Among the thousand currents of the university turmoil during these last several months, the tiny ripple that most securely caught my eye was a distinctly minor scandal at Harvard back in February, which caused not a single broken window or student riot or mass invasion by agents of the state. This was a scandal over a cartoon. The minor scandal had the virtue, however, of casting a retrospective light on an earlier scandal at Harvard, the original scandal, which was pretty much the founding moment of what eventually became the enormous tide of university protests and controversies. The original scandal was a statement signed by more than thirty Harvard student groups in the first days after the October 7, 2023 massacre blaming Israel (“entirely responsible”) instead of Hamas (unmentioned) for the atrocities — after which came the clumsy dithering of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, to speak up in a sufficiently articulate fashion about the massacre and the student statement, which led to her notorious failure in testimony to Congress to find anything condemnatory to say about students calling for genocide of the Jews (“depends on context”), which led to everything else. And this was not just in America. In Paris, Sciences Po, aka the Institut d’études de politiques de Paris, which is more or less the Harvard of France, generated its own scandal, beginning in March. The Sciences Po students held a pro-Palestine meeting. A Jewish student got up the courage to enter the amphitheater. And the Jewish student was greeted in a manner that was sufficiently obnoxious to attract the attention of Emmanuel Macron himself, who thought it his duty to underline the “unspeakable and perfectly intolerable” behavior — which led, by late April, to a student occupation of a stairwell, the intervention of riot police, indignation over the menace to academic freedom, and generally the turmoil that any number of universities and arts organizations have come to know. In this fashion, the enormous and sometimes scandalous wave of protests against Israel and Zionism that got started at Harvard has turned out to be, well, maybe not universal. Problems and protests like these seem not to have occurred in the Latin American universities, which is curious. Nor in various other regions. But the wave has been very large. The cartoon scandal — the mini-event at Harvard in February — was brought on by two student organizations, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the African and African American Resistance Organization, with the unfortunate support of still another organization called Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. The two student groups set out to show and acclaim the historical origins of African–American solidarity with the Palestinian cause. This reaches back to 1967 and the rebellious young activists of the civil rights movement. The Harvard student groups wanted to explain that, in adopting the Palestinian cause, the young rebels of those long-ago times took a major step in advancing the larger struggle for black liberation. The students composed an infographic making those points, and the graphic within the infographic was a charcoal-line cartoon by an artist named Herman “Kofi” Bailey, which the students lifted from the young rebels’ newsletter from 1967. The cartoon showed blacks and Arabs being jointly oppressed by their enemy, the Jews. A black man and an Arab man (who might have been Muhammad Ali, the boxer, and Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt) gazed helplessly upward from the cartoon with nooses draped around their necks. At the top of the cartoon a white hand, bearing on its back a Star of David tattoo encasing a dollar sign, held the two nooses loosely in its fingers, ready to give the fatal yank. But salvation was in sight. This was a scrawny arm brandishing a machete, with the arm and machete labeled “Third World Liberation Movement,” ready to slice the ropes and liberate the doomed. The cartoon was, in short, a melodrama of victimhood (blacks, Arabs), victimizer (Jews), and savior (Third World Liberation). The Harvard student groups saw sufficient value in the cartoon to post it on their Instagram site. Someone at the Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine was sufficiently impressed to repost it, signaling approval (even if, in reality, the faculty-and-staff group had no idea what was being reposted). And the mini-scandal was at hand. On this occasion, Harvard’s new interim president — Claudine Gay was gone by then — demonstrated that he had learned from Gay’s mistakes and was quick to condemn. And the dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, did the interim president one better. Dean Khurana called the Instagram post “unmistakably anti-Semitic and racist,” which was a sharp phrase, given that, at Harvard, the two student groups surely regarded themselves as racism’s boldest enemies. And the phrase was doubly sharp, given that Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine had made a point, in their founding statement, of disputing the claim that “critique of the Israeli state is anti-Semitic.” Their own critique of the Israeli state turned out, however, to be anti-Semitic. Said the dean: “It’s become clear that some members of our community are intent on testing the limits of how low discourse can go — and it now appears that we are hitting rock bottom.” Everyone apologized. Harvard is civilized. And yet, no one likes to be insulted. And the people under accusation by their dean may have felt that, even if they had failed to examine their cartoon closely enough, the general opinion among students at Harvard, and among a good many faculty as well, was on their side. Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine accordingly lamented their participation in the affair with a fine panache of the passive tense: “It has come to our attention that a post featuring antiquated cartoons which used offensive anti-Semitic tropes was linked to our account.” The student apologies ventured still further into the zones of passive aggression. The student groups expunged the disgraced cartoon from their Instagram
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