Noah Kassis is a rising senior at Harvard College and has played an active role in facilitating open conversations with the Harvard community about the Palestinian liberation movement. He is also a member of Jews for Palestine, the Forward-Thinking Jewish Union, and the Hillel Student Conservative Minyan at Harvard. Kassis sat down with The HPR to discuss his takeaways from Israel-Palestine conversations at Harvard and his experiences as a Jewish student connected to the pro-Palestine movement.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: You’ve played an active role in fostering Israel-Palestine dialogue at Harvard — can you give us some background on the work you’ve done and what motivated you to begin this work?
Noah Kassis: I’ll just list a couple of things that I did in this area. This semester, I started a series of programming called Artikkun. That’s a kind of a portmanteau of the words “art” and “tikkun,” which is a Hebrew word that means “repair” and is associated with the phrase “tikkun olam,” which means “repairing the world.” This was a program that I started through a course I was taking at the Kennedy School with Marshall Ganz, who is a lecturer of community organizing, and I worked with my partners on this program to bring together Jews on campus from differing political and religious perspectives to create art together and discuss political and religious differences and disagreements productively. I’m Jewish, by the way.
That wasn’t explicitly Israel-Palestine programming, but a lot of the conversations that ended up coming through that programming ended up being around Israel and Palestine. My motivation to be part of that program was certainly around my desire, my feeling that Jewish institutional spaces — not just on campus, but focusing on campus because that’s where I am — had essentially decided that they weren’t going to have any real conversations about what was going on and that they were only going to cater to one particular perspective or that they are certain perspectives that weren’t welcomed and couldn’t be articulated in those spaces, and then I wanted to push the bounds of that. I felt as if these institutions drew a line if you were a liberal Zionist like J Street, that was the furthest you could go. In addition, often you can’t do what you really want within a space like Hillel. So that was one thing I did.
When the encampment happened, I worked with some of my friends who were in the encampment, encampment organizers, or members of Hillel. And we had a couple of open-invite conversations with people from the encampment, Hillel, and the larger community. Those were mostly focusing specifically on the Palestine Liberation Movement or the pro-Palestine movement on campus, what the goals are, and what the strategy is. Mostly, those two conversations were for a greater understanding. The first one was mostly just understanding what’s going on and sharing how it makes people feel, and the second one was for people who want to be in support, but who have felt alienated in certain ways from the movement, and discussing what kinds of actions they could take. And so we did some thinking together and some brainstorming.
I was one of the core members of the Forward-Thinking Jewish Union. And so we’ve put on a couple of events and had a couple of conversations. I’ve also been a member of the Jews for Palestine group. And so I’ve been involved in some of the organizing that they’ve been doing. So that’s a brief history of my involvement here. And the other important thing to know was that through all this, I’ve been pretty involved in and present at Hillel. It’s an important community to me, specifically the Student Conservative Minyan — conservative in this context refers to a religious denomination, not a political affiliation. And it’s continued to be an important community and space for me even as I am often frustrated by how it positions itself concerning this issue. I’m also doing lots of internal organizing and work to try to make it a place that can be a home for all Jews on campus and not just Jews that have a certain political inclination.
HPR: Can you elaborate a little more on your involvement with Jews for Palestine and the Forward-Thinking Jewish Union? How have they shaped your perspectives on the conflict?
NK: I’m happy to elaborate on it. But to be frank, most of the work I’ve done has not been through either of those organizations. And what I feel proud of has been more through more informal collaborations with friends and people who I know. So these conversations we had around the encampment weren’t through either of those groups. The work that I’ve been doing internally at Hillel to try to shift the boundaries of acceptable speech was not through either of those groups. The art dialogue programming that I did was not through either of those groups. It would be a little contrived of me to say that those two groups were central to the work that I’ve been doing.
