Anti-Israel protesters donning keffiyehs marched through Harvard University on Friday, waving Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) flags and chanting “Long live the intifada” and “Globalize the intifada”, videos posted to social media showed.
The Boston Globe reported that the protest was organized by the “Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine” student group.
The group’s leaders were scheduled to meet with the college’s president and the school’s management company on Friday afternoon to discuss the school’s endowment, demanding it divest from Israel and businesses that support the country, according to the report.
One of the protesters who spoke at the event shouted into a microphone that dialogue is not a substitute for concrete change and that Harvard must divest from “apartheid in Israel.”
“I don’t know what you guys did this summer, but I stayed angry,” the protester said, before leading call and response chants and yelling “Free, free, free Palestine, from the river to the sea.”
Harvard, which has seen an uptick in anti-Israel activity since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and the war in Gaza which followed, has come under fire over its handling of antisemitism on campus.
In the days after Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, a coalition of 34 Harvard student organizations released a statement in which they blamed Israel for Hamas’ attack.
Later, then-Harvard President Claudine Gay came under fire after she, along with MIT President Sally Kornbluth and University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, testified before a congressional hearing on the issue of antisemitism on college campuses.
All three university presidents gave similar answers to Rep. Elise Stefanik in which they failed to unequivocally condemn antisemitism or even calls for genocide against Jews. Gay eventually resigned as President of Harvard.
In May, anti–Israel protesters at Harvard voluntarily took down a protest encampment after university officials agreed to discuss their questions about the endowment.
Last month, US District Court Judge Richard Stearns approved a lawsuit filed by Jewish students against Harvard University alleging that it enabled antisemitism on campus.
Judge Stearns rejected the request of the Ivy League university leaders to dismiss the lawsuit filed by the Jewish students and stated that "the plaintiffs have reasonably argued that Harvard's response to incidents on campus was insufficient and that the facts, as presented, show that Harvard failed its Jewish students."
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)