Boycott of ‘apartheid regime’ is urged
The weekend after the federal government sued Harvard for ongoing “relentless antisemitic on-campus discrimination,” Harvard co-sponsored an event with a boycott-Israel advocacy group in which a Harvard researcher accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza.
Signup for the online event of the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council was available via the website of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, which sits within Harvard’s School of Public Health. The “Harvard FXB program” was announced at the start of the event as a cosponsor, and the main speaker at the event, Bilal Irfan, was introduced as a bioethicist at “Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s hospital.”
After greetings from Alice Rothschild of the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council, which is promoting on its website a report about Israel’s “engineered collapse of Palestinian life,” and Miguel Garcia, global secretary of the People’s Health Movement, which issued a statement Thursday condemning “Israel’s military assaults on Lebanon and the US backing that makes it possible,” Irfan plunged into a slide presentation that he described as “documenting the Gaza genocide.”
Irfan spoke of what he said was “Israel’s policy of destroying the health system,” which he said was “a part of the genocidal aims.” He accused Israel of acting to “abduct these physicians” without mentioning that the Israel Defence Forces have described at least some Gaza doctors as suspected Hamas terrorist operatives and the released Israeli hostage Sharon Cunio said that most of her time in Hamas captivity was spent in a hospital. Irfan did not mention Hamas once in the entire presentation. At one point he referred to October 28, 2023, as “three weeks into the genocide” without making any mention of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. He accused Israel of “targeted attacks on maternity wards,” without acknowledging that Hamas stores weapons in hospital neonatal incubators. He also demonized Israeli doctors: “there are a number of Israeli health-care providers who are pro-genocide.”
Among the other accusations that Irfan made against Israel were “sexual violence against children” and detaining children “in small cages,” an accusation he said dated to June 2023.
Irfan complained that he had trouble publishing some of his findings because of pressure from journals and medical societies to “keep it two-sided” and because of funding guidelines “pushing people to not support boycotts of the apartheid regime.”
He concluded by urging people to “continue advocacy in your personal and professional lives.”
Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias has singled out the FXB Center for criticism. The task force’s April 29, 2025, report notes that the FXB staff openly and in writing rejected neutrality in favor of advocacy. Three FXB-affiliated individuals, Bram Wispelwey, Sawsan Abdulrahim, and David Mills, wrote a February 2025 article in which they say, “we join many others who have called for a paradigm shift away from the inertia of supposed objectivity and claimed neutrality that function to perpetuate injustice. Instead, we call for the collective practice of critical advocacy, solidarity with people affected by injustice and oppression, and an emancipatory politics in pursuit of justice in Palestine.” Wispelwey, Mills, and three other Harvard FXB-affiliated individuals, Yara Asi, Osama Tanous, and Weeam Hammoudeh, wrote a 2024 article, “Social medicine education towards structural transformation in Palestine,” in which they describe a course they taught to Harvard students in which one of three objectives was “to champion structural health interventions through solidarity, advocacy, and organizing.”
The task force also noted that FXB webinars were a subject of student complaints. “Several students raised concerns with the Task Force about these webinars, alleging that some of the featured speakers presented a demonizing view of Israel and Israelis,” the April 2025 report said.
As Robert Friedman, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 2024, noted in a November 18, 2025, report on a previous FXB webinar, the task force report described the FXB webinars about Gaza as “characterized by bias and misinformation,” noting, “The accumulation of dis- and misinformation of this kind about Israel is a form of demonization, and we were told it was experienced as such by Israeli and Jewish members of our campus community.” Said Friedman, “When a webinar like this is presented even after students have complained about the series and after a presidential task force has faulted them—and even after Harvard became subject to lawsuits and federal investigations for antisemitism—it raises questions of institutional intent.” That observation applies a second time around, and with emphasis, again, here.
In December 2025 the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, Andrea Baccarelli, announced a change in the FXB center’s leadership and focus. That prompted a petition for reinstatement of the previous director, Mary Bassett, from signers who saw “a deeper, troubling pattern of targeted erasure–especially of Black women whose scholarship confronts structural violence and insists on the dignity of marginalized peoples, including Palestinian.” The petition said, “Removing one of the few senior Black women leaders in public health amid heightened suppression of Palestine-related work is not incidental as it signals that both Black leadership and principled human rights scholarship are expendable when they challenge institutional comfort. This decision sends a chilling message that critical scholarship on racial justice and Palestine is unwelcome.”
Irfan did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. Neither did the new interim director of the FXB Center, Kari Nadeau, or two spokespeople for the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Neither did spokespeople for Mass General Brigham, the parent of Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
In response to Friday’s lawsuit from the U.S. government, Harvard issued a statement claiming “Harvard has taken substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism.” Whatever steps “Harvard has taken” in the case of the FXB Center seem insufficient. Not that Harvard should curb academic freedom or free speech. But neither should it allow an ostensibly research-and-teaching-focused university to be repurposed for “solidarity, advocacy, and organizing”—in the cause of falsely and obsessively demonizing the Jewish state.
The U.S. Department of Education announced March 23 that its Office of Civil Rights has opened two new investigations into Harvard, one related to undergraduate admissions, and the other related to “alleged ongoing antisemitic harassment on Harvard’s campus and the institution’s purported failure to protect Jewish students.”
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