Harvard awards $90,000-a-year fellowships to four anti-Israel activists

By Ira Stoll, The Washington Free Beacon

Harvard is bringing four more anti-Israel activists to campus, hiring a filmmaker, a “journalist” for a Qatari-owned outlet, an English teacher at a Hamas-linked university in Gaza who has accused Israel of “scholasticide,” and a professor who has described Israel as an “ecofascist state” guilty of “domicide.”

They’ll serve as Radcliffe Fellows in the 2026-2027 academic year, earning at least $89,550 over nine months for a stipend, expenses, and housing allowance and potentially tens of thousands of dollars more in child care, health care, and moving expenses, along with access to Harvard libraries and athletic facilities, office space, and use of Harvard undergraduates as paid research assistants.

The newly named fellows include:

— Mahdi Fleifel, the Dubai-born writer-director of London-based Nakba FilmWorks.

In 2018 Nakba FilmWorks affirmed its support of the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel.

In an interview published in July 2025 with the World Socialist Web Site, Fleifel appeared to justify the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel:

“The events of October 7? You leave the Palestinians to rot and die in a cage, what do you expect is going to happen? They’re going to send Christmas cards?”

He also agreed with an interviewer who asserted that dignity and freedom for Palestinians “requires the overthrow of everything,” replying, “Exactly.”

— Ibtisam Azem, whose LinkedIn profile describes her as, since 2014, a New York-based “journalist and novelist” for Qatari-owned Alaraby Aljadeed Ltd.

In July 2025, she conducted a fawning interview with Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University anti-Israel activist that the U.S. government is trying to deport.

Her questions included, “How do you situate your arrest and the broader Palestinian freedom movement in the U.S., especially student-led activism, in relation to other justice movements like the civil rights movements for African Americans, Indigenous struggles, or the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa?”

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Her introduction to the interview described “the genocide in Palestine—a genocide backed by President Donald Trump’s administration.”

She’s also a public supporter of the boycott against Israel; in a 2020 interview with the Asia Times, she said, “there is no agreement to translate the novel into Hebrew. Any such translation must be in accordance with the principles of BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions).”

In the same interview she described both Israel and the U.S. as “settler-colonial countries.”

— Ahmed Kamal Junina, a citizen of New Zealand who is a professor of English at Gaza-based Al-Aqsa University.

In 2016 the PLO-controlled Palestinian education ministry reportedly stopped recognizing degrees from Al-Aqsa amid a dispute over the influence there of the Hamas terrorist group.

The vice president of Al-Aqsa University, Faiq Al-Naouq, was a Hamas leader photographed at Hamas events promoting armed resistance against Israel, according to an article in JewishOnliner.

Junina’s articles for European outlets such as the Guardian and the Independent demonize Israel while making no mention of Hamas.