Harvard is bringing four more anti-Israel activists to campus, hiring a filmmaker, a “journalist” for a Qatari-owned outlet, an English teacher at a Hamas-linked university in Gaza who has accused Israel of “scholasticide,” and a professor who has described Israel as an “ecofascist state” guilty of “domicide.” They’ll serve as Radcliffe Fellows in the 2026-2027 academic year, earning at least $89,550 over nine months for a stipend, expenses, and housing allowance and potentially tens of thousands of dollars more in child care, health care, and moving expenses, along with access to Harvard libraries and athletic facilities, office space, and use of Harvard undergraduates as paid research assistants.
The newly named fellows include:
— Mahdi Fleifel, the Dubai-born writer-director of London-based Nakba FilmWorks. In 2018 Nakba FilmWorks affirmed its support of the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. In an interview published in July 2025 with the World Socialist Web Site, Fleifel appeared to justify the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel: “The events of October 7? You leave the Palestinians to rot and die in a cage, what do you expect is going to happen? They’re going to send Christmas cards?” He also agreed with an interviewer who asserted that dignity and freedom for Palestinians “requires the overthrow of everything,” replying, “Exactly.”
— Ibtisam Azem, whose LinkedIn profile describes her as, since 2014, a New York-based “journalist and novelist” for Qatari-owned Alaraby Aljadeed Ltd. In July 2025, she conducted a fawning interview with Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University anti-Israel activist that the U.S. government is trying to deport. Her questions included, “How do you situate your arrest and the broader Palestinian freedom movement in the U.S., especially student-led activism, in relation to other justice movements like the civil rights movements for African Americans, Indigenous struggles, or the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa?” Her introduction to the interview described “the genocide in Palestine—a genocide backed by President Donald Trump’s administration.” She’s also a public supporter of the boycott against Israel; in a 2020 interview with the Asia Times, she said, “there is no agreement to translate the novel into Hebrew. Any such translation must be in accordance with the principles of BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions).” In the same interview she described both Israel and the U.S. as “settler-colonial countries.”
— Ahmed Kamal Junina, a citizen of New Zealand who is a professor of English at Gaza-based Al-Aqsa University. In 2016 the PLO-controlled Palestinian education ministry reportedly stopped recognizing degrees from Al-Aqsa amid a dispute over the influence there of the Hamas terrorist group. The vice president of Al-Aqsa University, Faiq Al-Naouq, was a Hamas leader photographed at Hamas events promoting armed resistance against Israel, according to an article in JewishOnliner. Junina’s articles for European outlets such as the Guardian and the Independent demonize Israel while making no mention of Hamas. One website bio of him says, “he investigates how language serves as a resource for survival, empowerment, and political resistance in higher education under occupation. Ahmed is committed to decolonial, critical, and participatory methodologies.”
— Irus Braverman, a professor at the University of Buffalo who has described Israel as an “ecofascist state.” “The ecofascist dream is not just of a Jewish ethnostate but of a green one, too,” she wrote in a 2025 paper. In a 2024 paper she accuses Israel of “domicide—the purposeful and widespread destruction of homes and buildings to make a place unlivable.” Harvard says she’ll “pursue a project on ecopastoralism in Palestine-Israel.” Braverman is a contributor of short videos to a demonize-Israel project with fellow academics, with TikTok-ready titles such as “Israel uses parks to seize lands” and “Sheep-Washing: How Settlers Use Sheep to Colonize Palestine.”
Harvard’s May 14 press release announcing the new group of fellows named ten of them but omitted the four anti-Israel activists, relegating them to a hyperlinked “full list” in the last sentence of the announcement. The Harvard Radcliffe Institute press release also features a social media tool that facilitates sharing on the grim left-wing-tilted site Bluesky but not on the much more popular Elon Musk-owned X. Radcliffe used to be a women’s college before Harvard went co-ed. Instead of shutting down it started offering fellowships, led by Drew Faust, who went on to become president of Harvard, and by a longtime Harvard academic administrator, Judith Vichniac, who died in 2019 and who I suspect would have been dismayed to see the institution head in this direction, with anti-Israel activists swarming the Radcliffe endowment like Hamas thugs in Gaza looting a truck full of U.N. humanitarian aid.
The federal government sued in March 2026 over what the Justice Department’s complaint calls the university’s “toothless non-response to the ongoing relentless antisemitic on-campus discrimination.” An estimated $2.6 billion in federal funding for the university is at stake. Harvard’s $126-million-a-year lawyers are in court filings this month claiming, yet again, that “isolated instances of conduct targeting Jewish students” do not amount to a “severe, pervasive” “hostile environment,” and also that Harvard wasn’t deliberately indifferent. Harvard has also claimed the federal government is threatening funding for medical research into cures or treatments for Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and heart disease and is engaged in an “unconstitutional retaliation campaign against Harvard.”
Nakba FilmWorks and Junina did not respond to email inquiries from the Washington Free Beacon. A Radcliffe spokesperson and the dean of the Radcliffe Institute did not respond to a request for comment.
Harvard describes Junina as from “Al-Aqsa University (Palestine)” and says “At Radcliffe, he will develop ‘The University in Extremis: Reimagining Academic Freedom in Palestine,’ a book project examining how universities in Gaza and the West Bank illuminate academic freedom and the social purpose of higher education under siege.” Presumably Junina will not explore the fact that there is no academic freedom at all in Gaza, which operates under the control of Hamas and prohibits political and religious dissent.
Radcliffe recently “laid off four employees, shifted three staff members to part-time roles, and eliminated eight vacant positions,” the Crimson reported, with a memo from Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin citing “a wide range of federal actions targeting Harvard” along with “market volatility.”
In a December 2025 interview, Junina faulted college administrators for disciplining anti-Israel protesters. “I see this suppression as part of a broader global trend of silencing dissent, particularly when it comes to Palestinian rights. Student activism has historically driven some of the most important social changes—the anti-apartheid struggle, the civil-rights movement, anti-war protests—and universities know this. That is why the crackdown was so severe.” In the same interview, he described his losses: “I lost 43 members of my extended family in this war, including my sister, three nephews, my niece Amal, whose name means ‘hope,’ two brothers-in-law, my uncle and two cousins, along with their families.”
Junina has accused Israel of “scholasticide,” which the Anti-Defamation League and the Academic Engagement Network describe as “a false and harmful accusation” that is “fully aligned with the goals of the global BDS movement” and serves to “unfairly demonize Israel.”
“For me, this fellowship is a rare and meaningful opportunity to bring Gaza’s academic questions, struggles, and voices into one of the world’s leading intellectual spaces. I’ll go to Harvard carrying with me the voices of Gaza’s students and academics,” Junina said in a LinkedIn post.
Harvard says that Azem “will be working on a novel tracing the history of a Palestinian family in Jaffa through the narratives of three generations and their relationship to land, settler-colonial law, and organized crime.”
The Radcliffe Institute faculty advisory council includes Andrew Manuel Crespo, who gave a June 2025 Harvard Law School graduation speech denouncing “atrocities” in “Palestine.” It also includes Robin Bernstein, who signed a 2021 “statement by Harvard faculty in support of Palestinian liberation”: “We demand an end to US support for Israel’s apartheid regime, condemn Israeli state aggression, and affirm our support for the Palestinian liberation struggle.”
The Harvard website invites non-U.S. citizens to apply for the fellowships. “Applicants from throughout the world are encouraged to apply. Harvard University typically sponsors J-1 scholar visas for Harvard Radcliffe Fellows,” the website says.
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