When the Harvard Palestinian Solidarity Committee and the Harvard African and African American Resistance Organization put together an infographic for Instagram, their goal was to show the historical connections between the Black and Palestinian liberation movements.
They gathered old images of black activists who had been strong advocates of the Palestinian cause, including Angela Davis and Malcolm X.
They quoted Nelson Mandela: “Freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
And they pulled out an old cartoon from the archives of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one that shook the civil rights movement when it first appeared in 1967 and has lost none of its power to outrage. The drawing shows a white hand, marked with a dollar sign inside a Star of David, tightening nooses around the necks of a black man and an Arab man.
Drawn by black artist Herman “Kofi” Bailey, he It first appeared in a SNCC newsletter along with an article fiercely critical of Zionism, prompting accusations of anti-Semitism and furious condemnation of SNCC from Jewish community leaders.
More than half a century later, the cartoon sparked another firestorm when it was posted on Instagram and republished by Harvard Palestine Justice Faculty and staff.
“With teachers like these, it's easy to see why we Jewish students don't feel safe in class.” wrote Shabat “Alexander” Kestenbaum, a Jewish student at Harvard Divinity School who sued the university last month, alleging that it had failed to combat “severe and widespread” anti-Semitism on campus.
“This Should Be Called What It Is,” Harvard Chabad aware on X, formerly Twitter. “Reprehensible. Bigoted. Hateful.”
Pro-Palestinian activists removed the original post on Monday and reposted it without the offensive cartoon. “Our mutual goals of liberation will always include the Jewish community and we regret having inadvertently included an image that played on anti-Semitic tropes,” the activists said.
After Harvard issued a statement condemning the post as “despicable” and warning of disciplinary action, activists released a joint statement Tuesday saying the image “violated our internal standards and betrayed our core values of justice and liberation.”
“It should never have been published,” they said. “We sincerely apologize for the immense harm we caused.”
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There was no apology when the cartoon was originally published in 1967.
Israel was celebrating its victory in the Six-Day War when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asked Bailey, who was born in Chicago and raised in Los Angeles, to illustrate a controversial article in its summer newsletter.
The Atlanta-based civil rights group was known for its anti-segregation sit-ins in the Deep South, but by 1967 it had pivoted toward more militant black nationalism and asked all white members to leave. In the article titled “The Palestinian Problem,” SNCC called Israel an “illegal” state.
“Do you know that Zionism, which is a global nationalist Jewish movement, organized, planned and created the 'State of Israel' by sending Jewish immigrants from Europe to Palestine (the heart of the Arab world) to seize lands and homes? Belonging to the Arabs? SNCC wrote.
In Bailey's cartoon, the hand marked with the Star of David holds the ropes around the necks of American boxer Muhammad Ali and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the background, an arm holding a curved machete – labeled “third world liberation movement” – prepares to cut the rope and free the men.
The cartoon and article plunged SNCC into crisis, according to Michael R. Fischbach, a history professor at Randolph-Macon College and author of “Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Nations of Color.”
Donations had already declined when SNCC purged white members. Its Atlanta headquarters would soon struggle to pay utility bills, as the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League and a number of national Jewish groups denounced SNCC. “Anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism, whether it comes from the Ku Klux Klan or from black extremist groups, including 'Snick,'” Morris Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee, said in 1967.
But SNCC defended the cartoon. The dollar sign and the Star of David were not a statement about the Jews, SNCC stated in a later bulletin, but rather symbols of Zionism strangling the Arabs and of the United States strangling Muhammad Ali and the Arabs.
“Both signs were placed in hand to indicate the close relationship of the United States with ZIONISM and American support for the Zionist State: Israel,” the SNCC said.
In internal documents, Fischbach said, SNCC leaders described the hostile reaction to the cartoon as similar to a lynching. The idea that SNCC was anti-Semitic was a “big lie,” SNCC argued, propagated by a “wolf pack” of “establishment Jewish organizations” and progressive Jews who “wanted the blood out of SNCC.”
“Some would say there is no misunderstanding: They are targeting Jews as greedy,” Fischbach said. “SNCC denied it.”
Fischbach said he was “somewhat surprised” that Harvard students would share the cartoon in 2024.
“By using symbols like the dollar sign and the stars of David, one can well imagine that they were going to get a hostile reaction… It doesn't take much thinking to see that, whatever you meant, this really is “It's going to irritate people.”
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The cartoon is just the latest controversy engulfing the Ivy League school.
The day after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, on kibbutzes and at a music festival, many students, alumni and professors were outraged when the Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine and the Palestinian Solidarity Committee declared on social media that more than 30 student organizations “hold the Israeli regime fully responsible for all the violence that is taking place.”
Israel's subsequent attacks have killed more than 29,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in the Gaza Strip, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory, inspiring further waves of pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Even before the latest war between Israel and Hamas, Palestinian solidarity had become one of the most vigorous political movements on American college campuses. When protests broke out, critics accused university leaders of failing to respond coherently to the rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
In January, Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard amid growing criticism of her performance at a December 5 congressional hearing and accusations of plagiarism. Harvard's interim president soon announced the creation of two separate task forces to combat anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
This week, Alan M. Garber called the cartoon “flagrantly anti-Semitic.” In a letter to the university community, he said: “Perpetuating vile and hateful anti-Semitic tropes, or engaging in inflammatory rhetoric, or sharing images that demean people because of their identity is precisely the opposite of what this moment demands of us.”
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Dov Waxman, a political science professor and chair of Israel studies at UCLA, called the cartoon's reappearance depressing, showing how little progress has been made in getting people to avoid using anti-Semitic tropes. But at least, he said, Harvard activists removed the image and expressed regret.
“When people are willing to apologize for invoking anti-Semitic tropes or stereotypes, we should accept it,” Waxman said.
“Often, those who are on the left think that because of their anti-racist credentials and their progressive values, they're not going to be susceptible” to tropes deeply ingrained in society, he said. “They may be less careful because they somehow have the illusion that they are immune because of their political values.”
After the Harvard student activists updated their post and removed the cartoon, they stated that “our mutual goals of liberation will always include the Jewish community.”
In a separate apology, they promised to “educate our members about anti-Semitism in all its forms, including images and tropes that harm Jewish communities.”
However, some critics were quick to point out that Harvard activists replaced the offensive cartoon with a photo of Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, a black nationalist and former SNCC leader who has long been accused of anti-Semitism. In the 1980s, Ture became famous for stating: “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.”
Many students and professors are tired of the intense emotional rhetoric spreading across American campuses – a style of argumentation that one higher education observer described this month as “the hyperbolic style of American academia” – “breathless, declarative, at the same time aggressive and aggrieved.”
On Wednesday, the Harvard Crimson published an editorial titled “Anti-Semitic Caricature Is Everything Wrong with Campus Speech.”
He asked students and faculty to stop chanting and shouting and build a new discourse on campus that could “replace this pain, anger and restlessness with empathy and a willingness to learn.”
“It's time to talk to each other; be aware of what we say and how we say it; commit to the best intentions and see the best intentions in others; pursue uncomfortable conversations with courage and humility,” the editorial board wrote.
“However imperfect, frustrating and slippery it may be,” the board wrote, “often all we have is speech.”
