Harvard’s Israel Exception
The Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center says its mission is to educate future leaders about human rights. Its treatment of Israel offers a different lesson: how an institution can advertise balance while applying scrutiny unevenly.
Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, center director Mathias Risse has overseen a series of programs on Israel and the Palestinians. The speakers have included several of Israel’s most severe critics, whose claims Risse has often accepted or amplified. Israeli legal and security specialists capable of challenging accusations of apartheid, the unlawfulness of Israel’s continued presence in the Palestinian territories and genocide have been largely absent.
Risse’s July article, “Three Images of Israel: A Human Rights Assessment,” crystallizes the problem. He acknowledges Jewish self-determination and Israeli vulnerability, but his analysis subjects Israel to sustained structural indictment while treating Hamas and Palestinian governing institutions largely as background actors. The result is less a balanced human-rights assessment than a case study in selective scrutiny.
Risse largely ignores the substantial body of legal and historical scholarship that challenges his conclusions, leaving readers unaware that many of the gravest allegations remain vigorously contested.
The imbalance is apparent both in the center’s programming and in Risse’s own writing. Let’s start with the speakers the center selected – and the questions its moderators declined to ask.
From Pain to Hope?
Since October 7, Carr-Ryan has presented or co-sponsored at least 19 public events about Israel and the Palestinians, including six events that formed a spring 2026 series titled “From Pain to Hope?” Most centered on alleged Israeli wrongdoing or featured speakers strongly critical of Israeli policy. Only a handful featured participants prepared to defend Israel’s conduct or contest allegations of apartheid, genocide and unlawful occupation. Risse rarely challenged even the most consequential claims made by those guests. On several occasions, he accepted or reinforced claims that were false, inadequately supported or materially incomplete.
Risse hosted a virtual conversation with U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese on February 12, 2024. Albanese, whose record includes antisemitic statements and Holocaust distortion, made several sweeping or inadequately supported assertions. She dismissed allegations of UNRWA employees’ involvement with Hamas as “outrageous,” repeated the Gaza Health Ministry’s claim that 70% of those killed were women or children, and described Israel’s blockade as having prevented food, water and medicine from entering Gaza for 16 years. Risse did not press her on the evidence, acknowledge uncertainty in the casualty data or distinguish restrictions on particular goods from a complete denial of food and medicine. In August 2024, UNRWA terminated the employment of nine employees and in June 2026 it terminated another 70. Israel has provided evidence of UNRWA’s connection to Hamas, but UNRWA says it is still investigating those claims.
Instead, Risse reinforced Albanese’s position, asserting that the UN considered Gaza “occupied” before October 7 because Israel controlled its borders and airspace. However, Israel substantially tightened its restrictions only after Hamas seized power in 2007 and intensified rocket attacks.
Risse treats UN characterizations as neutral authority without considering documented concerns about the institution’s disproportionate focus on Israel. Risse presented the UN’s position – that Israel retained sufficient effective control for Gaza to remain occupied – as effectively dispositive. He did not explain Israel’s contrary argument that its 2005 withdrawal ended the occupation, or assess how Hamas’s independent government, armed forces and control within Gaza bear on the effective-control test.
The same pattern occurred on January 25, 2024, when Risse hosted an in-person discussion with Peter Beinart, a professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York. Beinart called Israel a “Jewish-supremacist state,” an inflammatory formulation that Risse allowed to pass without asking Beinart to distinguish criticism of particular laws from an indictment of the state and its Jewish character. He accused Israel of imposing a “state of starvation” in Gaza that is “unprecedented since World War I.” Risse did not challenge either characterization. Beinart’s description of a “Jewish-supremacist state” omits the political and individual rights enjoyed by Israel’s Arab citizens, including the rights to vote, hold office and organize political parties. His starvation claim was also presented without examining the disputed food-security data or establishing that shortages resulted from a deliberate Israeli policy or because of other factors, such as Hamas stealing food.
