Beware, War Criminal On Campus

This graduation, you’ll sit next to future teachers, artists, doctors, engineers, historians, journalists, proud parents, and sweaty siblings. You will also sit next to a war criminal: Harvard Law School Professor Gabriella Blum.

In the early 2000s, while working for the legal department of the Israeli Occupation Forces, Blum helped pioneer official legal guidance for targeted attacks against Palestinians. Specifically, her work focused on policies surrounding the new technology of militarized drones. These policies permitted the use of drones to assassinate Palestinians whom the IOF deemed a threat, without any legal proceeding or due process. Israel killed nearly 500 Palestinians and injured hundreds more in the first five years of the program alone.

Blum’s efforts helped pave the way for Israel’s widespread use of targeted drone strikes today. This adoption has been as cruel as it has been deadly: in 2009, Human Rights Watch published a report called “Precisely Wrong,” arguing that Israel’s use of supposedly precise drone strikes resulted in gruesome civilian deaths in Gaza. The report analyzed six drone strikes between December 2008 and January 2009 that killed 29 Palestinian civilians, including eight children. HRW concluded that Israel’s refusal to take precautions to avoid civilian death violated international humanitarian law. The report resulted in no consequences — an outcome made easier by Blum’s efforts nearly a decade prior to normalize drone violence.

The U.S. cashed in on this normalization, too. In July 2001, U.S. officials called Israel’s targeted assassinations “extrajudicial” and recommended that they stop. But after September 11, the U.S. warmed to Blum’s work and adopted the same legal justification as part of its own colonial projects, namely the “War on Terror.” Since then, the U.S. has executed thousands of people in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — including hundreds of known civilians — in Israeli-esque drone strikes. In 2009, the same year as HRW’s report, Blum’s colleague in the IOF’s legal department bragged, “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it ... The atmosphere was that Israel had committed a crime [by committing drone strikes]. Today everyone says it was preventive self-defense. International law progresses through violations.”

Gabriella Blum has no remorse for her part in enabling these violations. In 2018, she told a reporter from The Intercept that she was “sure” she was responsible for the legal guidance she developed being used to expand the use of drone strikes: “That part doesn’t weigh on me morally.”

Today, Blum works as the Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School, where she specializes in “public international law, international negotiations, the law of armed conflict, and counterterrorism” — a ripe role for someone who spent their career helping to violate international law. In December 2023, dozens of Harvard Law students staged a walkout of a talk Blum was giving on “Israeli law and security” to protest her complicity in mass death. But Blum carries on, teaching, supervising, and authoring legal scholarship under Harvard’s name. In this way, Harvard, too, has cashed in on Blum’s violent legacy.

This graduation, a war criminal will sit next to you and celebrate graduation at the richest university in the world. Meanwhile, Israel continues to block aid to Gaza and bomb civilian centers using the very drone strike program Blum helped construct.