaming Israel for the attack and vowed to pressure the university to cut ties with the Jewish state. Later, students stormed academic buildings chanting “globalize the intifada”; a faculty group posted an antisemitic cartoon on its social media page; a mob followed and surrounded a Jewish student, screaming “Shame! Shame! Shame!” into his ears; and the Harvard Law School student government passed a resolution that falsely accused Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

While largely present among left-wing campus groups on campus, such sentiments have recently emerged among Harvard’s far right.

Earlier this year, a conservative student magazine published an article that echoed the words of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

The Harvard Salient published an opinion piece in September which bore likeness to key tenets of Nazi doctrine, as first articulated in 1925 in Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, and later in a blitzkrieg of speeches he delivered throughout the Nazi era to justify his genocide of European Jews.

Written by David F.X. Army, the article chillingly echoed a January 1939 Reichstag speech in which Hitler portended mass killings of Jews as the outcome of Germany’s inexorable march toward war with France and Great Britain. Whereas Hitler said, “France to the French, England to the English, America to the Americans, and Germany to the Germans,” Army wrote, “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans.”

Army also called for the adoption of notions of “blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.