Harvard Wants to Talk about Israel-Palestine: Can It Succeed?

Harvard Kennedy School professor Tarek E. Masoud has faced hate mail, criticism from administrators, and the occasional cold shoulder from his colleagues for hosting the Middle East Dialogues, a series of conversations about the war in Israel and Gaza featuring people with varied — and often extremely polarizing — viewpoints on the conflict.

But for Masoud, the lowest point wasn’t when protesters disrupted one of his talks or when his own dean called a speaker’s prior comments “abhorrent.” It came when one of his students decided a speaker was so dishonest that their point of view wasn’t even worth hearing out.

“I don’t believe anymore in the integrity of Dr. Iriqat,” HKS student Roy S. Tichon told a packed room in the Kennedy School’s Taubman Building. Before the March event, Tichon had sent in a question for Dalal Saeb Iriqat, a Palestinian professor who had drawn public outrage for calling Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel a “normal struggle” for freedom. But when Tichon’s turn finally came, he opted to publicly condemn her instead.

Iriqat immediately shot back: “You can feel free to leave the room if you want to.”

In retrospect, Masoud says, that exchange “was kind of undermining the entire enterprise.”

“I took it almost as an attack on me personally, saying, ‘You just brought somebody who is not worth listening to,’” he added.

This isn’t a unique experience at Harvard. Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Harvard affiliates have struggled to have civil conversations with one another on the war amid frequent protests and intense outside scrutiny.

In an effort to avoid further controversy and diffuse campus tensions, Harvard has rolled out a plethora of initiatives that encourage people to simply talk to one other. And at Convocation in September, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 instructed first-years to do just that: “You will learn at least as much from each other as you will learn from anyone else at Harvard.”

“Be prepared to defend your point of view. Be prepared to articulate points of view that are different from your own. Be prepared, most of all, to change your mind,” Garber added.

But while Harvard tries to foster dialogue on the conflict, some students question how seemingly superficial programs like these could possibly be productive. Instead, they describe a campus filled with palpable concerns of doxxing, broken friendships, and fears of antisemitism from their peers. Similarly, while some faculty members say they want to have more conversations that force students to confront difficult topics head-on, they worry about consternation among colleagues, students, and external critics.

As dialogue on campus has faltered, the Middle East Dialogues seem to be one of few spaces where constructive conversations have actually unfolded. Jewish history professor Derek J. Penslar, the co-chair of Harvard’s presidential task force on combating antisemitism, calls the series “excellent” and says similar efforts should take place across Harvard. Penslar plans to teach a class of his own next semester on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“If all we’re going to do is replicate the conflict here in Harvard Yard with people screaming at each other,” Penslar says, “then we may as well shut the university down altogether.”

“We’re not an educational institution at that point,” he adds.

When the Middle East Dialogues were first announced, Masoud drew fierce criticism for hosting Iriqat. Articles condemned the decision to invite Iriqat over her views about Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. Thousands of emails flooded Masoud’s inbox with a petition demanding he disinvite her.

The immediate repercussions for Masoud did not stop at the University’s gates.

Amid the media backlash, former HKS Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf — who then helmed the Kennedy School — distanced himself and the school from Masoud’s series, writing in a statement at the time that he “personally finds abhorrent” Iriqat’s comments.

For the two weeks following the announcement of the series, Masoud — usually well-liked for his outgoing personality — would traverse the Kennedy School’s hallways only to watch colleagues turn and walk the other way when they saw him.

“They didn’t want to be seen with this person,” Masoud says. “That was hard.”

In the months since the fallout, Masoud has faced longer-lasting consequences for his decision to move ahead with the series. Any aspirations for University-wide leadership Masoud may have harbored are now pipe dreams, he says.

“If I had ever had any ambitions to greater university leadership, I think doing something like this is not conducive to that,” he says.

According to Masoud, though his center hasn’t been affected, the series has “severely strained relations” between other Kennedy School centers and their donors — a consequence Masoud feels “terribly” about.

“It’s not a good fundraising strategy to have difficult conversations across a broad political spectrum,” Masoud says. “You’re pretty much guaranteed to have brought somebody here that will make some donor upset.”

