Down with Sabra? The Harvard Hummus Protests By Carine Hajjar
That’s right, Harvard students are protesting . . . hummus.
Students in Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) are demanding that the Mediterranean spread made by Sabra be taken out of dining halls because of ties to the Israel Defense Forces. This is merely one — albeit the creamiest — of many instances of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)-style protests against Israel on college campuses across the country.
The Harvard Crimson reported that on Tuesday, students gathered in Harvard Yard holding signs that say “Why does your hummus taste like apartheid?” and chanting “Don’t buy products laced with hate, Sabra funds a racist state.” Stickers on Sabra snack cups in dining halls say something similar (picture provided by a student at Harvard):
The QR code takes you to a document that states that Strauss Group, the company that co-owns Sabra with PepsiCo, has “openly and proudly admitted to funding the Israeli army.” Strauss Group is the largest food company in Israel. Sabra itself is headquartered in White Plains, N.Y. (I’ll quickly add that the linked document suggests “moral alternatives” to Sabra, including Cedar’s Hummus. Oh please, Cedar’s? Too much lemon if you ask me. I’ll also add that my Lebanese food snobbery leads me to look askance at Sabra too . . . but I digress.)
Strauss Group sends food and care packages to the Golani Brigade in the IDF. To pro-Palestine activists at Harvard, this amounts to the sponsorship of murder.
It should be noted that Israel practices universal conscription, meaning most Israeli adults are either serving in the military or veterans. Donating food and resources to the IDF, therefore, is an unsurprising form of corporate charity.
Of course, this doesn’t matter to students who deny Israel’s right to exist.
The HOOP protest itself was relatively small. This demonstrates the ability of a vocal minority to dictate the norms of discourse on campus on a variety of topics, something I’ve written about before.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) came to a similar conclusion in its report on the 2020-2021 academic year. They found:
A small but vocal segment of U.S. student groups and faculty have espoused anti-Israel views on U.S. campuses. This reflects a stance among some parts of the left which alleges that Israeli human rights violations against the Palestinians, or at times the very existence of Israel, are representative of the worst of global systemic injustices.
If this is how students react to hummus, I wonder how they treat their Israeli peers. As a former Harvard student, I had Israeli classmates who served in the IDF. These are students who are being told their country does not deserve to exist. And in the case of students who served, they and their family members are being labeled murderers for serving their country.
I got to sit down with some members of the Harvard Israel Initiative (HII) to discuss the hummus protests. The group published this statement in response to HOOP’s demonstration:
We stand against any attempt to single out the State of Israel and uphold the right of the Golani Brigade — a unit dedicated to combatting terror groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah — to defend Israel from those who wish to annihilate it. Choosing to accuse a New York-based hummus company of ‘murder’ is a bad-faith attempt to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.
In our conversation, HII students reiterated their frustration with the protests — and their disbelief at the idea that a New York-based company, which is 50 percent owned by PepsiCo, would be held responsible for the IDF’s actions. They also voiced a right to openly support the IDF, finding it disturbing that students would question a state’s right to protect itself.
Most of all, they were worried about Israeli students. One HII member shared, “I’m not worried about Israel or Sabra, I don’t think this is making any kind of tangible impact on them. It’s just sad that it could make students on campus who identify with Israel uncomfortable.”
Pro-Israel sentiments generally are kept quiet at Harvard. Being unequivocally pro-Palestine is the default position. Of course, pro-Palestinian students should be able to protest and share their views; their insights bring up important issues with the current two-state solution. However, the utter lack of balanced and civil discourse on college campuses is a problem. Perpetuating an absolutist view of the Israeli-Palestinian question quashes productive conversation and ostracizes Jewish and Israeli students, who feel misunderstood and unheard.
Rampant anti-Israel sentiments come hand in hand with a growing anti-Jewish reality on campuses across the country. The 2021 ADL report found that “anti-Israel groups and activists blatantly [demonized] pro-Israel and Zionist students,” sometimes using “antisemetic tropes.”
An ADL and Hillel International 2021 survey found that 32 percent of Jewish college students have experienced antisemitism on their college campus, with 19 percent reporting offensive comments online and 13 percent experiencing them in person. The report found that 43 percent of Jewish college students “experienced and/or witnessed antisemitic activity in the last year.”
One HII member shared that “People are scared to say they support Israel. We support Israel’s right to exist the way we support America’s right to exist; it’s not to say I agree with everything Israel does, just like there are a lot of things about America that people don’t like.”
Before long, they might be scared to support the wrong kind of hummus.
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