Harvard's Carr Center platforming voices to replace the Jewish state ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, March 02, 2026

Harvard's Carr Center platforming voices to replace the Jewish state

Harvard’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy is hosting an event this week titled From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine. The book it features proposes to “end apartheid and occupation rule” and establish a transitional framework leading to democratic decision-making about the territory’s future governance.

Universities should host controversial ideas. Human rights centers, especially, should not be timid. But intellectual seriousness requires clarity about what is being proposed — and what assumptions are being adopted.

The book's premise is that Israel is an apartheid state and that the area from the river to the sea is essentially a one state reality today. The problem isn't the book making these false claims; it is that the Carr Center is treating them as uncontested fact.

The Carr Center’s event description does not say “what the authors describe as apartheid.” It states, flatly, that the goal is to end apartheid and occupation rule. That framing is not neutral. Whether Israel constitutes an apartheid regime is one of the most fiercely debated legal and political claims in international discourse. I have demonstrated many times that the groups making those arguments twist international law for their own political purposes. Treating it as settled fact is itself a substantive position.

More importantly, the proposal being discussed is completely different than how human rights are discussed in the context of any other state.

Normally, human rights groups either claim that a state is violating international law and demand it complies, or they seek to use existing legal frameworks to change the state's policies from the inside. Human rights advocacy typically demands compliance with international law within existing sovereign frameworks. It rarely proposes immediate regime replacement as the primary remedy.

Yet this is what is being suggested here. Only for Israel, a state that (whether the authors believe it or not) takes human rights and international law very seriously.

According to the event description, the authors seek to design a transition government, reform laws and institutions, and lay the groundwork for democratic decision-making about the future governance of Israel-Palestine. In practice, that necessarily entails redefining sovereignty, citizenship, and political authority across the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Extending equal political rights across the entire territory prior to any final status decision would, as a matter of demographics and constitutional design, transform Israel’s identity as a Jewish-majority nation-state. That is not a marginal reform; it is a foundational restructuring of sovereignty. It would fundamentally alter Israel’s current national identity as a Jewish-majority nation-state. It is not honest to describe it as merely a technical peace plan. It is a proposal to replace the existing political order with a new one, without the approval of the current citizens of Israel, who would have no say on replacing their own government.

That is not democracy.

A human rights center has a special obligation here. Human rights law protects individual equality — but it also recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination. The tension between universal civic equality and national self-determination is one of the most difficult problems in modern political theory. Presenting a blueprint that effectively collapses one side of that tension without acknowledging it is not neutral scholarship.

The event description also frames the problem as Israel “waiting for a perfect partner for peace,” implying unilateral obstruction. It does not acknowledge Palestinian political fragmentation, the history of rejected proposals, Hamas’s continued control of Gaza, or the security collapse that followed Israel’s 2005 disengagement. One may dispute the weight of those factors, but omitting them entirely creates a moral asymmetry that undermines credibility.

The fact that the Palestinians have rejected their own state, numerous times, since 1947, is ignored, and all those rejections are framed as Israel's fault alone. Yet Palestinian rejectionism was because they never wanted to build their own state where they can have rights, but to destroy another state. This plan fits in very well with that strategy,. It does not allow Jews to have rights, no matter what hand waving the authors claim. It is a warmed over version of Moammar Gaddafi's "Isratine" proposal.

There is another question the event framing does not confront: what prevents a transitional authority from descending into civil conflict? Regime replacement in deeply divided societies is historically volatile. South Africa is often invoked as a comparative case, but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict differs in demography, regional environment, armed non-state actors, and mutual existential fears. A glance at newspapers between 1945 and 1948 shows that Arabs were routinely attacking Jews and some Jewish groups responded in kind. People were murdered daily. That is the real "one state reality" that proponents of plans like this ignore.

If the event were structured as a debate, with explicit acknowledgment of competing interpretations of occupation, apartheid, and the asymmetry of demanding the overhauls of the only Jewish state where Jews can practice self determination while not demanding the same for any other nation may exemplify academic rigor.

As currently described, it reads like the Carr Center is accepting the false premises and the only debate is exactly how the Jewish state must be weakened or dismantled.

Beyond that, the book that is being discussed was written by and promoted by members of "Democracy for the Arab World Now." DAWN has treated Hamas primarily as a political actor rather than foregrounding its terrorism. A human rights organization that cannot bring itself to criticize Hamas is a peculiar one to be promoted by Harvard University. Beyonf that , DAWN has troubling ties to Islamist groups and its anti-Israel advocacy has no resemblance to fairness or accuracy. One example is its "doxxing" of members of AIPAC by putting their pictures on playing cards, reminiscent of armies who use playing cards so soldiers know who to target. DAWN knows the symbolism and chose to treat American Zionists as if they are war criminals deserving of being targeted for death. Why would the Carr Center even consider promoting a group that does such a thing?

A blueprint for peace is welcome. But clarity about what is being dismantled, what is being built, and whose rights are being recalibrated is not optional. It is the minimum standard for serious human rights scholarship.

As it stands, by accepting the premises of this book in its description, the Carr Center is abandoning the very human rights and democratic frameworks that they claim to uphold.