Despite the fierce backlash, several people familiar with the Middle East Dialogues have praised the series and Masoud for his decision to continue with the conversations — even in the face of such intense criticism. For many, Masoud modeled how to have the kind of constructive dialogue across ideological differences that Harvard has aimed to foster.

“No matter who he brought, he didn’t run the panel like a talk show host,” says Barak Sella, an HKS alum who took Masoud’s class on Middle Eastern politics. “He ran the panel like a serious academic, where he would interrogate them, he would challenge them.”

“I felt professor Masoud’s series, in a way, was the type of conversations that I came to Harvard to be part of,” Sella adds.

Even some of Masoud’s critics have eventually become his most ardent supporters.

Michael A. Schmidman, a professor and former dean at Touro University’s Graduate School of Jewish Studies, was one of the thousands who emailed Masoud with a petition requesting that Masoud withdraw his invitation to Iriqat.

To Schmidman’s surprise, Masoud responded to his email asking to talk and explain the thinking behind his conversation series. After the two spoke for more than an hour-and-a-half over Zoom, Schmidman emerged a staunch proponent of the series — and of Masoud.

“He is the ideal person to conduct these conversations,” Schmidman says. “He just wants to get to the honest truth, whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant.”

With its success, the series has continued into this year as Masoud held a virtual conversation on Nov. 14 with Husam Zomlot, the ambassador of the Palestinian Mission to the United Kingdom.

However, Masoud is far from the only faculty member hosting tough conversations on Israel and Palestine. Other initiatives have been held or will be held across the University, including a course on the history of Israel and Palestine taught by Penslar and events hosted by the Kennedy School’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

***

Despite the popularity of Masoud’s events among attendees and the prevalence of other talks at the University on the war in Gaza, these initiatives don’t seem to have the same reach at the College level.

Of the more than a dozen undergraduate students contacted for this article, only two say they attended Masoud’s series. Undergraduates familiar with the Middle East Dialogues express mixed reactions to the events.

Zakarias Erdos ’26, a Harvard Hillel student board member, praises Masoud for bringing in speakers involved with policymaking in the region, such as Kushner or Salam Fayyad, the former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.

“It’s interesting that they bring actually involved and relevant people, and not just people that have views,” Erdos says. “People that actually have a stake and sort of power in whatever is going on.”

However, Violet T. M. Barron ’26, a Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine organizer, criticizes the range of speakers Masoud hosted. She says that having a “conversation with a Palestinian person, then conversation with a Zionist person” incorrectly implies that both views are “equally legitimate.”

“To me, it feels very wrong to have a big, official, platformed conversation which implies that there are two equal sides that both have something meaningful to say, when one of those sides — whether or not they say it — is predicated on dehumanization, subjugation,” says Barron, a Crimson Editorial editor.

Still, the range of student reactions to Masoud’s series highlights deeper challenges surrounding discourse at the College and the University at large. Masoud’s events may be popular and even effective, but students face bigger barriers on the ground which these talks have so far struggled to overcome.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, conflict was already on our campus,” Masoud says, in response to critics who accuse him of exacerbating campus tensions. “I’m not the one who brought it here.”

During his freshman year, Nuriel R. Vera-DeGraff ’26 would sit down with his Jewish suitemate in their dorm room in Wigglesworth Hall and have tough but productive conversations on Israel and Palestine. Though he worried at multiple points whether their disagreements had gone too far, their friendship endured.

Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza, however, proved to be too much for the relationship.

In December 2023, Vera-DeGraff posted an Instagram story about the chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” His former suitemate responded on Instagram: “this is disgusting Nuriel.”

“I immediately obviously felt bad, because I’m sure he had some kind of knee-jerk bad reaction to it,” Vera-DeGraff says. “My first instinct was to talk about it, because I knew we had these conversations in the past. But when I tried to respond, I saw that he had blocked me.”

This has, at times, become the context in which Masoud and the University are trying to hold difficult conversations. As official events and panels take place across campus, some students are shying away from discussions in fear that any comments they make about Israel and Palestine could elicit fierce backlash.

Some of this pressure comes from beyond the University’s walls. The months following Oct. 7 saw doxxing trucks parade through Harvard Square and websites publicize the personal information of pro-Palestine student activists. Vera-DeGraff himself received external hate mail. Barron found herself on Canary Mission, a doxxing website, and with public vitriol directed towards both her and her family.

