Editor's Note: Gaza is Running Out of Time

Less than two weeks ago, Israel launched “Operation Gideon’s Chariots,” unleashing a new level of genocidal fury and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza. With this plan, Israel has announced explicitly to the world that it plans to seize complete control of Gaza, displace and trap all of its people in a small area of land in the south, and weaponize its decades-long blockade to allow just enough food in so that Palestinians do not starve to death but cannot truly live. The exact violence that Israel has promised is already underway. Just three days ago, Israel bombed a school turned shelter, killing more than 50 Palestinians. Again, as in so many other Israeli attacks, the number of injured people far exceeded the number of ambulances that could reach them. Though Israel frames Gideon’s Chariots as a distinct and final stage in its campaign of extermination, nothing about its intentions or strategy is new. For the last 20 months, Israel expressed its genocidal intent explicitly to the world, and that world has watched, at every moment, as Israel has wrought the exact devastation it has promised.

It should come as no surprise, then, that fascism has arrived on our doorstep, in full force.

Fascism in the United States, here at Harvard, does not just look like anti-DEI rhetoric, attacks on education and public resources, and ICE abducting and detaining immigrants at will: Aiding and abetting the genocide of Palestinians, too, is a form of fascism in and of itself. Every time Israel commits an act of terror against supposed “Hamas terrorists” and the world does not erupt in response — with every hospital or school destroyed, with every tent pitched upon rubble bombed, with every child maimed, with every single martyr — we permit the creation of a world in which no one is safe. These same tactics of violence will haunt us and crop up wherever the powerful want to put a subjugated population in their place.

Even as it claims to stand up against the Trump administration, we can’t fall for the distractions and discursive tricks Harvard employs to divert attention from its complicity in genocide. In this issue of the Harvard Crimeson, we want to remind you that Harvard’s so-called resistance to Trump rings is hollow, a facade that obscures a far greater moral obligation this University has refused for over two years: denouncing, divesting from, and fighting the ongoing genocide.

As you read this issue, as the minutes and seconds tick by until your degree is conferred, Gaza is running out of time. Within the U.S. empire which bankrolls and defends every stage of Israeli apartheid and occupation, every passing moment of our inaction seals the fate of compounding tragedies for Palestinians. At a university that actively downplays genocide; casts doubt on its legitimacy; and justifies every bomb dropped on a home, school, place of worship, or refugee camp, we cannot afford to keep quiet about Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This Commencement cannot go on as if everything were normal.

Walking through the University gates one final time, remember that your moral obligation to Palestine extends past your time at Harvard. Many of you likely refused to speak out about against the genocide for fear of punishment, or hid away in the comfort of distance. Yet our worlds are not far apart, incompatible, or separated by unbridgeable divides. Under this sun, we all exist in a world in which by the second, Israel shores up its forces, mobilizes its “civilian” population, and sows deceitful seeds of justification for its campaign of extermination. As American politicians manufacture consent for genocide — all the while standing by as the Trump administration targets international students at Harvard — we must remember that Palestine’s liberation is tied up in our own.