Late in the afternoon Eastern Time on Oct. 7, 2023, after reporting revealed that invading Iran-backed Hamas jihadists had perpetrated atrocities against Israel’s civilian population, 34 Harvard student organizations stated on Instagram that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
As Harvard fends off a Trump administration lawsuit alleging the university failed to protect Jewish students from “relentless antisemitic on-campus discrimination,” inquiring minds will want to know where Harvard students learned to vilify the Jewish state.
One likely source of such lessons, a recent controversy at Harvard Business School suggests, is the Harvard faculty.
The controversy revolves around a case study, “Divestment (A),” prepared under HBS professor Reshmaan N. Hussam’s supervision and authorized by HBS for use in her spring 2026 course, “Globalization and Emerging Markets.” Hussam specializes in “questions at the intersection of development and behavioral economics, with research in three areas: migration, health, and finance.” She is also a campus activist, having protested on campus in solidarity with pro-Palestinian protesters.
The case study examined whether the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (GPF-G) should divest from Caterpillar, IBM, Microsoft, and Unilever because of their “complicity” in Israel’s alleged war crimes against Palestinians and creation of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The case study, however, treated those odious allegations against the Jewish state as established facts. Whatever its relation to her primary research, the case study furthers Hussam’s campus activism.
Following student and alumni objections, Professor Hussam postponed teaching the original case study. In the second week of April she presented in class a revised version. Reportedly, it was less one-sided though class discussion was decidedly anti-Israel.
The case method is HBS’ signature approach to classroom instruction. It typically involves a 10- to 20-page case study drafted under faculty supervision describing a real business dilemma with no easy answers. Case studies promote the business school’s educational mission by conscientiously laying out complex facts, identifying competing interests and principles, and exploring conflicting interpretations of pertinent actions and judgments.
Since the original HBS case study bears the 2026 copyright “President and Fellows of Harvard College” while departing from HBS standards by serving as a polemical indictment of Israel, it deserves scrutiny.
In “A Critical Analysis of the HBS ‘Divestment (A)’ Case: Bias, Half-Truths, and Missing Contexts,” HBS alumni offer a devastating critique of the original Hussam case study. The HBS-alumni brief shows that even as the teaching tool “presents itself as a neutral exercise in ethical investment decision-making for the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global,” it functions as “a one-sided advocacy document.”
Hussam’s original case study’s very first sentence, indicates the HBS-alumni brief, obscures Hamas’ motives, war crimes, and aims. The opening line reads, “When Palestinian armed groups launched a ‘coordinated, complex attack on Israeli civilian communities, civilian locations and military bases’ near the border between southern Israel and Gaza on October 7th, 2023, killing more than 1,200 individuals within Israel, the complexity of the relationship between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories was brought to the forefront of the world’s attention.”
Granted, a single sentence can only do so much. But the one in question sanitizes Hamas’ slaughter, using the anodyne term “Palestinian armed group” and not mentioning “Hamas” or “terrorist.”
The rest of the case study proceeds resolutely in the same skewed manner. Nowhere does it mention that Hamas slaughtered parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents, used sexual assault as a weapon of war, maimed people, gunned down at point-blank range hundreds of young people attending a music festival, and kidnapped 251 persons, mostly civilians. Nowhere does it mention “jihad” or Hamas’ goal, proclaimed in its 1988 covenant, to “obliterate” Israel and “to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.” Nowhere does it mention that Hamas deliberately conducted military operations amid and under Gaza civilian populations to ensure that Israel’s legitimate efforts to defend itself would tragically injure and kill large numbers of noncombatants and lay waste to massive amounts of civilian infrastructure. And nowhere does it mention the Islamic Republic of Iran, much less that Tehran funds, equips, and advises Hamas, and that Gaza represents one arena of the multifront war that Iran has been waging for decades against the Jewish state.
By omitting these crucial facts and others, the original Hussam case study subverts students’ ability to assess fairly and accurately Israel’s conduct. Stacking the evidence against Israel thwarts the formation of a reasoned judgment about whether divestment from companies doing business with the Jewish state is warranted on ethical grounds.