These doxxing incidents, according to Vera-DeGraff, have had a chilling effect on campus free speech. “People won’t even talk about it because they’re so scared about having any little disagreement about it,” he says. “Caution manifests in the sense of people not sharing their full set of beliefs.”

Several Jewish students say that campus life has often felt isolating and that they have experienced increased antisemitism on campus. Daniel O. Denenberg ’26, Hillel’s Israel Chair, recounts a moment when a faculty member asked an Israeli student to leave a class she was auditing because, the professor said, her presence made other classmates uncomfortable.

“Jews feel alone,” Denenberg says. “Jews don’t have allies.”

Some students also say that antisemitism has grown at Harvard due to rhetoric used by certain pro-Palestine activists, pointing to an antisemitic cartoon posted by the PSC in February and chants used at certain protests such as “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada.”

The PSC wrote in a statement that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism and that it rejects “attempts to center the conversation around Palestinian liberation on racist misinterpretations.”

Still, Charles M. Covit ’27, a Hillel student leader and Crimson Editorial editor, says some pro-Palestine activist groups use “threatening antisemitic rhetoric” that discourages Jewish students from engaging in dialogue.

“When you post publicly about your peers, that their student organizations were mass murderers, [it paints] a real target on those organizations,” says Covit. “Hillels have been attacked in different places in the country.”

“It’s decisions like those that I think really make it impossible at this stage to have a real dialogue,” he says.

To make matters harder for Masoud and the University, brewing beneath these fears of backlash are core ideological disagreements between students about Israel, Palestine, and what peace in the Middle East could look like. Especially for the students most involved with the issue on campus, these differences have stymied attempts to hold conversations.

Last year, as campus tensions mounted, student leaders involved with Hillel and the PSC held several private meetings in an unofficial capacity to lower the temperature and find common ground, according to Hillel Executive Director Rabbi Jason B. Rubenstein ’04 and Covit, who was present at the talks.

During the conversations, the students discussed the possibility of Hillel and the PSC releasing a joint statement mourning the death of innocent civilians since Oct. 7 and establishing more formal lines of communication between the two organizations, Rubenstein and Covit say.

But these attempts to foster discourse ultimately failed. The meetings devolved as students ran up against fundamental — and what at times seemed like insurmountable — ideological disagreements.

Covit says the dialogues broke down in part because PSC members’ refused to allow an Israeli student to join the conversations. “Israelis are part of the community, and they’re the ones most affected by the anti-Israeli bias on campus,” Covit adds.

The PSC wrote in a statement that no official meetings between the groups occurred, but did not deny that student leaders involved with the organizations met in an unofficial capacity last year.

More generally, the PSC claims that discourse between Hillel and PSC has been hampered by Hillel International’s policy prohibiting Hillels from engaging with organizations that support “a boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel.”

Barron says Hillel can’t have conversations “in good faith” with pro-Palestine organizations and individuals “until Hillel actually changes its stance on Israel and commits to being non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, and then invites in anti-Zionist speakers.”

Rubenstein, however, says a central part of Hillel’s goal is welcoming Jews regardless of religious stances and allowing students to host events so long as they don’t aim to undermine certain Jewish communities — including Zionists.

“You might be Lutheran and I might be Buddhist. We might fundamentally disagree on theology, but we also know that we have an obligation to support one another’s right to be here,” he says.

Rubenstein instead says dialogue has failed because of the commitment among some pro-Palestine activists to the “anti-normalization of Israel,” which he defines as the “the cultural and academic boycott of Israel.”

“Their attitude is ‘We’re not going to normalize, we’re not going to engage with Zionism, we’re not going to speak to Israelis,’” says Covit. “It makes it very hard to have dialogue.”

The PSC wrote in a statement that while it “refuses to normalize Zionism,” this approach “has not prevented us from engaging in countless conversations with Zionist and Israeli individuals,” citing its office hours and educational events.

Barron, however, still says having organizations like the PSC host events with Zionist speakers would be “parallel” to the Harvard Black Students Association “inviting or speaking with David Duke or a KKK member.”

“That’s very extreme, but it would be one affinity group having a conversation with another group which does not believe, again, in the humanity of that identity that is held by this affinity group,” Barron says.

