The Harvard Out of Palestine student group held a meeting with the university administration just days after the start of the new academic year.
Harvard: Pro-Palestinian protesters rally, demand Israel boycott
The Harvard Out of Palestine student group held a meeting with the university administration just days after the start of the new academic year.
Harvard students rallied for a pro-Palestinian protest on Friday, only three days after the college’s fall semester began.
“I don’t know what you guys did this summer, but I stayed angry,” one protester shouted in the university’s Science Center Plaza, according to the Boston Globe.
Keffiyeh-wearing students responded by yelling pro-Palestinian slogans and chants of “Free, free, free Palestine, from the river to the sea.”
The demonstration was led by a student group named Harvard Out of Palestine, which held a meeting with Harvard President Alan Garber, Harvard Corporation Fellow Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Harvard Management Company staff in the Smith Campus Center, the Harvard Crimson reported.
The group raised the issue of Harvard’s endowment, demanding it divest from Israeli companies or organizations that cooperate with the Jewish state.
Harvard officials stressed that the fact of the meeting does not imply that concessions would be made. The university’s administration held a meeting on Thursday with a Jewish group of students.
Garber was appointed to lead the university until at least 2027, after filling in as the interim president following Claudine Gay’s resignation in January.
Gay presided over the Ivy League institution during seething tensions on campus over the war in Gaza.
She submitted her resignation following her remarks on antisemitism that caused a public fury. Testifying in front of Congress, the former president said that whether calls to commit genocide against Jews violated Harvard conduct were “context dependent.”
Shortly after she stepped down in January, Garber announced the formation of a university task force to tackle bias and hate against Jews and Israelis, coupled with a task force to combat “Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias.”
Photo : Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images.