opinion
An Open Letter to the Editorial
Board of ‘The Harvard Crimson’
BY RICHARD L. CRAVATTS
I n a breathtaking display of tendentiousness and
a misreading of history and fact, you published
an editorial on April 29 in The Harvard Crimson
titled, “In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanction and
a Free Palestine,” an outrageous column replete
with slanders against the Jewish state that called
for the Harvard community to commit itself to the
corrosive BDS campaign against Israel.

You suggested that the editorial was inspired by
the April demonstrations and programming of the
Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee
which, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week, “installed
a colorful, multi-panel ‘Wall of Resistance’ in favor
of Palestinian freedom and sovereignty.”
Even more importantly, you contended, falla-
ciously: “The admittedly controversial panels dare
the viewer to contend with well-established, if
rarely stated, facts.”
What are examples of those “facts” you
alluded to? One panel announced in capital
letters, for example, that “Zionism is: Racism‒
Settler Colonialism‒White Supremacy‒Apartheid,”
mendacious slurs that echo the notorious 1975
Resolution 3379 issued by the United Nations that
proclaimed that Zionism is racism.

Framing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a mat-
ter of race, as this foolish display did, and accusing
Israel of maintaining a system of apartheid is some-
thing that Israel-haters are fond of doing, even
when the charge is patently false. And the puerile
accusation of white supremacy against Israel is
as grotesque and unhinged as is the oft-repeated
claim that Israelis are the new Nazis, committing
genocide against the Palestinians. Both are not
only counter-factual but also forms of antise-
mitic expression described in the International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working defi-
nition of antisemitism.

Of course, your claim that the “facts” on the
HCPSC mock wall are “well-established” is only
true inasmuch as these are facts that live in the
minds of progressives and antisemites who care-
lessly throw around words without attention to
their actual meaning and import.

Your other preposterous contention that these
attitudes toward Israel — these supposed facts
— are “rarely stated” is so naive that only college
students who have just begun to counter anti-ac-
tivism could possibly believe them since the cam-
paign to slander, libel and destroy the Jewish state
has been in high gear for some two decades, and
this counter-factual language and the allegations
16 MAY 5, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
within it have been and continues to be ubiquitous
on campuses worldwide. It requires no bravery
at all to be an enemy of Israel on university cam-
puses seeped in such activism, as much as you
try to impute bravery on the part of those who
promote Palestinianism.

In justifying your position in this debate, you
remarked: “It is our categorical imperative to side
with and empower the vulnerable and oppressed.”
Really? Does that include Jewish civilians who
are being stabbed, rammed with cars, blown up
and showered with rockets in their sleep by the
genocidal terrorist organization of Hamas in the
Gaza Strip and lone-wolf Palestinian terrorists?
Or it is only the Palestinians you care about, who
have rejected statehood when offered to them on
multiple occasions, preferring instead to mount
an endless resistance against a sovereign state
they cannot and will not abide simply because its
residents are Jews?
You feel very
comfortable, sitting in
the safety of your
Harvard Square offices,
hectoring Israel to tear
down its security wall.

Calling for a BDS campaign to be unleashed
against Israel demands that, among the many
and various calamitous examples of human strife
and suffering occurring around the world, Harvard
should focus on and commit to denouncing only
one: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And more than
that — just as the Third Reich and Arab League
before them — you wish to target Jewish busi-
nesses, organizations and educational institutions,
and expel them from the world community.

You yearn for the “liberation of Palestine,” but
what do you assume such an event would result
in? When you refer to a liberated Palestine, are
you talking about the West Bank and Gaza, areas
that would comprise a new Palestinian state? Or
are you really describing and eagerly imagining a
liberated Palestine that BDS supporters and their
fellow travelers in the Arab world and in the West
actually seek — one that includes, and subsumes,
present-day Israel?
Israel knows this because of its experience after
cleansing Gaza of all of its Jews, that instead of
working on the creation of the beginnings of a
state for themselves in the Strip, the Palestinians
allowed Hamas to transform Gaza into a terror
enclave from which to continually assault Israel.

And that is something Israelis understandably
imagine could happen again were the West Bank
to be totally controlled by the Palestinian Authority,
Fatah or in another scenario, Hamas.

Conspicuously absent from your editorial is
any questioning or critique of Palestinian agency,
responsibility, behavior, political decisions or even
the nature of their culture and society. You feel
very comfortable, sitting in the safety of your
Harvard Square offices, hectoring Israel to tear
down its security wall, welcoming millions of Jew-
hating Arabs into its country as citizens, abandon-
ing territory it rightfully owns or won in defensive
wars, and otherwise making any concession you
and other critics of the Jewish state demand of
Israel, even to its own detriment and physical
safety — consequences you apparently could
care less about in your relentless quest for social
justice for the long-aggrieved Palestinians.

You make a careless reference to Israel’s killing
of Palestinians, including children, without any
context, failing to mention, of course, the incon-
venient fact that since the 1920s, Arabs have
resisted, through violence and attacks, any Jewish
presence in the Holy Land, including to the current
day. Like other enemies of Israel, you are quick to
count Arab bodies when they are killed by Jews,
but carelessly and immorally ignore the deaths of
innocent Jews in Israel at the hands of psycho-
pathic murderers who randomly attack civilians
without provocation, including the 15 innocent
people murdered randomly in the streets in the
past month as part of an uninterrupted campaign
of terror that you and your fellow travelers help
justify when you euphemistically excuse “resis-
tance” on the part of Palestinians.

The plea in your editorial to employ the corro-
sive BDS campaign as a part of the cognitive war
against the Jewish state again reveals that you are
either ignorant of or indifferent to the actual stated
intention of that movement — namely, extirpating
Israel completely, thereby “liberating” Palestine
and removing any annoying “racist” Jews from
what is now modern-day Israel. JE
Richard L. Cravatts, a Freedom Center Journalism
Fellow in Academic Free Speech and president
emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East,
is the author of “Dispatches From the Campus
War Against Israel and Jews.”