In late March, Harvard University, anticipating a funding fight with the Trump administration, suspended its School of Public Health’s longstanding research partnership with Birzeit University, a West Bank institution known for hosting Hamas military parades. But a half-dozen faculty members and affiliates who have defended Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and accused Israel of “genocide” and “terrorism” remain at the school, a Washington Free Beacon review found.
They include the director of Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights, former New York health commissioner Mary T. Bassett, who sent a message to the center’s students and faculty just one week after Oct. 7 that accused Israel of “potential genocide.” Bassett penned an article for Qatar’s Al Jazeera in February arguing that Israel aims to kill “all Palestinians in Gaza” and calling on the Jewish state to pay “reparations.”
The Center for Health and Human Rights is housed within the School of Public Health and was the primary source of collaboration between Harvard and Birzeit. Her views are widespread among the academics working underneath her. FXB Center visiting scientist Sawsan Abdulrahim, for example, posted an image of a Hamas paraglider to her since-deleted X account on Oct. 8, 2023, a nod to the terrorists who flew into the Nova music festival, massacred 364 Israelis, and took another 40 hostage. The next day, she shared a post expressing solidarity with the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for the attack.
FXB Center postdoctoral fellow Rania Muhareb, meanwhile, has argued that any improvement in conditions for Palestinians “is predicated on the radical dismantling of Zionist settler colonialism.” On Oct. 8, she said those in the West who condemned the attack engaged in “undisguised racism that masquerades as moral concern.”
FXB Center affiliate Lara Jirmanus, a family physician in the Boston area and self-described “Lebanese-Palestinian American,” has accused Israel of “apartheid,” “terrorism,” and “genocide,” including before Oct. 7. Fellow affiliate Bram Wispelwey, a Harvard Medical School instructor, has suggested Israel’s “occupation and apartheid policies” prompted Oct. 7. And visiting scholar Yara Asi, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida and “Palestinian from the West Bank,” has charged Israel with “settler violence,” “war crimes,” “genocide,” and “terrorism.”
Those faculty members and fellows reflect the persistent nature of anti-Israel activism at Harvard. They also help explain why certain academic centers—like FXB at Harvard and the Center for Palestine studies at Columbia—have attracted the attention of the Trump administration as it pushes for reforms at both Ivy League institutions.
Visiting scientists and fellows like Abdulrahim and Muhareb are not considered full-time faculty members and typically serve in temporary roles. But as director, Bassett, a former Columbia professor who has held the position since 2018, plays a leading role in filling those fellowships and driving the center’s direction.
Last summer, months before President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the Harvard School of Public Health launched an internal review into the FXB Center, a move it said was part of an effort to probe all of its centers and programs “to ensure the highest quality of scholarship and teaching excellence.” But it wasn’t until late March, days before the Trump administration launched its review of $9 billion in Harvard grants and contracts, that the university suspended its relationship with Birzeit after its memorandum of understanding between the Palestinian school and the FXB center expired.
That relationship has long been a source of controversy at Harvard, with the likes of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) and former Harvard president Larry Summers calling to cut ties with Birzeit over anti-Semitism concerns. The Palestinian school is has hosted military-style parades honoring Hamas and another terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Last July, Israel arrested members of Birzeit’s student council over their plot to carry out a “significant terror attack” in the West Bank on Hamas’s behalf.
That did not deter some academics at the FXB Center, who rallied behind Birzeit as its terror ties surfaced. Asi, the visiting scientist, dismissed Summers’s call to end the partnership, saying, “In this period, there has been a lot of noise, and that’s not conducive to this work.” Wispelwey, the FXB Center affiliate and Harvard Medical School instructor, launched a joint program with Birzeit, the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights, in the wake of a December 2021 parade at Birzeit commemorating the PFLP’s 54th anniversary.
Harvard’s suspension of the Birzeit partnership prompted tepid praise from the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, which said it was “gratified that they have finally done it” and pushed for a “permanent termination.” The move—and Harvard’s internal review of the FXB Center—is also unlikely to satisfy the Trump administration. Harvard could resume its relationship with Birzeit when it issues a final decision later this year, and the administration has demanded a probe of the FXB Center commissioned by an external body rather than an internal board. The administration’s anti-Semitism task force plans to pull an additional $1 billion in federal funds to Harvard over that demand and others, the Wall Street Journal reported, which would bring the total amount of frozen funds above $3 billion.
Anti-Israel activism is also reflected in the official work of other FXB Center academics.
Muhareb, the postdoctoral fellow, “focuses on the right to health in Palestine, drawing on the UN Apartheid Convention and Genocide convention and the settler colonialism framework,” according to her Harvard bio. From 2017 to 2020, the bio states, she “worked as a legal researcher and advocacy officer with the leading Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq,” which Israel designates as a terror group for operating on behalf of the PFLP. Last June, Asi and Wispelwey co-authored a research article titled, “Racism as a Threat to Palestinian Health Equity.”
“Using the principles of health equity, we show how Palestinian health inequities are rooted in settler colonialism and racism, amounting to violence and oppression against Palestinian Arabs as a racialized group, regardless of religion or citizenship,” they wrote. “Structural racism should be recognized as a driver of Palestinian health inequities.”
Neither Harvard nor the FXB Center responded to requests for comment.
