New “Encampment for Palestine” Will Greet Arriving Harvard Freshmen

At Columbia, event features “no condemnations” imam

A new anti-Israel “encampment” is coming to Harvard—just in time to greet the incoming class of 2028.

Harvard administrators in the spring negotiated an end to a weeks-long anti-Israel encampment by students on the Cambridge, Massachusetts campus. Now the tents are coming back, to land just steps away that is controlled by the City of Cambridge, not Harvard.

It’s the latest sign at Harvard and on other high-profile campuses that this fall, rather than bringing new calm or civil discourse to discussion of Israel or the war in Gaza, is on track for a re-run of the violent clashes that characterized the 2023-2024 academic year. Administrators and alumni hoping that the new academic year would bring a fresh start, with attention turning to other issues, may find themselves instead mired in more of the same. 

“As the genocidal war rages on against Gaza, we are grieving, outraged and shocked by the ongoing U.S-backed Israeli atrocities,” the announcement for the “Community Encampment for Palestine states. The event is scheduled for August 24 and 25, when pre-orientation programs for incoming Harvard students—the First-Year Arts Program, First-Year Urban Program, First-Year Retreat and Experience, First-Year International Program, and Leadership Institute for the First-Year Experience—are all in full swing. Student athletes will also be on campus preparing for the fall season.

Because the event is off-campus, it’s difficult for Harvard to control, but students will see it and will see the news and social media coverage of it. Harvard Hillel, Harvard Chabad, and the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance are planning their own major event, on the campus itself, on Sunday September 22, billed as “Crisis on Campus: Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Future of Higher Education,” and featuring some big-name speakers from Israel. September will also likely see the release of reports by Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias and by Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias.

Harvard’s First-Year Convocation, a Commencement-style welcome event scheduled for Labor Day, has been disrupted in recent years by anti-Israel protesters. Whether that happens again this year and how administrators respond to the disruption will be another early test.

Meanwhile, at Columbia, the Muslim Student Association is hosting a virtual event on August 20 titled, “For the Sake of Allah, From Gaza to Encampments,” with Imam Tom Facchine and Brother Raja Abdelhaq. An X account called Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia U, with nearly 18,000 followers, is challenging the invited speakers. “No speakers like these two terrorist supporters should be allowed to speak on campus or virtually hosted by the university. This includes student groups,” the account says, posting a video of Facchine from October 10, 2023, saying he supports Palestinian resistance 100 percent, “no condemnations.” At Barnard, which is both independent of Columbia and integrated into it, a protest is scheduled for this Monday, August 19, at 9 am to “defend the student intifada.” 

In news coverage of Columbia President Shafik’s resignation to go work for a British foreign secretary, David Lammy, who has been so hostile to Israel that Prime Minister Netanyahu reportedly just refused to meet with him, Columbia professors have voiced their concerns. The New York Times quoted one professor, James Applegate, who described the campus as a “toxic hellhole” and said, “I won’t be surprised if there’s an encampment on the first day of classes.”

Another Columbia professor, Shai Davidai, said in a social media post, “Antisemitism at the university runs deep and is perpetuated by indoctrinating professors.” 

As Jeff Robbins, who teaches at Brown, put it to me the other day, “We’re about to go into round two.”

Bloomberg’s tax wish list: Bloomberg has an editorial advising that “To avoid a severe fiscal crunch, the country needs less public spending and more revenue than currently legislated, not less.” The editorial goes on to devote half a sentence to the spending reductions (“above all a willingness to reform entitlements”) and floats the following tax increases:

1. On the federal deduction for state and local taxes, now capped at $10,000 per filer, the editorial says that rather than eliminating or increasing the cap as lawmakers from high-tax states such as New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut have asked, the cap “should be retained and ideally lowered.”

2. Raise the corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 21 percent.

3. “New consumption and carbon taxes, and close egregious loopholes that let the rich pay less than they should.”

So you’ve got Bloomberg, who is the voice of the centrist Wall Street and business establishment, talking about increasing the corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 21 percent—which would be a 19 percent increase—and adding “New consumption and carbon taxes.” 

Meanwhile, Vice President Harris, while getting the press to focus on her proposed increases to the child tax credit and extension of the earned income tax credit, also takes as her policy starting point the Biden 2025 budget that includes, over a decade, a $2.1 trillion corporate tax increase (to a 28 percent rate) and $500 billion or so from a new “billionaires tax.” 

And President Trump touts further corporate rate reductions (to 20 percent from 21). He wants elimination of the federal income tax on tips, an idea Harris also has now embraced. Trump wants an end to taxes on Social Security benefits for seniors. He is also talking about imposing new tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on imports. The result is a muddled message reminiscent of what happened in 2020, when suburban voters were furious about the cap on state and local tax deductibility, and they blamed Trump for raising their tax bills (see “SALT in the Electoral Votes”).

The key players in how this all will eventually shake out may be in Congress, which writes the tax law. In the House, the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is Jason Smith of Missouri, and the ranking Democrat is Richard Neal of Massachusetts. In the Senate Finance Committee, it’s Chairman Ron Wyden and ranking Republican Mike Crapo. Whether any of those guys are the next Jack Kemp or even the next Senator Bill Bradley, I’ve got my doubts. Maybe these sorts of deals are now hammered out by leadership—Senator Schumer, Speaker Johnson—rather than by the committees. Crapo, Smith, and Johnson are all signers of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform pledge to oppose tax increase.

The 2024 tax dilemma is that with a $2 trillion annual budget deficit, politicians are constrained by mathematical reality in proposing anything that would result in less federal revenue. And the political reality is that voters are accustomed to at least being promised some tax cuts, and typically resistant to politicians promising large or broad-based tax increases. Economic growth would improve the deficit picture, but it’s hard to generate growth while increasing tax rates or adding new taxes. 

The likeliest scenario is that Congress winds up with a compromise not too far from today’s tax rates. Yet if either political party wins the White House by a wide enough margin to also take control of both the House and the Senate, the compromise may take some steps in the direction of the presidential campaign plans.

Bloomberg gets credit, at least, for specificity in proposing deficit-narrowing tax increases. Trump frequently talks about how the corporate chiefs tell him the regulations are a bigger problem than the taxes. That may account for the pro-growth camp’s lack of focus on the tax issue. Whatever happens in November’s election, the Republicans will want to think about articulating pro-growth tax policies of their own that go beyond merely defending against the Democrats’ worst ideas for big new taxes.

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