Harrison Mann, a non-resident fellow at DAWN, is a former U.S. Army major and executive officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East/Africa Regional Center who resigned in protest at his office's support for Israel's war in Gaza.
Donald Trump and Amnesty International don't often see eye to eye. But they seem to agree on one thing: Gaza has been rendered uninhabitable. According to Human Rights Watch and the United Nations, this is a war crime. Why, then, is Harvard honoring one of the men responsible?
Brett McGurk, who was announced on February 10 as a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, was the Biden administration's top Middle East official and its No. 3 man backing Israel's genocidal war in Gaza. Though less recognizable than former Secretary of State Antony Blinken or National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, McGurk was far from a functionary following orders. He was an enthusiastic and influential advocate for the U.S. military support that sustained Israel's brutal campaign in Gaza, even after the White House became fully aware of the massive civilian death toll there. When colleagues in the administration raised concerns about civilian casualties, according to The Atlantic, "McGurk would push back against the complaints, invoking his stint overseeing the siege of Mosul during the Obama administration," apparently considering an operation that flattened much of the city and killed over 9,000 Iraqi civilians a model for success.
McGurk has also made clear his approval for Israel's use of starvation as a weapon of war—an explicit war crime—tacitly promising early in the war that desperately needed aid would be withheld unless Israeli hostages were released.
Hiring McGurk is a declaration that being party to a litany of war crimes isn't a deal-breaker at Harvard.
- Harrison Mann
To credit McGurk for the current hostage deal, as the Belfer Center's press release does, shows a disappointing level of credulity for a research center that describes itself as "the hub of Harvard Kennedy School's research, teaching, and training in international security and diplomacy." The press release's only mention of Gaza is its breathless claim that McGurk "spearheaded intensive negotiations that secured a cease-fire in Gaza together with the release of hostages held by Hamas." But in a recent, fanciful op-ed in The Washington Post, McGurk was still parroting the lie that the Biden administration employed for months to avoid any real progress on a cease-fire: that Hamas, not Israel, was the main obstacle to a deal.
A parade of Israeli officials, from ousted Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to the far-right extremist lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Cabinet until last month, have laid the blame (or credit) with Netanyahu. For his part, McGurk credits the cease-fire to his unshakeable conviction that the "only way to realistically wind down the war was through firm support for Israel" as it prosecuted what political scientist and military historian Robert A. Pape called "one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history."
McGurk must see it as an incredible coincidence that his strategy happened to bear fruit as soon as Trump and his new envoy took over negotiations with Israel and, for better or worse, made their own terms for a deal.
Hiring McGurk is a declaration that being party to a litany of war crimes isn't a deal-breaker at Harvard. But somehow, it's even worse than that. McGurk's Washington Post op-ed was re-tweeted by none other than Netanyahu, who has been looking for a way out of the cease-fire since before it was signed, and pointed to the article as evidence (perhaps the only evidence he could find) that Hamas alone is to blame if a deal breaks down. In his byline for that op-ed, The Washington Post identifies McGurk as a senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center. Who do you think got that article placed?
As someone with the dubious distinction of being both a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School that now houses McGurk, and a veteran of his war on Gaza, I demand better. In the fall of 2023, while McGurk was persuading the rest of Biden's National Security Council to shrug off thousands of civilian casualties and keep fueling the slaughter in Gaza, I was preparing to resign from my intelligence job that supported Israel's wars because, unlike McGurk, I was unable to shrug off all the dead kids. By the spring of 2024, I was debating whether to go public with my resignation.
The very least Harvard and other elite institutions can do is stop laundering the reputations of the architects of an ongoing, generational atrocity.
- Harrison Mann
I received an email from Harvard meant to reassure me and the rest of the alumni that the students demonstrating on campus against the war in Gaza would be punished swiftly and harshly. The email did indeed reassure me—that if these kids could put their degrees, futures and even physical safety on the line, the least I could do was speak out publicly. When I did, faculty and former classmates were quick to share their support.
Harvard University should take principled stands, too, and in fact has done so in recent memory. I was a student at the Kennedy School during the January 6th insurrection, when then-Dean Doug Elmendorf removed unrepentant election denier Elise Stefanik, the Republican congresswoman, from the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics Advisory Board for her role promoting dangerous voter fraud conspiracies.
Still, it would be naïve, especially after the past 16 months, to expect Harvard as an institution to prioritize the Palestinian cause. Barely a year ago, the governing Harvard Corporation ousted Claudine Gay as president of the university for insufficiently cracking down on student demonstrations over Gaza. Last May, the Harvard Corporation withheld degrees from students who had participated in those protests. And in January, to resolve a lawsuit, the university adopted the stifling definition of antisemitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that conflates criticism of Israel with hate speech.
Likewise, it would be ahistorical to expect that Harvard, and especially its Kennedy School, wouldn't house one of American foreign policy's blunderers, grifters and warmongers. I should know: I had the privilege of witnessing a 96-year-old Henry Kissinger dial into a class via Zoom. But that doesn't mean Harvard needs to invite more in, whitewashing their bloody histories and raising the odds they get a seat at the table to enact more disastrous U.S. policies in the future. Admittedly, true accountability for today's cheap Kissinger knock-offs seems more distant than ever. But the very least Harvard and other elite institutions can do is stop laundering the reputations of the architects of an ongoing, generational atrocity. That includes Brett McGurk.
