Harvard Law School Administration Marks Oct. 7 With Love-Letter to Israel-Bashing U.K. Minister
Alumni publication describes Israel as “the occupied territories”
Harvard Law School’s official administration-published alumni magazine is marking the anniversary of the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel with a gushy profile of a British politician who has been one of Israel’s nastiest critics.
The article won’t even use the word Israel or Israelis, instead apparently describing Jerusalem as “the occupied territories.”
Readers of The Editors know the British foreign minister, David Lammy, well. When the president of Columbia, Baroness Minouche Shafik, abruptly resigned from her Ivy League post to go work for Lammy in London, our editor in Europe, Michael Mosbacher, wrote (“Columbia University President Resigns to Go Work for British Minister Tilting Against Israel,” August 15, 2024):
Lammy’s tenure as foreign secretary, though, has not started well. After first reversing the last government’s formal objection to the International Criminal Court’s request for an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, Lammy decided to reinstate British funding for UNRWA, the UN agency that has employed and provided cover for Hamas terrorists. Now an arms embargo on Israel is on the cards. The foreign secretary has been relentless in publicly criticizing Israel even before all the facts are in, weighing in in recent days to “strongly” condemn an Israeli minister’s visit to Jerusalem holy sites, pronounce himself “appalled by the Israeli Military strike on al-Tabeen school” (a strike Israel says killed 31 confirmed terrorists in a “Hamas stronghold”), and be “deeply concerned by Israel’s decision to revoke the status of 8 Norwegian diplomats.”
In September 2024, Lammy halted some arms exports to Israel, a decision Netanyahu described as “shameful.” As Mosbacher reported for The Editors in November 2024, before becoming foreign minister, Lammy had a weekly three-hour talk radio show on the U.K.’s leading talk radio broadcaster, LBC. In 2018 he described Trump as a “woman hating, Neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath,” and on another occasion as a “deluded, dishonest, xenophobic narcissist.”
This year, Lammy has been at the forefront of Britain’s move to grant official recognition of the state of Palestine, a move that Israel, the U.S., and the British chief rabbi say is an unwarranted reward for Hamas terrorism.
The Lammy described in the 3,000-word, glowingly favorable, Harvard article is something else entirely— “A Man for All Seasons,” as the Harvard Law Bulletin article dated October 6, 2025, puts it. “A big part of his work is about finding common ground and forging connections. He considers himself a bridge builder,” the Harvard article says.
Perhaps the most bizarre passage in the Harvard article is this one:
Lammy also recalls sitting in the occupied territories listening to Jewish families who had loved ones held hostage in Gaza, and to women who’d been abused in Sudan and were fleeing for their lives as their villages were ransacked. “That’s the key,” he says, “and I learned those skills in part at Harvard — that ability to listen beyond cultures and boundaries.”
Lammy’s own official social media (January 13, 2025 and July 17, 2024) described his visits with hostage families as taking place in “Israel.” One of the meetings seems to have taken place at the King David Hotel, which is in Israel’s capital of Jerusalem. Lammy reportedly removed his yellow hostage lapel ribbon for his meeting in July 2024 with the Palestinian Authority prime minister, which tells you about what you need to know. And the fact that he considers Jews—including British Jewish hostage families—as being from another culture than his own is also telling.
You could write this off as just a random one-off glitch, but it points to wider issues both at Harvard Law School and at Harvard University generally. It was the law school where, in March 2025, a current student sought to join an antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard. As we reported then, “Two Current Harvard Students Ask to Join Kestenbaum’s Antisemitism Lawsuit,” March 21, 2025:
The law student identified in the suit as John Doe #2 was “trapped in Wasserstein Hall by a pro-Hamas mob with no response from Harvard,” the complaint says, referring to an October 19, 2023 anti-Israel demonstration at Harvard. “Fearing a violent attack, students in the study room removed indicia of their Jewishness, such as kippot, and hid under desks.” When one of the students emailed the law school’s assistant director of student life, Jeffrey Sierra, asking what could be done to address the rampant antisemitism, he directed her to campus mental health services and said he was “not in a position to do more.”
In May 2025 the Harvard Law Review gave a $65,000 fellowship to an anti-Israel student who faced misdemeanor criminal charges for assaulting a Jewish student during a campus protest (the case was eventually dealt with via a pre-trial diversion to community service and in-person anger-management training).
Also in May 2025, a Harvard Law professor speaking at a graduation Class Day event decried “atrocities” in “Palestine.”
Harvard’s defenders typically make a series of claims, some of which are contradictory. They say that the Jew-hate is exaggerated, that it’s already been fixed, that it can’t be fixed because it’s a matter of academic freedom involving research and teaching by tenured professors, and that it’s a matter of student-on-student social shunning that the university isn’t really in a position to control or police.
But this instance, just as with the October 7, 2025 Nieman Reports article that I wrote about yesterday, “Harvard Central Administration Marks October 7 With Lies Smearing Israel,” doesn’t involve inter-student shunning. It doesn’t involve academic freedom, because no Harvard students or professors are involved. Instead this is a product of the Harvard Law School Communications Office and its 14 person staff.
Harvard has been telling the American public that life-saving cancer-research is grinding to a halt because of Trump’s budget cuts, yet the 14-person communication office at Harvard Law School has time and money to assign (apparently to a freelance writer) a 3,000-word positive profile of anti-Israel British Labour Party politician? It’s almost enough to make someone suggest cutting back some of the communications staff and reallocating the resources to the life-saving cancer research. If, even after all the federal budget cuts, Harvard still has the dough to be commissioning lengthy positive profiles of anti-Israel politicians out of the 14-person Harvard Law School communications office, maybe Trump hasn’t cut enough money from Harvard.
(The Law School’s associate dean for communications and public affairs, Jeff Neal, has not yet responded to my Friday afternoon email asking about the “occupied territories” reference and asking “why, timed to October 7, a big Harvard profile of a nastily anti-Israel foreign left-wing politician?”)
Another thing Harvard’s defenders say is that the university is renewing its focus on its core research and teaching mission. How does this article fit with that idea? It actually contradicts it. It’s not research or teaching. It’s basically a big advertisement for a foreign politician.
There already exist many government-funded and privately funded publications that write glowing profiles of anti-Israel British politicians. The Guardian, the New Statesman, the New Yorker, the Economist, the New York Times magazine…the list goes on. By publishing this garbage Harvard is just adding to the kultursmog rather than adding any Veritas or value.
In the private sector, executives sometimes ask, “why are we doing this”? At Harvard, with an endowment and with students and parents borrowing federal money to pay tuition (borrowing that gets forgiven or put on indefinite repayment hold during Democratic administrations), the “why are we doing this?” question sometimes does not get asked. It would be a better university if the question were asked more frequently and if inadequate answers were sometimes met with a cessation of the activity.
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