“Zionism Is a Disease” Poet Is Hailed in New Harvard Campus Structure Full of Lies

As Summers is “disgusted” at inaction by university leadership re public health school fueling Jew-hate

Side one of a large lie-filled anti-Israel structure that has been erected at a crossroads on the Harvard Campus. Photo: The Editors.

Side two of the large lie-filled anti-Israel structure that has been erected on the Harvard campus. Photo: The Editors

On my way over to yesterday’s Inaugural AI Summit at Harvard University, I passed a giant anti-Israel and anti-Jewish structure that has been newly erected in a central location on the Harvard University campus. (Harvard’s Central Administration “Office of Common Spaces” lists the Science Center Plaza as one of its common spaces, describing it as “Located at the major campus crossroad between Harvard Yard and the Science Center at 1 Oxford Street.”)

The display makes a mockery of Harvard’s motto of Veritas. It also advocates, and is an exhibit of, discrimination on the basis of religion and national origin in a way that makes a joke out of the university’s nondiscrimination policy.

So it’s worth taking a careful look at all twelve panels, along with the messages along the bottom that form, in essence, two more panels.

As far as I know, no one at Harvard this year has offered any kind of official response to the content of the structure. Perhaps that’s in keeping with the new supposed commitment to “institutional neutrality.” The stated justification for the institutional neutrality is to advance the university’s mission of pursuing the truth. In this case, though, what’s on display is not truth but lies—lies that students and other community members, including first-year students living in dormitories with windows looking out on the lies, are basically forced to confront on their daily pathway to classes, meals, and libraries. Absent a response, the truth isn’t advanced.

Side one

Bottom message: “Boycott, Divest, Sanction.” This is a call for religious and national origin discrimination that runs counter to Harvard’s stated policies. It would hurt Harvard’s excellence and its mission of research, teaching, and learning to prevent students and faculty from interacting with Israeli professors, many of whom are on the frontiers of research in their scholarly fields. The only country these people want to boycott, divest, and sanction is Israel, not the many other countries with much worse human rights records. The single-minded focus on Israel is a sign of the bigotry.

Panel one: “Right of return amid the second nakba.” The so-called “right of return” is effectively a ploy to destroy Israel by flooding it with people who oppose its existence as a Jewish state. The existing Jewish inhabitants of Israel would almost certainly be killed or pushed out if any such “right” were implemented. All sovereign countries (other than perhaps, for a brief period, President Biden’s America) control border entry and restrict entry by those who aim to overthrow the existing government. This panel features an image of a kite; such kites have been used by Hamas terrorists to commit arson attacks from Gaza into Israel, foreshadowing the October 7 terrorist attack. The Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, an officially recognized Harvard College student group, set up a website to explain the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish structure it erected and says that this panel also includes a poem by “Gazan Poet Refaat Alareer.” As documented by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, Alareer’s social media accounts have said things such as “are most Jews evil? Of course they are.” And also, “Zionists are scum,” “Zionists are the most despicable filth,” “Zionism is a disease.” This is the poet Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee chooses to honor on its giant wall at a central “common space” that Harvard describes as the “major campus crossroad.”

Panel two: The student website says “This panel showcases Harvard’s direct complicity in the genocide of Palestinians, featuring the image of a grieving father holding a child in a shroud.” Jews as baby-killers has been a longstanding, classical antisemitic theme predating the establishment of the modern state of Israel, and it’s sad to see that kind of imagery on display in the middle of the Harvard campus.

Panel three: This panel features the words “dignity is invincible” over the image of someone wearing a keffiyeh. I guess one can debate how dignified Israel’s Arab enemies have been and whether they have been invincible or not, but I found this panel fairly unobjectionable in comparison to some of the others. It’s worth noting, though, that it fails to acknowledge the dignity of Israeli Jews or accept that they are invincible.

Panel four: This panel carries an image of Hind Rijab along with the words “335 bullets” and “one of the 17,400 children killed in the genocide.” Some of these “children” are 15-, 16-, and 17-year olds, consistent with Israeli reports of Hamas recruiting older children as fighters as the supply of available older-than-18 fighters dwindled. And the Hamas tactic is to surround themselves with civilians, including children, as human shields. The claim that there were that many bullet holes in the car originates with Al Jazeera, an outlet owned and controlled by the government of Qatar, an enemy of Israel and a country that hosts Hamas. The Israel Defense Forces said after investigating that there were no Israeli troops in the immediate area when Rijab was killed. The charge of “genocide” against Israel in Gaza is so patently absurd that I haven’t even deemed it to merit a thorough debunking, but for those who are curious, Bret Stephens of the New York Times had a July 2025 New York Times column on the topic and John Spencer, a West Point urban warfare expert who has been to Gaza four times since October 7, also dealt with the false accusation.

Panel five: There is a picture of a woman with a Palestinian flag hugging a tree, which the website describes as a reminder that “the agricultural land of Palestinian farmers is frequently destroyed and vandalized by Israeli settlers.” There was plenty of Israeli agricultural land destroyed on October 7, 2023, too. That destruction goes totally unacknowledged in the anti-Israel display. Meanwhile, Israel has made the desert bloom and advanced agriculture in scores of countries worldwide with its innovative irrigation techniques and products.