But I can speak a little bit about the motivation behind each of those groups. I’m the only person to my knowledge who has been involved with both of those groups and who is involved with the J for P [Jews for Palestine] side of HOOP [Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine]. I’m not a member of HOOP — I’m not exactly sure what it is — but J for P is part of or close partners with HOOP. I think I’m the only person who’s part of that world and also part of the Hillel world, so that’s an interesting perspective. And that desire is shaped by my dual perspective that Palestinians are deeply and unjustly oppressed by Israel. And the oppression is not a historical accident, but it’s inherent to the Israeli project.
On the one hand, that’s the understanding that leads me to feel like I need to be in some way connected to Jews for Palestine and the HOOP side of things because they see that political reality in a way that other groups don’t see very clearly. But then on the other hand, my understanding as a Jew and being a part of the Jewish community for a very long time is that while some aspects of the Zionist project make it inherently oppressive for Palestinians, being motivated to care about the Zionist project is not inherently related to a hatred of Palestinians or racist attitudes.
So that’s the place where I depart from the pro-Palestine consensus, and this is just born out of the understanding that I have lots of friends who are liberal Zionists, and they don’t like what’s happening, and they want there to be a two-state solution. For them, being Zionist means that there should be a Jewish state. For some of them, it comes out of a place where they’ve been to Israel, and they love that they can be in a place where being Jewish is normal, and that’s beautiful for them. And for some of them, it comes from a place of a certain historical understanding that there is no safety for Jews if there’s not a Jewish state. Now, I might dispute both of those, and I might also say that a deeper political analysis would reveal that perspective to be a little bit logically inconsistent.
But I think that from a strategic perspective, it’s foolish for people who want justice for Palestinians to write off those people, to write off liberal Zionists. And so my goals here are twofold: One of which is to have the Palestine movement think critically and strategically about its messaging, its tactics, the language it uses, and the objectives that it sets out, and to be constantly thinking about how we are going to win over a majority of people, or how we are going to build a broad coalition, which I don’t think is a central focus at all. If anything, it is often around “let’s be as ideologically and politically pure as we possibly can,” and that’s very against coalition building.
And then on the other hand, as a Jew who cares about Jewish life, Jewish communal life, and Jewish institutional life, what can I do to push these institutions to stop being so partisan, and to — in a basic sense — be moral and not be supporting massacre or genocide or however you want to put it. And also, how can I make these Jewish institutions a place that’s comfortable for people like me? So those are the two goals: pushing on the [Jewish] institutions in one direction and pushing on the Palestine movement in the other direction.
HPR: Could you elaborate on your interactions with Jewish communities at Harvard? How have you reckoned with your peers’ perspectives, especially ones that may be different from yours?
NK: I’m a big believer that talking is not harmful, for the most part. And so I have conversations with people; I’ve had conversations with people who are very, very strongly Zionist in the Jewish community, and they can sometimes be frustrating, but sometimes you find unexpected areas of commonality. Usually, I find that people are quite willing to talk, and you can have a pretty respectful conversation with people. The frustrating thing is that you might have a respectful conversation with someone or even a series of respectful conversations, and then they do something that feels super crappy, and that makes you feel betrayed. And you’re feeling like, “Hey, I thought we had something going here. I thought we were friends. And you went and wrote this op-ed, which is accusing my friends of being terrorist sympathizers.”
And so that’s been my big frustration with dialogue, and that applies to dialogue that I’ve had with leaders of Jewish institutional spaces where sometimes it feels like we’re moving towards some change and we’re really on the same page. And then that person goes and does something that feels like, “Wow, were you being duplicitous? Were you not being real with me? Or were you being real?” For most of what I did this semester, I wouldn’t use the “dialogue work” to describe it, because what I’m going after is something I hope is a little bit stronger than dialogue, because “dialogue” sometimes has a milquetoast connotation to it. But, I think it can be broadly categorized as “dialogue work.”
