HTR Summer Fellowship Must Take an Anti-Zionist Stance
I] Context
This summer, in light of the racialized murders at the hands of the state, and the much-needed momentum that the Black Lives Matter movement has picked up, the Harvard Technology Review (HTR) — in co-sponsorship with the Harvard Black Students Association (BSA) — decided to launch an inaugural (virtual) summer fellowship. This fellowship was designed to allow a cohort of incoming first-year students to critically engage with the intersection of systemic anti-Blackness and technology; to use that as a segue to discuss broader issues of racial bias in technology; and to publish an article on some racial justice/tech topic. More broadly, HTR hoped this program could begin to equip fellows with the much-needed lens of racial justice for future work in technology and tech-journalism.
The two-week program was set to run from Monday 8/3 to Friday 8/14 (programming consisted of various webinars/workshops, reading discussion groups, and community-oriented activities). As a crux of this program, HTR on-boarded a number of incredible professional mentors & speakers. There was an intentional effort made to center BIPOC womxn and gender-expansive folks, specifically with the goal of creating a space radically more inclusive than that of the tech
industry, and of giving credit to those who have done the most to further this burgeoning
movement for radical technology. However, as a student organization with limited funds, it was impossible to provide financial honorariums for mentorship. Thus, in an effort to honor in other ways the intellectual/emotional labor that mentorship demands, HTR opted to compile and boost a donation list of organizations linked to the work of our mentors.
This week, shortly before the start of our fellowship, one of the board members of HTR reached out with some concerning requests. Specifically, this board member requested that HTR:
Remove two organizations suggested by our mentors for the donation list because they were “antisemitic” — namely the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition & the Allied Media Projects
Cited that the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition signed onto a US Campaign for Palestinian Rights petition that apparently “includes many antisemitic claims” — ex: “The apartheid regime imposed by the state of Israel...is a strategy implicit in genocide to maximize economic gains.”
Cited that the Allied Media projects funded these sessions — ex: "de-shelving Israeli consumer goods, remaking and reinstalling bus shelter graphics, subway graphics installation, outdoor projections, appropriating Zionist outreach materials, and stealth actions at pro-Israel events.”
Disinvite a speaker we had planned for the event, Dr. Melina Abdullah (co-founder of the Los Angeles BLM chapter)
Claimed over text that Dr. Abdullah has “actively promoted anti-Semitic violence” & cited this opinion letter as justification
A few days later, a follow-up call was scheduled with this member and the executive leadership team of HTR to discuss the problematic nature of these demands. With no prior notice, a prominent member of Harvard Hillel was also brought on to the Zoom link to help defend this stance. During this call, these individuals explicitly expressed discomfort with HTR/the fellowship broadly taking an “anti-Zionist” stance.
Personal testimony (Nikhil Dharmaraj, Harvard ‘23): As the organizer of the fellowship, I personally felt deeply uncomfortable and heavily gaslit during multiple instances. I initially expressed my hesitation to have some sort of “civil discussion” with the board member in-question, because what civil discussion is there to be had with a perspective that believes acknowledging the apartheid reality of Israel is antisemitic? I refused to allow Zionist perspectives to overtake the months of labor I had put into organizing this fellowship. In response, upperclassmen leaders of the organization simply dismissed my concerns as not being “inclusive” enough and called my behavior “frankly disappointing.” However, I still stand firm in my conviction that there is no room for any sort of productive or respectable discourse when it comes to clearly hateful and racist ideologies. Moreover, as mentioned above, I was unknowingly led into a call where I was clearly being cornered by multiple upperclassmen students defending their stance. On this call, I was aggressively put on the spot to answer huge, open-ended questions about a complex 72-year occupation by multiple individuals. I in fact felt so overwhelmed and defenseless that I just ended up leaving 10 minutes into our scheduled meeting.
II] Importance of Including Anti-Zionism in Anti-Racism Organizing
“Black solidarity with Palestine allows us to understand the nature of contemporary racism more deeply.” – Angela Davis
Zionism is unquestionably a racist, sectarian, exclusionary, Jewish-supremacist political ideology that has dispossessed, displaced, and ethnically cleansed Indigenous Palestinians from their lands for over three generations. Zionism is not Judaism. Opposing Zionism must be a central tenant in any anti-racism work. We would be foolish to believe that freedom struggles can be separated from one another. In the words of the timeless activist and intellectual Angela Davis, “if justice is indivisible, it follows that our struggles against injustice must be united.” Davis’s insight is not a simple cliche to be regarded lightly. Rather, it details profound analysis of the nature of systems of oppression that relate and connect to one another through ideological and material form.
Zionism as a genocidal and ethnocidal political ideology does not exist in isolation. Zionism as propagated by Theodore Herzl and effectuated by war criminals — and founding fathers of the state of Israel — David Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Yossef Nachmmani, Ezra Danin, and many others, is deeply rooted in, and shares theoretical and practicable frameworks with, white supremacy, settler-colonialism, ethnonationalism and fascism. We have a moral obligation to resoundingly reject each of these ideologies of division, hate, and exclusion.
