Harvard Gaza Revisionists
How The Keffiyeh Became The Ivy League’s Favorite Identity Costume
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
— Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
I. The Costume of Suffering
The keffiyeh is the new feather headdress.
It happens like clockwork. Every generation of elite liberal students needs a new cause — one far enough away to mythologize, and just close enough to parade.
Back in the 80s, white students on college campuses claimed Native heritage. As journalist Eli Saslow wrote in White Lies: “They all descend from full-blooded Cherokee great-grandmothers.” Students who looked like Betsy Ross declared they were daughters of Sitting Bull.
In the 1980s, Elizabeth Warren claimed “Native American” on her Texas Bar registration card. She submitted recipes to Pow Wow Chow. Harvard named her a diversity hire. It wasn’t ancestry — it was access.
Suffering had become social capital. And so the privileged borrowed — feathers, beads, and all.
But Warren wasn’t the outlier. She was the prototype.
Today, the feather has been replaced by the keffiyeh. The borrowed tribe is now Palestinian.
Today, when those same students chant “From the river to the sea,” the laughter is gone. The rhetoric is genocidal. The delusion just as deep. And the certainty, moral.
No historians need apply, because the factual record isn’t part of the narrative. And don’t bother raising “cultural appropriation” concerns — keffiyehs, traditionally worn by Arab men, are now brunchwear for protest tourists.
Gaza, no longer a staging ground to commit atrocities against innocent Israeli civilians, has become a stage.
II. October 7 and the Harvard Revisionists
On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants stormed southern Israel and murdered over 1,200 civilians. Babies were burned. Women raped. Holocaust survivors kidnapped. Executions livestreamed.
It was the single deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Yet that same day, Harvard’s Students for Justice in Palestine issued a statement blaming Israel. “From the river to the sea” — a call for Jewish ethnic cleansing — echoed through Ivy League halls. Within days, the world’s fury turned not toward the butchers but toward their victims.
As The New Yorker reported, a Palestinian-American student at Harvard worked frantically — still in pajamas — to release “an emergency statement.” She cut the stats. Made it punchy. Blamed Israel in the first sentence.
Soon, protests erupted in New York, London, and Sydney. “From the river to the sea” migrated from campuses to corporate boardrooms. Gaza became a morality play, and Israel — again — was cast as villain.
October 7, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, has been scrubbed, softened, or rationalized. In its place, a new myth has taken hold: Gaza as martyr, Gaza as saint.
Sidebar: Never Again, Again
Harvard’s Jewish Problem (from The Chosen — The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard): In the 1930s — not exactly a low-risk decade for Jews — Harvard felt there were too many Jewish students getting in on merit. So the university found a workaround. They didn’t call it a quota. But that’s exactly what it was. They started adding new “criteria” to admissions:
- Public spirit
- Leadership potential
- Likeability
- Interest in others
Translation: If you were brilliant but didn’t golf or crew, you were out.
Harvard didn’t need to say “no Jews allowed.” They just built the fence high enough that the right kind of student — not Jewish, didn’t.
III. Gaza, the Myth
To understand Gaza’s grip on the progressive mind, you must ignore geography and study mythology.
Gaza is poor, brown, stateless, and Muslim. Israel is rich, Western-aligned, militarized, and Jewish. That’s all the moral math requires.
Forget who attacked first. Forget that Hamas places its rocket launchers next to hospitals. Forget that Gaza hasn’t been “occupied” since 2005. Only optics remain. And in the optics war, Hamas always wins.
Why? Because in this narrative, Israel isn’t a nation — it’s an abstract villain. Something to resist, like oil pipelines or colonial statues.As journalist Matti Friedman put it:
“In the narrative of Israel-Palestine, Jews are not supposed to behave like people. They’re supposed to behave like a metaphor.”
IV. The Forgotten Refugees
Here’s what rarely gets said: More than half of Israel’s Jews are of Middle Eastern or North African origin. Mizrahi. Sephardic. Black- and brown-skinned. Arabic-speaking.
They didn’t colonize. They fled. They were refugees. Not only from the lands they left, but from Israel. History matters.
Between 1948 and 1972, over 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries — Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Morocco, Iran. Their synagogues were burned. Their businesses confiscated. Their communities erased.
They are the last remnants of a Jewish Middle East that once stretched from Aleppo to Casablanca.
Yet the modern narrative casts them as white European invaders. And casts Hamas — whose charter calls for Jewish extermination — as indigenous freedom fighters.
V. The Original Arab Nazi
Long before October 7. Long before Hamas. A single match ignited the Palestinian grievance industry: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. If there is one criminal to blame for the catastrophe that is modern Palestine, this is the guy.
Born into Ottoman privilege, he stoked anti-Jewish riots in 1920. In 1941, he met with Hitler, praised the Final Solution, and later organized the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad.
He recruited Muslims into the Waffen-SS. After the war, Charles de Gaulle helped him avoid Nuremberg. He returned to the Middle East and sabotaged every peace offer on the table.
In 1948, al-Husseini instructed Arabs in Palestine to flee — confident that invading Arab armies would wipe Israel off the map. They failed. The land was lost. And a myth was born: the eternal Palestinian refugee.
A myth built on war, preserved through denial, and weaponized through generations.
VI. Madness, in Costume
Today’s moral theatrics require no reading. No nuance. No memory.
Only costume.
A keffiyeh. A chant. A grievance — borrowed but never questioned.
You can be the oppressed if you look the part. You can be the hero if you chant the right slogan. And you can ignore mass murder — so long as your scarf is folded just so.
“Men go mad in herds,” Mackay warned, “but only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
We’re still waiting. For someone to take off the keffiyeh.
Epilogue: The Israel I Knew
Not Settlers. Survivors.
In 1956, I was five years old, playing in a sunlit field near our home in Tzahala, a suburb of Tel Aviv. My friends and I found a heavy metal ball and kicked it around until dinner. That ball was an Egyptian artillery shell. It was dropped during the ongoing Sinai War, and Israel’s survival was at stake.
And then came the boots. Soldiers racing toward a bomb we’d kicked like a toy. That’s how I learned what Israel was. Not theory. Not politics. Boots.
IDF soldiers risking their lives to save a child. To stop the next war before it starts.
My father flew for El Al. Before that, he flew over the Himalayas in World War II. But his most dangerous mission came later and in silence: Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.
In 1951, Iraq allowed Jews to emigrate — if they gave up all property and passports. Over 120,000 Iraqi Jews were airlifted out. The flights were disguised as charters. The passengers were refugees.
Pilots like my father and Lou Lenart smuggled them to safety. They bribed guards. They never told their stories.
But the larger story is this:
- Between 1948 and 1972, over 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries.
- 52% of Israeli Jews today are ‘brown’ or Mizrahi or Sephardic — from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Syria, Iran.
- 45–50% are Ashkenazi, descended from those who fled pogroms or survived the Holocaust, which claimed 6 million Jewish lives.
- 19% of Israelis are Arab citizens, with full rights and parliamentary representation.
This isn’t a white-colonial outpost. It’s the last refuge of a shattered people. When you drape yourself in a keffiyeh and chant for Gaza, you erase that history. You erase the Jews of Baghdad and Benghazi. You erase Auschwitz and Aden. You erase the Israel I knew — and the one the world still refuses to see.