“I’m not trying to say that Hillel is the KKK,” Barron quickly adds. However, she says, “I would not have a conversation with anyone who doesn’t believe that people who are my friends are less than people or lesser than them.”

Some pro-Palestine activists even question the benefits of discourse in the first place. In their view, the war in Gaza is so morally urgent it requires material action, not just conversations. Zakiriya H. Gladney ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor and pro-Palestine student activist, says that while discourse is “valuable,” the ongoing nature of the war means protest takes precedence.

“There’s an incredible moral outrage that’s currently happening in Gaza,” says Gladney. “For people to tell those people, ‘OK, now’s the time for you to discuss this issue with people,’ is often incredibly patronizing.”

“It’s reductive of what’s going on,” he adds.

Last spring, Masoud visited the pro-Palestine Harvard Yard encampment with a colleague to prove to her that Harvard undergraduates involved with the protest were, in his words, “very sincere” and “not bad kids.”

In front of University Hall, Masoud had a civil conversation with one of his students. Then, he and his colleague took a walk to survey the encampment and its various signs.

But as they roamed the area, a student participating in the encampment confronted Masoud.

“That was so reckless of you to bring Jared Kushner here,” Masoud recalls the student saying. “You should leave. You’re not welcome here.”

As some students shy away from discourse and even reject the concept of dialogue itself, certain faculty members say that even the best faculty and University-led initiatives have limited potential for impact. The onus to create an environment conducive to productive conversations, according to some, falls on students instead.

“When it becomes the case that students want to stop certain points of view from being expressed in the University, students, too, have the ability — I’m sorry to say — to make it harder to have a University environment where different points of view can be expressed,” says Harvard Law School professor Noah R. Feldman ’92.

“It is students who, in the end, shape the culture of a University more than anybody else,” he adds.

While Feldman describes students as a cause for the breakdown of campus dialogue, Masoud and other faculty members express optimism about students and their willingness to engage in discourse. Harvard students, Masoud says, are “virtuous people” and “searchers.”

“The news reports about Harvard as a place that is riven by conflict, with students who can’t bear to hear anything that is at odds with their own views, as a place where we flee from difficult conversations — I always felt that was not exactly right,” Masoud says.

“The vast majority of students understand that the people on both sides of this have a point, and they want to listen to and hear those points,” he adds.

***

But even for faculty members who believe students are willing to engage in constructive conversations, some say there is lacking internal support from administrators for hosting events on Israel and Palestine.

In March 2024, Chance E. Bonar, a house resident tutor, organized a panel at Lowell House on antisemitism and Islamophobia slated to feature several scholars of Jewish and Islamic studies.

But Bonar was forced to cancel the event after the Lowell House faculty deans and the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics removed themselves as co-sponsors. They cited concerns about lacking viewpoint diversity among the panelists and pulled support after criticisms that the event did not provide information about kosher food or the Jewish fast day of Ta’anit Esther.

For Bonar, the backlash was intense. He received hate mail and saw several articles published in right-wing media outlets criticizing him and the panel. And in Lowell House — where Bonar still resides today — he has experienced “ongoing tensions and fallouts,” he writes in a statement.

“I’ve been most concerned about how the backlash and lack of willingness of administrators to engage in meaningful repair and public apology may affect my professional reputation,” Bonar writes.

The Lowell Faculty Deans wrote in a statement at the time that though they did not sponsor the panel as part of Lowell’s institutional programming, they personally supported the event and praised Bonar’s “extraordinary contributions as a beloved community member.”

Still, in the tense environment surrounding discourse about Israel and Palestine at Harvard, several professors say that holding events similar to Masoud and Bonar’s is no small task for faculty members.

“It takes balls, it takes guts to do it,” says David S. Patel, a residential visiting scholar at the Middle East Initiative. “Why didn’t a lot of people do it? Because you’re gonna get attacked, and your life is easier if you keep your head down.”

Even Masoud acknowledges that putting on his events took a toll. Though he expresses pride about the Middle East Dialogues and says he believes “it was the right thing to do,” he admits that the fallout from the series has made him, at times, question his decision to host the conversations.

“Definitely there were times where I really regretted it,” Masoud says.

“Part of me still regrets it,” he adds.