And honestly, I might be losing faith, and I’m not quite sure if I need to do some more thinking. But I haven’t seen it pay off in the ways I hoped it would. And more than that, it’s not what I expected to pay off — I don’t expect it to solve the world, but in several instances, I’ve been pretty disappointed, because I’ve invested a lot of effort in having dialogue with people. This is true also with dialogue I’ve had with people in the Palestine movement, like talking about certain phrases or certain kinds of language and why it is not productive. We’ll talk about why this isn’t productive, and then a week later, they will go back around and use it again. So I’m not sure if this will be my approach moving forward.
HPR: Could you share some of your largest takeaways from the Israel-Palestine conversations that you have either facilitated or observed? And was there anything in particular that was particularly impactful for you?
NK: Yeah, I can only speak about this broadly, because some of the conversations that I’d like to speak about we had specific rules about confidentiality and so I can’t share specific things that people said even without their names attached. But broadly what has been surprising and beautiful to me is hearing people who are — in some way or form — under the Zionist umbrella express a real desire to be part of the pro-Palestine movement and that they feel like certain things are holding them back. And I guess for me, that’s super impactful because that’s such a shame to me. Because that’s what people in the movement should be listening to. And I don’t know, it may just be my perspective, it may not be their [the movement’s] perspective, it may be that they want press coverage more than people or that they want people but only on their terms. And maybe that’s a valid strategic perspective, but it’s not mine, and I certainly haven’t been let into that in a way that would assuage my concerns.
But how can you hear people say they want to be brought in, and yet some things make them feel unwelcome, and the movement may not want to think about how to address those things that make them feel unwelcome and bring them in. And that doesn’t mean that you address every single thing that makes them feel unwelcome. Like in organizing, you often have to challenge someone. And that’s something else that’s been super impactful to me, as in some of these conversations where some people from the encampment have said, “Well, I challenge you to come in anyway. I’m sorry you feel uncomfortable, I also feel uncomfortable about certain things.” And in a movement, there are always people who are going to feel uncomfortable, and every single person is probably going to feel intense about something, but I challenge you to step in anyway and to shape it from the inside. And I think that’s a really powerful challenge, too. So those have been some of the most impactful things to me.
Another thing that I have heard that is impactful in a different way, in a sad way, is that I hear a lot of people who care about Palestinians’ wellbeing, who care about peace, who care about a just solution, especially from the liberal Zionist camp, but for most of these people the solution is a two-state solution, but I don’t think there’s a huge difference between that and the one-state solution that a lot of the Palestinian people want. But they care about this [the Palestinian movement] and yet, I hear them say a lot, “I just don’t have any agency over it.” I mean, it’s not exactly those words, but you hear a lot like, “I want this to happen, but I’ve come to peace with the fact that I just can’t do anything about it.” And that’s a common refrain at Harvard, and it’s bogus.
And I think that we have more agency than almost any other human in the world, and certainly more agency than any other 18 to 22-year-old human in the world. And people say that because it’s a good excuse to not act, and it’s a good excuse to choose a path that’s easy and not hard. I have heard a lot of times when people are talking about their careers, they will say “I’ve come to feel peace with the fact that I can’t have a great impact on the world. And so I’m just going to go into finance, right?” And no, that’s ridiculous. And I guess what I dream for — for our culture around Israel, Palestine, or other tough political and moral issues at Harvard is for us to be more comfortable challenging each other on that kind of bogus. Because hey, you have a lot of agency, so what are you going to do about it?
HPR: How do you think that Harvard students specifically can do more to exercise their agency with the war in Gaza? And what do you think Harvard — both the institution and the individual students, faculty, and administration — can or should do, if anything, to foster larger conversations around Israel-Palestine relations?