The pattern extended to events moderated by others. On March 5, 2026, Stephen Walt moderated a discussion, “From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine,” with Michael Omer-Man and Sarah Whitson about a book they had co-written. Omer-Man and Whitson’s thesis rests on two principal claims: that Israel practices apartheid and that its continued occupation of the West Bank is unlawful.
Walt did not ask the authors to defend their apartheid characterization or address the substantial criticisms of it. Nor did he explore the dispute surrounding the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion that Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank and Gaza is unlawful. Israel, the U.S. and a number of legal scholars dispute the opinion’s reasoning and conclusions. For example, see this statement by the ADL and this legal analysis disputing the argument of illegal occupation. One might question whether Walt was an appropriate choice to host this event, since he was a co-author of the 2007 book The Israel Lobby, which faced extensive criticism for its poor scholarship and biases.
The contrast became clearest when Risse encountered a guest whose conclusions favored Israel. Risse’s March 31, 2026, conversation with Israeli journalist Amit Segal showed that he is willing and able to challenge a guest’s central premise. That willingness was conspicuously absent from the discussions with Albanese, Beinart, Omer-Man and Whitson and others.
Risse challenged Segal’s rejection of the genocide accusation by invoking the ICJ proceedings and findings by Human Rights Watch. But the ICJ has not ruled that Israel committed – or even plausibly committed – genocide. Its provisional-measures orders addressed the plausibility of protected rights and the risk of irreparable harm, not the ultimate merits of South Africa’s accusation. The ICJ case has also been challenged by legal scholars.
The charge of genocide against Israel has been rejected by virtually all reputable scholars. More than 500 scholars of law, history, the Holocaust and genocide rejected the genocide claim. The American Jewish Committee published a separate legal and factual rebuttal.
The Segal discussion appears to have been the only event centered on a prominent participant prepared to defend Israel’s conduct against the center’s principal legal accusations. Absent were Israeli specialists in international law, military-law practitioners, security experts or scholars prepared to contest the apartheid, genocide and other accusations.
Three Images of Israel
The same imbalance carries into Risse’s July article, which summarizes the content from the “Pain to Hope?” discussions. It contains legally misleading formulations and a consistent pattern of asymmetric framing. Israeli wrongdoing is described structurally, confidently and at length; Hamas’s conduct is treated briefly, euphemistically and largely as an opening qualification before the article returns to Israel.
Risse wrote that critics of the ICJ genocide case accuse its supporters in ways that are “structurally akin to medieval antisemitic mythmaking.” This is an exaggeration. There may be some critics who make this claim, but much of the criticism of the genocide charge has been on legal grounds, including the fact that ICJ judge selection is a politicized process. Its rulings have been biased against Israel, in the same way the UN is biased.
Risse writes that the genocide case proceeded under “plausibility and urgency standards applicable at that stage.” That wording invites a common misunderstanding. The court did not find that Israel was plausibly committing genocide. It found that Palestinians in Gaza had plausible rights under the Genocide Convention and that at least some requested measures were linked to those rights.
Risse cites B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch to support his contention that there is a serious legal case for characterizing conditions in the West Bank as apartheid. But the pro-Israel watchdog NGO Monitor, which scrutinizes nongovernmental organizations involved in the conflict, has accused both groups of methodological weakness and political advocacy. NGO Monitor alleges that B’Tselem relies on one-sided or unverified sources of information, actively engages in political partisanship, and is funded by foreign governments and international organizations. NGO Monitor similarly criticized Human Rights Watch for offering “publications [that] reflect the absence of professional standards, research methodologies, and military and legal expertise, as well as a deep-seated ideological bias against Israel.” Risse neither acknowledges those criticisms nor presents any contrary legal analysis.
