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“‘Can you move a little bit?’”

Avi S. Steinberg ’02 — a Radcliffe fellow — and a few colleagues had just unfurled a banner reading “Free Speech Includes Palestine” at an April rally organized to call on Harvard to protect international students.

Within moments, a member of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors, who organized the rally, asked him to shift their banner out of the spotlight. Steinberg refused.

“I was like, ‘No, we’re not moving,’” Steinberg recalled. “‘It’s not your message, but it should be, and that’s why we’re here,’” he said.

Steinberg’s banner — meant to draw attention to the University’s suppression of pro-Palestine protest on campus — was a reminder that the coalition of affiliates angry with the Trump administration is an uneasy one, divided on which messages to center, which to avoid, and how much fault to assign to Harvard.

On the heels of a year dominated by pro-Palestine activism on campus, the new group of activists that has united over research funding and international student protections has had to make decisions about how to engage with the active and controversial campus movement for Palestine, whose supporters have long argued that war in the Middle East and divestment should take center stage.

Psychology professor Steven A. Pinker, a co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom and often a critic of campus protesters, said activists often argue issues are interconnected under a “cabal of oppressors.” But he thinks the approach is not strategic: “It’s tactically unwise to, if there is a particular cause, alienate potential supporters by bundling it with some other cause that people might oppose.”

Pro-Palestine organizers vehemently disagree.

“There’s no such thing as tackling Palestine and tackling immigration and tackling health care as totally separate spheres of existence,” said Olivia G. Pasquerella ’26, an organizer for Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine — the central coalition that organized an encampment for divestment last spring.

“If it is true that these groups think that they can fight for the rights of international and non-citizen students without thinking about Palestine, well, clearly that’s wrong,” they added.

The new combination of student and faculty groups that have taken up the protesting mantle in recent months could represent an end to the era of pro-Palestine organizing as the dominant force in campus activism, but tensions in the scene are likely to persist.

‘A Sense of Common Unity’

Protests in 2025 are only beginning to resemble the explosion of campus activism during President Donald Trump’s first term, when students rallied around racial justice and immigration reform en masse.

Starting in January 2017, Harvard students hosted rallies regularly to voice anger at several Trump policies — the travel ban that targeted Muslim-majority countries, the revocation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and Trump’s nominations to the Supreme Court.

“Folks across the organizations had this sense that we are stronger together,” said Anwar Omeish ’19, a former campus activist. “I don’t think any of us were in competition or opposition.”

Daishi Miguel-Tanaka ’19 said there was “a general buy-in” to care about the Trump administration’s stance toward immigrants.

“I think there was a sense of common unity that the Trump administration was causing a lot of harm, especially to immigrant communities,” he said.

The unexpected president-elect gave activists a reason to band together — giving rise to the Harvard Student Power Network. The coalition served as a system of communication between circles of activism on campus to share “tactics and political education.”

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Another student-led group, Act on a Dream, ramped up efforts to organize rallies on campus specifically focused on immigration advocacy.

Hundreds of students regularly attended the group’s protests throughout the Trump presidency, drawing support from a range of other activist groups including Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard and Our Harvard Can Do Better, a group advocating for Title IX grievance process reform.

“Our membership exploded,” Miguel-Tanaka remembered.

But after Trump left office, the Student Power Network faded from the spotlight, and protests slowed dramatically — a trend only accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sonya A.L. Karabel ’18, a former Power Network organizer, said that while the group was successful in the short-term of “making some connections between people,” the movement never turned into “a long-standing thing.”

Meanwhile, the Palestine Solidarity Committee had been organizing on campus since 2002, growing precipitously after 2020 alongside a renewed national movement for racial equity. The group occasionally drew ire from the Harvard administration for protest activity, but never with the participation and international attention it would later attract.

Omeish, a former member of the PSC, said that the organization’s active presence on campus swayed between a “strong core of people” and a “lull in membership” throughout her time at the College from 2015 to 2019.

That changed in early October 2023, when a statement organized by the group rocked Harvard in a way not even student protesters expected.

A Singular Message

After Oct. 7, 2023, protests unrelated to conflict in the Middle East largely disappeared, replaced by at times daily pro-Palestine protests across Harvard’s schools with hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of attendees.

Instead of going quiet following an incendiary statement that placed blame entirely on Israel for Hamas’ attacks, the PSC organized protests on a new scale, aided by several unrecognized student groups including HOOP and the graduate student union’s pro-Palestine caucus.

Groups that had been active just months before — advocating for affirmative action and labor reforms — were absorbed by pro-Palestine advocacy. Their members were pushed to join or fall out of the activism world.

“We understand that all of our historic movements for freedom and justice are intertwined,” HOOP organizers wrote in their spring 2024 mission statement. “The Palestinian cause is not for Palestinians alone — it is a cause for people of conscience, concerned with humanity, freedom, and justice.”

Despite their insistence on shared values, the new wave of activism drew more controversy than ever before. As organizers faced widespread accusations of antisemitism and support for terrorism, students became hesitant to even discuss the conflict openly.