More specifically, as a fellowship designed to address racial justice in technology, we believe it is imperative to discuss surveillance tools, among other tactics of domination, as they are deployed in state-sanctioned violence. Given the nature of the US-Israeli Police Exchange, also known as the Deadly Exchange, we maintain that this fellowship would be remiss to not study the overlap, and symbiotic relations, between these two connected systems of oppression. Only then can we condemn them both and work towards a more just world for all.
In this present moment of heightened awareness of — and long-overdue pushback against — white supremacy’s role in shaping the United States’ social, political, and economic life, it is incumbent upon us — if we are serious about the cause of truth — to address and dismantle all permutations of racism and white supremacy across the globe.
Organizing around anti-Zionism is not new. Since its inception in 2014, the Black Lives Matter Movement has made its stance clear: in order to be firmly anti-racist, it must also be vehemently anti-Zionist. The Black Lives Matter movement understands the Palestinian cause for freedom, justice and equality, which is what compels them to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement. The Black Lives Matter movement understands that in order for Black lives to matter, Palestinian lives must also matter. This means disavowing Zionism for the racist ideology that it is. Justice is uncompromising.
III] Denouncing Antisemitism
We want to make it unwaveringly clear: it is with the same principled impetus with which we decisively denounce and condemn Zionism that we denounce and condemn antisemitism in all of its forms. This is a matter of both moral consistency and real-world necessity. No one is free until we are all free. We do not believe that any human life holds more weight or value than another. That is why we do not tolerate any form of racism, whether it be anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Jewish racism, anti-Black racism, or anti-Indigenous racism.
As such, we cannot treat as respectable the false, ahistorical, intellectually dishonest, and dangerous assertion that criticism of Zionism is equatable to antisemitism.
Further, we find it extremely dangerous to label rightful and necessary criticism of the actions of the state of Israel as antisemitic, as exhibited by the board member in question. The fact that Israel is an apartheid state must not be up for debate, lest we descend into the perilous waters of moral relativism, disinformation, and mendacity. We stand resolute with the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which works to detail Israel’s systematic human rights abuses and uplift the Palestinian cause for freedom and justice, as well as its World Without Walls Delegation Statement.
Additionally, we find morally objectionable the board member’s insinuation that boycotting Israeli products that prop-up and perpetuate Israeli crimes against humanity is somehow antisemitic. The tool of boycott has been an indispensable, non-violent means of oppressed peoples compelling their oppressor to treat them with basic dignity and decency. Again, the conflation of boycotting Zionism with antisemitism is both dangerous and disingenuous.
III] Demands
Thus, we call upon HTR to comply with the following demands:
Boost the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition & Allied Media Projects on the donation list, as suggested
Keep Dr. Melina Abdullah as a speaker for the fellowship — specifically, as a co-panelist for the proposed event “BlackLivesMatter is More Than A Hashtag: A Conversation with Roslyn Satchel & Melina Abdullah about Community Organizing for Racial Justice Now”
Dr. Abdullah is the co-founder of the BLM chapter in Los Angeles, the chair of the Cal State LA Pan-African Studies Dep’t, and generally, a pillar of the Black Lives Matter movement. She has been interviewed in the groundbreaking documentary 13th; organized on-the-ground movements in Los Angeles; and written much valuable content on the intricate relationship between race, class, and gender. We maintain that she, as a Black woman activist, will lend much invaluable expertise to this space, especially in the context of a conversation about community organizing.
Take an explicitly anti-Zionist stance throughout this Racial Justice & Technology fellowship and beyond
This includes explicitly denouncing Zionism as a inhumane and illegitimate ideology; freely discussing and criticizing Israeli foreign and domestic policy throughout events of the fellowship as criminal when appropriate; understanding and grappling with the inherent long-term and historic ties between Black liberation & Palestinian liberation; and continuing to advocate on behalf of Palestinian self-determination, freedom, justice and equality.
We demand that HTR adopt this basic moral positioning. Otherwise, we affirm that this fellowship will occur in another space that lends itself to holding anti-Zionism, anti-white-supremacy, and racial justice as uncompromisable and central principles.
Signatories
Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine
Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee
Association of Black Harvard Women
Harvard Black Students Association
Harvard Society of Black Scientists and Engineers
Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign
Harvard Jewish Coalition for Peace
Native Americans at Harvard College
Harvard Organization for Prison Education
Harvard Ethnic Studies Coalition
Harvard Pakistan Forum
Harvard Student Labor Action Movement
Harvard Young Democratic Socialists of America
Harvard Islamic Society
Harvard Society of Arab Students
Harvard South Asian Women's Collective
Asian Americans for Political Justice
Harvard College Queer Students and Allies
Harvard College Eritrean + Ethiopian Student Association
Harvard College Act on a Dream
HealthRIGHTers
Vanderbilt Students for Justice in Palestine
Harvard College SHADE
Harvard Sikh Students Association
Harvard Pakistani Students Association
Harvard College Latino Men’s Collective
Black Lives Matter - Los Angeles