🚨 Students at Harvard University launched an encampment in support of Gaza in Harvard Yard moments ago, calling for an end to Harvard's moral and material complicity in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

Harvard has invested over $200 million of its over $51 billion endowment in companies with ties to zionist settlements in the West Bank, while most of its investments to the zionist entity are kept secret.

The students are demanding financial transparency regarding investments related to the zionist entity, as well as genocide and occupation in Palestine; divestment from these investments and reinvestment in Palestine; and dropping all charges against student activists.

The University has suppressed student voices in support of Palestine time and time again, suspending the Palestine Solidarity Committee just this week on baseless grounds. They have also enabled attacks on pro-Palestinian students from the media and politicians. Today, the students say enough is enough, and that they will no longer tolerate their institution's support for genocide.

This brings the number of ongoing encampments to 19, with more to come.

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Harvard University students have now set up their own encampment in solidarity with Palestine, demanding that the school also divests from Israel’s war on Gaza.

Source.

Follow Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee for more updates.

April is National Decoration Month.

Art et décoration was first published in 1897. The publication was suspended during the two World Wars from August 1914 – April 1919, and from 1939 through 1945. The Fine Arts Library has the original volumes if you want to see them. Request to view them in the Special Collections Study Room!

Art et décoration : revue mensuelle d'art moderne Cover title: Art et décoration et l'architecture 1936-37 Paris : Librairie Centrale des Beaux Arts, Frequency note: Monthly French HOLLIS number: 990062486850203941

You cannot suspend the movement.

Harvard students launched Encampment!!

Harvard Silences Pro-Palestinian Voices

Harvard University has suspended the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee after months of administrative repression, harassment and intimidation from right-wing politicians and donors, the group said in a statement sent to Middle East Eye.

"For months, we have been disproportionately targeted by the administration on the grounds of technicalities that we tried to observe vigilantly in the interest of protecting student safety," the statement on Monday read. Harvard PSC said on 6 March that it had been retroactively placed on probation since 1 March, for a February event that it had not officially sponsored. The student group was subsequently suspended this week because it held a rally in solidarity with the Columbia students and in protest against student repression with group that were not official student organisations.

The group said that Harvard University has demonstrated time and again that Palestine remains the exception to free speech.

"After standing idly by as pro-Palestine students faced physical and cyber harassment, death threats and rape threats, and racist doxxing, Harvard has now decided to dismantle the only official student group dedicated to the task of representing the Palestinian cause," the group said.

"As the death toll in Gaza rises with each day of the ongoing genocide, our right to protest this violence only becomes more important. It is shameful - but not surprising - that an institution that is actively invested in Israel’s blatant violence against Palestinians, one that hesitates to even recognize the existence of Palestinians in its official communications, has taken the extra step to erase the only official student group dedicated to solidarity with the people of Palestine."

Since the events of 7 October, when a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel killed 1,150 and over 200 were taken back to Gaza as hostages, the Strip has been under siege and deprived of basic necessities while facing a devastating bombing campaign by Israel.

At least 34,000 Palestinians have been killed and around a million displaced, in what has been described as an unfolding "genocide". Harvard University, like several other educational institutions in the US, has been a key site of struggle for pro-Palestinian protesters since Israel's war on Gaza began. Pro-Israel groups and billionaire donors have repeatedly conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

In December, Harvard president Claudine Gay testified at a Congressional hearing about antisemitism on campus. Her testimony drew widespread criticism and led to her resignation in January. Harvard University did not respond to MEE's request for comment.

✍️ by: Azad Essa

Harvard has launched a Gaza Solidarity Encampment

-- Talia Jane, 24 Apr 2024 1:10 PM EDT

Two days ago, Harvard suspended the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC). Today, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (ACLUM) sent and published a letter urging Harvard to lift the suspension:

The ACLU of Massachusetts calls on Harvard to remain true to its own commitment to “affirm, assure, and protect” its students’ rights to associate, protest, and express their political views, and to ensure that students expressing views that may be unpopular or controversial receive the same protections as all other students, and are not disproportionately targeted due to their viewpoints... we urge Harvard to reinstate the PSC and avoid subjecting the PSC or other student groups to actions that chill the exercise of their expression and association rights.

February is also National Embroidery Month, and we’re excited to show you some cool items we have in the Special Collections. The first one is a hand-embroidered canvas book made by Candace Hicks who collects coincidences from the books she reads and gathers them in her artists’ books and installations.

Hicks created a variant series of hand-embroidered books, copying the form and design of dime-store "composition" books. In this volume, Hicks kept a record of coincidences in the books she was reading and noted every time the word “coincidence” occurred.

Common threads : Volume 28 Hicks, Candace [Austin, Tex. : C. Hicks,] 2011. English HOLLIS number: 990128839780203941

Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, circa 1839-1846 (Houghton Library, Harvard)

𝓛𝓪 𝓢𝓸𝓻𝓫𝓸𝓷𝓷𝓮

Est. 1257

In a statement that was shared with The Nation, a group of 25 HLR editors expressed their concerns about the decision. “At a time when the Law Review was facing a public intimidation and harassment campaign, the journal’s leadership intervened to stop publication,” they wrote. “The body of editors—none of whom are Palestinian—voted to sustain that decision. We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the Law Review in this way. “ When asked for comment, the leadership of the Harvard Law Review referred The Nation to a message posted on the journal’s website. “Like every academic journal, the Harvard Law Review has rigorous editorial processes governing how it solicits, evaluates, and determines when and whether to publish a piece…” the note began. ”Last week, the full body met and deliberated over whether to publish a particular Blog piece that had been solicited by two editors. A substantial majority voted not to proceed with publication.” Today, The Nation is sharing the piece that the Harvard Law Review refused to run. Some may claim that the invocation of genocide, especially in Gaza, is fraught. But does one have to wait for a genocide to be successfully completed to name it? This logic contributes to the politics of denial. When it comes to Gaza, there is a sense of moral hypocrisy that undergirds Western epistemological approaches, one which mutes the ability to name the violence inflicted upon Palestinians. But naming injustice is crucial to claiming justice. If the international community takes its crimes seriously, then the discussion about the unfolding genocide in Gaza is not a matter of mere semantics. The UN Genocide Convention defines the crime of genocide as certain acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” These acts include “killing members of a protected group” or “causing serious bodily or mental harm” or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Numerous statements made by top Israeli politicians affirm their intentions. There is a forming consensus among leading scholars in the field of genocide studies that “these statements could easily be construed as indicating a genocidal intent,” as Omer Bartov, an authority in the field, writes. More importantly, genocide is the material reality of Palestinians in Gaza: an entrapped, displaced, starved, water-deprived population of 2.3 million facing massive bombardments and a carnage in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Over 11,000 people have already been killed. That is one person out of every 200 people in Gaza. Tens of thousands are injured, and over 45% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed. The United Nations Secretary General said that Gaza is becoming a “graveyard for children,” but a cessation of the carnage—a ceasefire—remains elusive. Israel continues to blatantly violate international law: dropping white phosphorus from the sky, dispersing death in all directions, shedding blood, shelling neighborhoods, striking schools, hospitals, and universities, bombing churches and mosques, wiping out families, and ethnically cleansing an entire region in both callous and systemic manner. What do you call this? The Center for Constitutional Rights issued a thorough, 44-page, factual and legal analysis, asserting that “there is a plausible and credible case that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza.” Raz Segal, a historian of the Holocaust and genocide studies, calls the situation in Gaza “a textbook case of Genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.”