Mission Statement

One month ago, we distributed nearly 1,000 copies of THE HARVARD CRIMESON at Harvard’s commencement ceremony. As the University inducted its new alumni into the ruling class, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians did not have a graduation. Tens of thousands of them — martyred by the Israeli Occupation Forces — will never finish school.

We founded The Crimeson out of outrage, to hold the wealthiest university on Earth accountable for its complicity in the genocidal military campaign waged by Israel against the Palestinian people. As students, we’ve seen how Harvard maintains the appearance of normalcy while functioning as an engine for colonial actions and ideologies.

On Harvard’s campus, pro-Palestinian voices are dismissed as misinformed, falsely construed as antisemitic and disruptive, and met with punishment and vicious threats to personal security and safety. Our administration refuses to respond to the persecution of Palestinian students or answer their repeated requests for dialogue. Now, with the University’s announcement that it will adopt institutional neutrality, this inaction has become official policy.

Harvard’s silence, suppression, and sponsorship of the genocide is why — in the lineage of outlets like the New York Crimes, published by ACT UP during the AIDS epidemic, and the New York War Crimes, published by Writers Against the War on Gaza since October 7 — we mimicked the form of the University’s paper of record: to illuminate the stories it conceals or fails to cover. Our newspaper intends to act as both a protest object and as a legitimate journalistic space for writing about Palestine. The first issue contains speeches, essays, and scholarship by Palestinian students; testimonies from protesters; photography from the Gaza Solidarity Encampment; and critical engagement with the black box of Harvard’s endowment.

We take aim at three targets. The first is the Israeli regime, which — backed and bankrolled by the U.S. empire — has perpetrated an ongoing Nakba against the Palestinian people for over 76 years. The second is Harvard University, which funds these atrocities through hidden private investments, upholds the Palestine exception to free speech, and ignores Palestinian suffering. The third is The Harvard Crimson, whose coverage of the “Israel-Hamas war” and its reverberations on campus has been inaccurate, unsympathetic, one-sided, and often racist.

Our targets are not equal, but they are interconnected parts of a political and media apparatus that manufactures consent for genocide. Harvard has supported apartheid states before; we know which side it’s on. But as student organizers and journalists committed to liberation, we reject its control of the narrative. We will not rest until Palestine is free.

— The Editors