I arrived a year before the atrocities of October 7, 2023, yet there was a clear foreshadowing of the anti-Israel explosions to come, given a widespread, university-wide focus on Israel—a contemptuous obsession inflicted on no other country. For example, there is an annual student-sponsored Israeli Apartheid Week, with a campus installation calling for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel, accompanied by a display in a central Harvard plaza stating, “There is no Zionist state without racism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing.”
The delegitimization and demonization of Israel is embedded in the divinity school’s recently founded Religion and Public Life Program. The program’s offerings included the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, which provided a field study seminar titled, “Learning in Context: Narratives of Displacement and Belonging in Israel/Palestine.” This seminar brought students to Israel and the West Bank.
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