Risse minimizes the threats that adversaries pose to Israel. He writes that “armed actors have repeatedly attacked Israeli civilians, and some continue to deny Israel’s right to exist.” These were not merely attacks by “armed actors”; they were acts of terrorism. Although half a dozen Arab countries recognize Israel as a state, none – including the Palestinians – recognizes it as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
Conditions in Gaza were dire before October 7, but Risse assigns responsibility almost entirely to Israel. He gives insufficient attention to Hamas’s authoritarian rule, its appropriation of civilian resources and the security threats that prompted Israeli and Egyptian restrictions.
Risse says that Arab citizens, who make up roughly 20% of Israel’s population, face “persistent systemic discrimination.” He presents this as a settled conclusion without defining the term or confronting contrary evidence. Arab citizens possess the right to vote, hold office and enter every profession, and an Arab party has served in a governing coalition. Some disparities in income, education, municipal resources and land use nevertheless remain. A serious assessment would examine the causes and legal significance of those disparities rather than treating the label “systemic” as self-proving.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Risse cites this as a “signal” of international legal actions against Israel. But he omits key facts. Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute and disputes the court’s jurisdiction. The ICC maintains that it possesses territorial jurisdiction because Palestine is a state party and alleged crimes occurred in Gaza or the West Bank. Israel has also raised complementarity objections, arguing that its own judicial system can investigate alleged misconduct. Risse does not explain those jurisdictional and admissibility disputes. This omission is significant, because Risse elsewhere insists on the “integrity of legal categories.”
Risse criticizes Israel for providing insufficient humanitarian assistance but offers little data with which to assess that claim. A UNICEF-led survey conducted in accessible areas (representing 83% of the population) of Gaza in June 2026 found an acute-malnutrition rate of 1.3% among children under five. The results challenge sweeping descriptions of current conditions, but they do not resolve disputes over conditions during earlier stages of the war.
Those factual and legal overstatements are serious. The omissions are more revealing.
Risse mentions Hamas’s killing of civilians, hostage-taking and “other grave abuses,” but he does not explicitly address the evidence of rape and gang rape on October 7 or sexual abuse of hostages in captivity. Nor does he mention the extent of Hamas’ brutality. The Civil Commission report described what it called “kinocide” – the killing of relatives together or in one another’s presence – and documented perpetrators broadcasting some attacks through victims’ social-media accounts. The commission argues that such acts were intended to compound the victims’ suffering.
Omitting these crimes seriously undermines Risse’s claim to offer a comprehensive human-rights assessment.
More broadly, Risse’s article focuses almost exclusively on alleged Israeli crimes and violations, leaving the impression that Israel alone deserves human-rights scrutiny.
He pays scant attention to Hamas’ violations. There is no mention of Hamas’s tunnel network beneath populated areas; its military operations from civilian neighborhoods; weapons and command infrastructure placed in, beneath or near protected sites; combatants not wearing uniforms; Hamas officials’ calls for civilians to ignore evacuation directives and Israeli evidence that Hamas obstructed evacuation routes; interference with aid distribution and intimidation of aid workers; or continued rocket fire.
Risse also ignores the argument that Hamas acted with genocidal intent. Its deliberate targeting of Israeli and Jewish civilians, eliminationist charter and ideology, leaders’ statements and declared intention to repeat October 7 have led many scholars to classify the attack as genocide.
Taken individually, any one of these omissions might be defensible. Taken together, they reveal a consistent pattern: Israeli claims are interrogated, while accusations against Israel are amplified.
The center’s Israel exception
A human-rights center need not divide every program evenly between Israel’s defenders and detractors. But it does owe its students intellectual seriousness. Contested allegations should be identified as such, contrary evidence should be examined, and Palestinian institutions should be judged by the same standards applied to Israel.
Carr-Ryan has too often failed that test. Its programming and Risse’s writing examine Israeli power in detail while treating Hamas’s ideology, military practices and repression as secondary concerns. The result is a hierarchy of skepticism in which Israel’s explanations are interrogated while its accusers’ claims are too readily accepted.
A human-rights center should teach students to test every consequential claim against evidence. Harvard should insist that Carr-Ryan practice the intellectual impartiality it professes.