***

In the hopes of facilitating more dialogue on campus, the University has launched a spate of new policies and working groups to improve open inquiry at Harvard.

This fall, incoming first-years were required for the first time to complete an online module on holding constructive conversations. When the Class of 2028 arrived on campus, they attended a talk on intellectual vitality led by Government professor Michael J. Sandel. For upperclassmen, the University launched a program that selects tutors and proctors to facilitate dialogue in Houses.

Other University-wide initiatives include the Intellectual Vitality Initiative, the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue and Institutional Voice working groups, a Faculty of Arts and Sciences initiative on promoting civil discourse, the Candid and Constructive Conversations task force at the Kennedy School, and the Council on Academic Freedom, an organization which Masoud leads as co-president.

Despite these efforts, some students and faculty members say the University still hasn’t done enough to foster dialogue around Israel and Palestine on campus.

“Harvard does a lot of talk about wanting dialogue and wanting hard conversations to be had,” says Irati Egorho Diez ’25, who works as a research assistant for the Middle East Initiative. “A lot of the initiatives in which, presumably, that sort of hard dialogue is going to take place then end up being more talking about doing difficult things than actually doing them.”

Meanwhile, Philosophy professor Edward J. “Ned” Hall says that faculty members still don’t feel wholly supported by the University in holding difficult conversations similar to Masoud’s events. “We’re not currently in a kind of situation where faculty can take absolutely for granted that the administration will have their backs,” he says.

“In general, we’ve seen too many incidents over the years where some faculty member gets targeted for a certain kind of abuse or opprobrium or anger because of some idea they had or defended that’s well within the bounds of what’s reasonable to defend,” Hall adds.

While it’s clear to several faculty members that the University should change how it interacts with faculty-hosted events on controversial topics, there is less consensus around how exactly this change should happen.

Hall thinks the University should play a more direct role in fostering dialogue. One way Harvard could do this, he says, is by creating a new administrative position tasked with promoting open inquiry and supporting faculty facing public backlash over their opinions and academic work.

Hall also believes the University should launch “high profile grants” for faculty to hold events like Masoud’s. His proposal resembles the recently-announced President’s Building Bridges Fund, which will fund student proposals for mending campus tensions and promoting dialogue, except that it would support faculty-led initiatives instead.

Masoud, however, says he would prefer for the University to maintain a stance of neutrality in accordance with its recently-announced institutional voice policy and not interfere with faculty-led efforts to facilitate conversation. Harvard will inevitably attract external scrutiny and even backlash, he says. In his mind, the only sustainable response to this attention is for the University to try and remain above the fray.

“I’m not asking the University to protect me,” says Masoud, who holds a tenured position. “I want the University to adopt a position of neutrality towards what its faculty say.”

Whether the institution remains neutral or not, Masoud believes the solution does not lie in events hosted by the University or the open inquiry initiatives launched last year. In his view, the only way to have difficult conversations is far simpler.

“My view is: this is not hard,” he says. “Just do it.”

***

On March 7, Iriqat, the Palestinian professor, finally came to Harvard to speak with Masoud for the Middle East Dialogues.

Besides the tense moment between Tichon and Iriqat, the event went smoothly. But as Iriqat answered questions from the audience toward the end of the talk, she referenced the Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary force that fought to end British rule in Northern Ireland, and how this military group was included in negotiations that ended the conflict. Hamas, she said, should be similarly included in any future peace talks aimed at ending the war in Gaza.

“They need to come to the table,” Iriqat said. “It has been tried and it has been successful.”

Her statement immediately sparked mumblings of disagreement throughout the packed room. An attendee said “kill us all” — an apparent reference to the violence they would expect from Hamas — prompting Iriqat to jab back.

“No, who wants to kill you all? Who are you?” she exclaimed. For a moment, it seemed like the event was on the verge of devolving into chaos.

But as tension in the room mounted, Masoud stepped in.

“Everybody, please, help me,” Masoud said, holding up his hand in a plea. “I’ve been trying to tell the world that we can have these conversations at Harvard like adults.”

“We’re going to do it, we’re going to succeed,” he said.

The room quieted down, and the talk proceeded.

— Magazine writer Xinni (Sunshine) Chen can be reached at sunshine.chen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sunshine_cxn.

— Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.