At least 100 Harvard University faculty members signed a letter defending the pro-Palestinian slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” despite its association with the destruction of Israel and genocide of Jewish people.
They criticized Harvard’s response to combatting anti-Semitism, accusing the university of bowing to pressure from donors and alumni.
“As Harvard faculty, we have been astonished by the pressure from donors, alumni, and even some on this campus to silence faculty, students, and staff critical of the actions of the State of Israel,” the letter reads.
“It is important to acknowledge the patronizing tone and format of much of the criticism you have received as well as the outright racism contained in some of it.”
“We were nevertheless profoundly dismayed by your November 9 message entitled ‘Combating Antisemitism.’ The University’s commitment to intellectual freedom and open dialogue seems to be giving way to something else entirely: a model of education in which the meaning of terms once eligible for interpretation is prescribed from above by a committee whose work was, on Tuesday, described to the faculty as only beginning.”
“Similarly, the phrase ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free’ has a long and complicated history.”
“Its interpretation deserves, and is receiving, sustained and ongoing inquiry and debate. Singling it out as necessarily implying removalism or even eliminationism – when over a million Palestinians have been forced from their homes and over ten thousand civilians, including four thousand children, have been slain in Gaza, actions which the Holocaust historian Omer Bartov suggests in The New York Times may amount to a ‘crime against humanity’ being executed with ‘genocidal intent’ – is imprudent as a matter of university policy and badly misjudged as an act of moral leadership.”
The faculty members also called for an advisory group on Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism.
They defended the slogan’s use and suggested that Israel was guilty of genocide, using Gaza Health Ministry-approved casualty numbers as evidence.
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