In 2002, a group of Harvard students and faculty circulated a petition calling for the university to divest from corporations that do business with Israel. Lawrence Summers, then Harvard’s president, rejected the petition. In response to today’s renewed calls to boycott Israel on college campuses, including Harvard, and the American Studies Association’s boycott of Israeli universities, Summers addresses the issue once more:

The response of most academic leaders to [the BDS movement] has . . . been of a generic nature, going to issues of avoiding the politicization of universities and not to the highly questionable nature of the specific acts. . . .

There are two problems with this line of argument. First, it is too broad. It is far from clear that academic boycotts are always inappropriate. Should American universities have cooperated fully with Nazi universities and loyal Nazi scholars in the late 1930s? . . .

Second, it misses the point. For the same reason that those proposing divestiture [in 2002] were advocating something that was anti-Semitic in effect if not intent, the academic boycott of Israel and universities and scholars from no other country is also anti-Semitic in effect and quite likely in intent. It [seeks] to demonize only the Jewish state. It [is] unrelated to the expertise of the American Studies Association.

What should university presidents have said? I would have said something like this: “The decision of the American Studies Association supported by a majority of its membership to single out Israeli institutions and Israeli scholars for selective boycott is abhorrent. The university believes it is very dangerous for scholarly associations to insert themselves into political issues outside of their range of competence. While individual members of the faculty are free to do as they wish, the university is withdrawing its institutional membership in the ASA. We will withdraw from any scholarly association that engages in similar boycotts with respect to Israel or any other country.”

Such statements would in my view bring moral clarity where it is currently missing. . . . In the same vein, I believe that universities should make clear that their names cannot be invoked as the purported sponsor of conferences or dialogues in which the primary thrust is demonization of Israel.

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.