Panel six: This is an attack on the Boston Consulting Group for having tried to help stand up a humanitarian aid program in Gaza that was not controlled by Hamas. The Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee website explains, “it serves as reminder that numerous actors—Israel, the U.S., private firms like BCG— are to blame for the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Gaza.” One actor that is not mentioned: Hamas, which caused the crisis by launching a terrorist attack, taking hostages, refusing to disarm, stealing the humanitarian aid, and attacking and killing individuals working for or using the non-Hamas aid programs.

Side two:

Bottom message: “Free Palestine.” Unspecified are the borders of this “Palestine.” What they really mean is having Hamas or the Palestine Liberation Organization take over all of Israel.

Panel one: “Boycott now.” The same objections to the “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” message on the other side of the structure apply again here. And boycotting Jewish-owned businesses has been a tactic used by antisemites in various times and places in modern Jewish history.

Panel two: “Israel’s siege of healthcare.” Hamas has used Gaza hospitals as bases of operations. They are the ones threatening healthcare. Israel, by contrast, has facilitated the evacuation of thousands of sick Gazans for health treatment in other countries. The Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee website makes no mention of Hamas using Gaza’s hospitals as bases, a reality that has been repeatedly verified by governments and news organizations.

Panel three: “Steadfastness.” The Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee website describes this as “a Palestinian value that has come to encapsulate Palestinian existence as resistance.” It’s a positive spin on rejectionism or stubbornness. Had Palestinians been a little less rigid in violently refusing to accept Israel’s existence, they’d be in a better position and might even have a state of their own by now. By praising that rigidity, the Harvard students and similar international advocacy groups are decreasing the probability of peace, which requires compromises.

Panel four: “Israel kills journalists.” This theme comes directly from Nieman Reports, a publication of a unit of Harvard’s central administration. As I noted when I wrote about the Nieman Reports article, some of the “news workers” that advocacy groups count as casualties in Gaza were actually Hamas terrorists operating under journalistic cover in a way that endangers legitimate journalists. Other “journalists” worked for outlets, such as Al Jazeera, coordinating with Hamas and owned and controlled by the governments of dictatorial countries that are Israel’s enemies.

Panel five: “The flour massacres.” This was no Israel-inflicted “massacre” but rather a crowd stampede worsened by armed Gazan gunmen.

Panel six: A picture of the globe with the words, “Our liberation is intertwined.” The Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee website blames Israel for problems “around the world.” This is an example of the sort of conspiratorial thinking—the Jewish state is to blame for the whole planet’s problems, “From Armenia to Turtle Island, Kashmir to Puerto Rico”—that characterizes antisemitism. “Turtle Island” is the word that these radicals use for North America, because they think the United States itself is a European settler colonial project almost as bad as Israel.

The context for this in recent weeks at Harvard includes an October 22 event at Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights on “Understanding genocide through a public health lens: Perspectives from Gaza.” This was an official Harvard version of the same distorted narrative that characterizes the student display. A former president of Harvard and former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, took to social media to say, “@HarvardChanSPH, through its FXB Center, has failed to maintain even the most minimal intellectual and moral standards. The FXB Center on a continuing basis platforms supporters of terror, foments anti semitism, willfully ignores Hamas atrocities and distorts plain facts. I am disgusted that despite repeated requests university leadership has not even spoken critically, let alone acted, to maintain moral and intellectual quality.” Summers is right about this.

An anti-Israel structure erected on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Mass. during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.

Also part of the context was the erection, during the Sukkot holiday, of a structure also in the Science Center Plaza area by a group calling itself “Harvard Undergraduate Jews for Peace.” A sign adjacent to the structure referred to “the nearly two million Palestinians displaced by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.” I’m told that literature distributed there said, “today Jews are responsible for the displacement of over 1.9 million people in Gaza.” [Update: Here, below, is an image of that literature.]

“Today, Jews are responsible for the displacement of over 1.9 million people in Gaza,” literature handed out on Sukkot on the Harvard campus said.

In fact the Palestinians were displaced not by any Israeli genocide but by the terrorist group Hamas’s decision to launch an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and by Hamas’s decision to take hostages and to organize itself in tunnels and among the civilian population, so that in the war of self-defense by Israel following the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack, Palestinian civilians found themselves on the battlefield and were advised to move to safer areas.

The Harvard administration may consider it progress that this discourse has been moved a short distance geographically out of the Harvard Yard that was home to the spring 2024 “encampment.” No one, least of all me, wants a university where students or alumni never encounter ideas that make them uncomfortable or that they disagree with. But Harvard already saw one president, Claudine Gay, ousted and humiliated after she couldn’t give Rep. Elise Stefanik a clear answer about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated university policies. Summers’s disgust about the current university leadership’s lack of action when it comes to maintaining moral and intellectual quality is a feeling that is widely shared at the highest levels of those who care deeply about Harvard’s quality and about the truth. You could say it’s not the university leadership’s job to police incorrect speech or to supply missing context. But surely part of restoring “intellectual vitality” at Harvard means making sure that when lies are spread, there’s robust pushback.

I’m doing my best here. Larry Summers is demonstrating courage. Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi at Chabad and Rabbi Jason Rubenstein at Hillel are both strong players and forceful advocates with solid grasps of the issues. But after all the faculty task forces and high-priced lawyers and sincere reassurances and congressional hearings and Trump administration interventions and legal settlements, the sad fact remains that it’s now normalized in Harvard’s “major campus crossroad” to use classical antisemitic tropes, call for Israel to be wiped off the map, and to make false genocide accusations. What has gone wrong with Harvard? And, among the ten thousand men and women of Harvard, where are the rest of the voices expressing dismay?

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