The HBS-alumni brief elaborates on the original case study’s pronounced anti-Israel slant.
The original Hussam case study ignores the decades-long assaults from Gaza and the West Bank that have compelled Israel to defend itself. Since Israel withdrew every soldier and civilian from Gaza in 2005, according to the HBS-alumni brief, “Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist factions launched over 22,570 rockets and mortars at Israeli civilian communities.” And in the early 2000s, Israel built a security barrier to block West Bank Palestinian suicide bombers from entering Israel and killing and maiming ordinary citizens on buses, in restaurants and cafes, and strolling down the sidewalk.
The original Hussam case study advances the abhorrent allegation that Israel is committing genocide against Gaza Palestinians as an open-and-shut case without so much as considering the legal definition of the worst of crimes. “The UN Genocide Convention (Article II) defines genocide as acts ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,’” stresses the HBS-alumni brief. Yet no journalist, scholar, diplomat, or international organization has come close to demonstrating that Israel’s Gaza mission involved anything other than “the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capacity” and “not the physical elimination of the Palestinian people.”
The original Hussam case study advances the false charge that Israel is an apartheid state. In reality, Israel is the only rights-protecting democracy in the Middle East. Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy full civil and political rights. They serve in the parliament and the judiciary. In 2021, the Arab party Ra’am joined the governing coalition. The term “apartheid” is often wrongly applied to the condition of the more than 3 million West Bank Palestinians: They have never been Israeli citizens and are in a state of conflict with the Jewish state.
The original Hussam case study promotes the slander that the Israel Defense Forces indiscriminately kill Gaza civilians. The HBS-alumni brief cites military expert John Spencer to counter this ugly accusation. His work documents that “Israel provided days and weeks of advance warning to civilians before ground operations; sent direct text messages and phone calls to residents of targeted areas; employed ‘roof-knocking’ (dropping small non-explosive munitions to alert building occupants before striking); dropped printed evacuation maps by drone; used loudspeaker announcements; and maintained a layered targeting review process with lawyers and intelligence officers authorizing individual strikes.” No other military engaged in urban warfare has taken such extensive precautions to minimize civilian casualties.
The original Hussam case study treats the judgments of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court as authoritative despite these institutions’ manifest anti-Israel biases. The UN and its Human Rights Council direct a wildly disproportionate share of their formal censures at Israel while neglecting glaring human-rights abuses of authoritarian states (including some serving on the council) whose populations dwarf that of Israel. The case study relies on a non-binding ICJ opinion supported by authoritarian states without acknowledging that Israel rejected the court’s jurisdiction in the matter. And in November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant before completing the investigation and in advance of charging Hamas leaders.
Finally, the original Hussam case study concludes with several exhibits hostile to Israel but not one supporting Israel’s claims and contentions. None of the exhibits features, the HBS-alumni brief emphasizes, “Israel’s security rationale,” “Hamas’s founding charter,” “data on rocket attacks against Israeli civilians,” “survivor testimony from October 7,” “John Spencer’s urban warfare analysis or any independent military assessment of IDF civilian protection measures,” and “data on Iran’s proxy financing.”
If, as the HBS-alumni brief observes, “Harvard Business School’s stated mission is to educate leaders who make decisions based on evidence, rigorous analysis, and moral clarity,” then the brief’s conclusion is inescapable: “A case study that withholds central evidence, suppresses expert counterargument, and channels students toward a predetermined moral conclusion fails that mission.”
Since at the Harvard Business School “academic research and case development are connected and mutually reinforcing,” it would be good to know how Hussam’s deeply flawed instructional materials initially won approval. It also would be illuminating to review the revised case study.
As Harvard prepares its defense against the recent federal lawsuit accusing it of failing to combat campus antisemitism, the controversy over Hussam’s original case study provides the university – and observers – a clearer understanding of where Harvard students learn to vilify the Jewish state.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter. His new book is “Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America.”