“People won’t even talk about it because they’re so scared about having any little disagreement about it,” Nuriel R. Vera-DeGraff ’26, a pro-Palestine activist, told The Crimson in November. “Caution manifests in the sense of people not sharing their full set of beliefs.”

Under pressure to respond, the University also instituted new restrictions on protest, including clarifying rules about permissible use of space and volume levels — which the PSC and HOOP labeled as repression.

“Universities in the past, the response was always like, ‘Oh, that’s cute, we’ll just kind of pass — basically just ignore it,’” said Karabel, the Power Network organizer, adding that while Harvard has rarely met protesters’ demands historically, the basis for discipline has undergone a major transformation.

Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, an especially vocal critic of the PSC and former Harvard President Claudine Gay, said the wave of protests that followed Oct. 7, 2023, carried an inherently personal tone that previous protests had not.

“Many in the community — Israelis and many Jewish students who identify with Israel — experience themselves as targeted by the protests and disruption in a way that no one felt targeted by protests, for example, against South African apartheid,” Summers said.

As the student population became more educated about Israel, they also became more divided.

In May 2023, half of graduating seniors who responded to The Crimson’s annual senior survey had either no opinion or not enough information to express an opinion on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. A year later, that percentage had fallen by half; the rest of the senior class was split with 34 in favor of divestment, and 48 percent opposing. Half of the class of 2025 was in favor of divestment, with 14 percent in opposition.

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Richard F. Thomas, a professor in Classics and a PSC faculty adviser, acknowledged that the pro-Palestine protests on campus raised “tension within the student body.”

“I think the difference in the current situation is fairly obvious in that there is a body of students who identify, understandably, very closely with Israel — not necessarily with the current government, but with Israel for various reasons,” Thomas said.

Phoebe G. Barr ’24, a fossil fuel divestment activist who was temporarily prevented from graduating because of her involvement in the Harvard Yard encampment, said that some people equated the pro-Palestine movement with terrorism, which led to a persistent “chilling” of activism.

“I would say that the major difference is that Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine has always been seen as more controversial, even among people who are liberal,” she said.

‘Stuff That 80 Percent of Campus Agrees On’

Trump’s second term and the scaled up attacks on Harvard’s funding have triggered a resurgence of broad-based activism, energizing students who may never have participated in a protest during their time at Harvard.

Under a new group, Harvard Students for Freedom, undergraduates have rallied against the Trump administration’s cuts to federal funding and threats to international enrollment, drawing crowds in and around Harvard Yard.

Joined by Harvard Undergraduate Association Co-Presidents Abdullah Shahid Sial ’27 and Caleb N. Thompson ’27, the group has both celebrated Harvard for its public challenge to Trump and condemned the University for a series of administrative actions scaling back diversity programming.

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The swift mobilization of activists into a broader student group has been reminiscent of how Act on a Dream and the Harvard Student Power Network gained influence. But amid the tense climate of pro-Palestine activism, the group faced immediate questions of how closely aligned they would be to HOOP and the PSC — and whether they could control the narrative enough to choose.

Leo Gerdén ’25, an international student from Sweden and organizer of Students for Freedom, said he would like speakers at the group’s events to focus on academic freedom rather than the war in the Middle East.

“We ideally want them to stand by our message of freedom of speech, of academic freedom, rather than focus specifically on what is happening in the Middle East right now,” Gerdén said. “That is always going to be a balancing act.”

“If people want to show up and they have Palestine flags, there’s nothing that we can do about that,” he added.

But not all student protesters share the same vision. Some have argued that administrative interventions into the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Harvard Divinity School prove pro-Palestine speech has been specifically targeted.

“Why has the ongoing presidential showdown between Donald Trump and Harvard President Alan Garber been framed as one between opposing forces?” pro-Palestine organizer Violet T.M. Barron ’26 said at an April rally sponsored by HOOP. “Harvard’s Zionism and Trump’s fascism are not at odds. They are two sides of the same coin.”

Gerdén said he has told other Students for Freedom organizers that “all of the messaging from our side should be stuff that 80 percent of campus agrees on.”

Yet some of the most committed attendees of their protests remain pro-Palestine activists, and organizers will have to assess which issues they think can unite the student body moving forward.

Sial, who has attended meetings with organizers and given a speech at a Students for Freedom event, said the presence of pro-Palestine voices at rallies does not inherently pose an issue for the group.

“Many of these protests were painted as, ‘Oh, some of it was a mistake by having a lot of pro-Palestinian voices as well,’” Sial said. “I wouldn’t say that’s an issue. I think that is inevitable. That happens. I think that is something which, if you think about it, that’s what the movement is fighting for — being able to say anything you want.”

He added that Students for Freedom leaders have “very, very varying views on the Israel-Palestine conflict,” but that it has not stopped them from uniting behind the group’s mission of protecting international students.

“This part of Harvard reflects a very mature side of the undergraduate body where people advocate for something and can work out their differences and stand in for a common cause,” Sial said.

—Staff writer Caroline G. Hennigan can be reached at caroline.hennigan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cghennigan.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.