NK: That’s a good question. I think that students can do a couple of things. First of all, if you’re at least seventy percent in alignment with the pro-Palestine movement as embodied by HOOP, PSC [the Palestine Solidarity Committee], and J for P, you should join it. Again, I say seventy percent because there’s always going to be dissonance. I’m part of it in a certain sense, and there’s tons of dissonance for me, there’s tons of things that piss me off. So you should still join. On the other hand, that means that PSC and HOOP organizers need to create avenues for people to join. From my perspective, it’s very opaque. How do you join? How do you take on a position of leadership? And that’s a really big shame because organizing is all about building leadership and bringing in new people. And I understand to some extent, some of that opaqueness comes from fears of doxxing. But there needs to be a balance, there needs to be avenues for new people to come in, and to become leaders. So that’s a big thing.
And then if you’re less than seventy percent in line, but you still see — as I think probably eighty percent of people on campus do — what’s happening in Gaza as a humanitarian catastrophe, you’re really sad and angry that children are being killed and that there are hospitals still being held, you should come together with people and find a different way to act. That could be a fundraiser for UNRWA or the Red Crescent. That could be finding some lowest common denominator policy maybe around enforcing the human rights violation restrictions on weapons sales and organizing a lobby day going to D.C. or going to Boston and talking to people. That’s another thing that I’ve realized: There needs to be an organization or coalition for people who care about the issue, but who are more moderate. And I hope that if that kind of organization were created, PSC and HOOP would be able to view it strategically as a good thing and not as something to critique. I’m not sure that would happen, but I hope that would happen.
Beyond that, always learning is really good. I know that a lot of people are reading about this, and a lot of people are doing their research. And that’s wonderful. And that’s always a good thing. But again, around the agency question, having to do your research first can be an excuse to not act or to think that you can’t act. So keep learning, but do something. Because you don’t need to know the entire world’s history to know that killing children is bad. And for Harvard, I mean, I have very little faith in the institution. I think whatever it does — it will be something that students push it to do. One first thing could be to not suspend students and prevent them from graduating. That may be a little too late.
I would love to see FAS stand up for itself. They just got steamrolled by the Corporation, and a lot of them are probably really pissed. And I would love to see them seriously organize and take back their power at the university because the students matter, but without the FAS, the university is absolutely nothing. And so I would love to see them get angry about this because they should be angry that the Corporation just really disrespected them. And for them to push back and change things, change the governance structure, take more power for themselves, and hopefully take more power for students — that’d be great. That’s the big thing.
I think the university should divest from anything that’s going into human rights abuses, anything that’s going into settlements, and probably just war in general. But, in terms of fostering conversations, like university-led discourse, no one ever goes to that. So for the university to just create a lot of resources and set aside a pretty big pool of money for students who want to do their own initiatives, that usually tends to work out better. Students hold better dialogue and discourse initiatives than the university does. Those are most of the things that I can think of.
HPR: With the end of the encampment, in a May 14 email, interim president Alan Garber wrote that he would “facilitate a meeting with the chair of the Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and other University officials to address questions about the endowment.” So this agreement was part of negotiations for ending the encampment, as one of the large aims of the encampment was to protest Harvard’s investments in the West Bank. Do you think that it’s probable that calls for Harvard’s divestment are heeded and that the meeting will be the start of something leading down that path?
NK: No, I don’t. I think that it’s a meeting to pacify people. And I also think it’ll be useful. Hopefully, the meeting will be useful to organizers because they’ll probably get some more information that we haven’t had yet. My understanding of it both from the language and from conversations I’ve had with people who were adjacent to or involved with the conversations with Garber is that this meeting, whenever it happens, is going to be basically him saying “this is how our investments work. This is why we could never disclose [our investments] and we could never divest. So you should just shut up or focus on training curriculum or something.”
I guess what I’ll say is that the encampment was a tactic, and it didn’t win its tactics. It didn’t achieve its objectives. And anyone responsible would see clearly, and the group does see clearly, that these meetings are not a victory. They’re not a start to a path to divestment. They’re something, and they’re better than nothing, but they’re what could be gotten after other things did not succeed.
