Palestinian support at MIT; Israel solidarity at Harvard
CAMBRIDGE — Supporters of the Palestinian people gathered at MIT late Friday afternoon to mourn the lives lost this week in Israeli bombings in Gaza, while a simultaneous gathering at Harvard University showed support for Israel after last weekend’s brutal sneak attack by Hamas.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more than 100 people gathered in the outdoor amphitheater at the Stata Center, many of them students at MIT and other area colleges who wore masks to hide their identities.
Attendees who spoke with the Globe declined to give their full names, saying they feared retaliation for voicing their support of the Palestinian people. A Globe photographer was asked to the leave the event.
“There’s a lot of fear and a lot of pain in this space,” said one Palestinian student. He said his family lives in one of the Palestinian territories while he attends college in Boston. “I just wish we didn’t have to mourn with a mask on.”
The 45-minute vigil at MIT was one in a series of demonstrations held in the Boston area and beyond since the war began last Saturday with the massacre of more than 1,300 Israelis by Hamas, the ruling Palestinian militant group, and Israel responded with a continuous bombardment of Gaza that has reportedly killed 1,800 people.
Meanwhile, about 1,000 Harvard University students gathered roughly a mile away on the Science Center Plaza for an emotional Shabbat service in solidarity with Israel led by the university’s Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, and attended by university President Claudine Gay.
Gay said she had canceled a trip to New York so she could attend.
Deborah Thompson, a doctoral student at Harvard, and her fiancé, Ariel Wertheim, said they both have family in Israel. They are to be married soon and had discussed postponing their wedding because of the war, but Thompson’s grandmother vetoed the suggestion.
“She said, ‘Absolutely not, you must continue to live,’” Thompson said.
So the wedding will go on as planned.
“In the most awful of times, people find joy,” Wertheim said.
At the MIT vigil, Nina Lytton, the university’s interfaith chaplain and spiritual adviser to the Indigenous community, led the audience in a chant: “Land back for Palestine.” She described the bombing of Gaza as “continued settler violence from Israel.”
A Palestinian flag hung from a nearby tree toward the top of the amphitheater. Another hung at the front of the crowd from a cart where people handed out fliers with a QR code directing people to a Google Form to join the “Palestinian Solidarity Network.” to “stay connected with current efforts on campus to continue advocating for Palestinian liberation.”
“A Palestinian life is no less than any other life, and no one should [condone] what is happening,” said Kareem, a Bentley University student who attended the vigil. He declined to share his last name and said he is concerned about facing backlash for supporting Palestine.
“A lot of us have never said anything. We just want a right to live,” he said. “And putting pictures of people on buses is not very, like ... we shouldn’t be scared in a country that says it’s freedom of speech.”
On Wednesday, an out-ofstate conservative group drove trucks through Harvard Square displaying pictures of Harvard students linked to a controversial statement on Israel, labeling them “antisemites.”
An MIT student who said her mother’s family lives in Gaza described the region as an “openair prison.” She said she and many of her Palestinian friends “don’t feel safe to speak up on social media and in public spaces.”
“Everyone is wearing a mask for a reason,” she said.