“If you plan on disrupting, you will miss an opportunity to learn something that you cannot learn [in college]… To those of you who will pull out a flag and race out of here angry and [flustered]: I want you to know I don’t respect that act enough for you to matter.”
This was how Haviv Rettig Gur opened his talk, “Roots, Return & Reality: Jews, Israel and the Myth of Settler Colonialism.” Gur, a veteran Israeli journalist, senior analyst for The Times of Israel, and host of the podcast Ask Haviv Anything, was invited by the Bi-College Chabad, Club Chai, and a group of Haverford alumni led by Kevin Foley (HC ‘83) to speak at Haverford College’s Stokes Auditorium on February 1, 2026.
The lecture hall was at capacity, predominantly filled by older community members form the surround area and their families. Also present was a large group of masked protesters who, due to the lack of available seating, clustered along walls and staircases. Upon entering the auditorium, they were met with laughter, shouts, and filming from many audience members.
Gur announced that he would not begin his talk until the protesters, who up to that point had not yet caused any disturbance, could “get it over with” and leave or unmask and learn from him.
“I have lost friends; I have lost Palestinian friends; I have fought in wars… There are ideologies of a genocide against my people that are majority opinions in Middle Eastern countries and the pupils tell us that. And you don’t [expletive] care about any of the real, actual people… So just get your screaming, emptiness, silliness that you picked up on some TikTok video over with, and get out so the rest of us can learn,” said Gur, directed at the protesters.
After a minute of silence, Gur said he would begin by discussing “massacres of Jews”, when he was interrupted by an unidentified masked individual, who requested Gur speak instead about a “genocide of Palestinians.” Gur said he took the questioner very seriously, arguing that “[he] came out and these cowards didn’t,” referring to the other masked protesters.
Continuing to direct his speech at the masked individual, Gur spoke of the earliest reasons for Jewish migration to Palestine. He referenced historical instances of the exploitation and subjugation of the Jewish people as leaving them with no other choice but to migrate to the region. He clarified that such events do not exonerate Israel of any wrongdoing.
The masked individual continued questioning Gur’s statements, bringing forth the idea that a group of people seeking refuge “do not have the right to establish sovereignty in the place that they are seeking refuge.” The two continued to debate the legitimacy of the establishment of Israel for approximately 20 minutes. In regards to a Palestinian right of return, Gur said he “desperately wants [one],” though he does “not want a right of Palestinian return that denies the Jews self-determination [and] self-defense.”
Their conversation was interrupted spasmodically by audience members, shouting things such as “I signed up to hear him, not you, you [expletive]!”, “There is no Palestine, there never was a Palestine, and there never will be.”, “Have you read the bible you [expletive]?” When their conversation came to an end and the protester exited the building, the audience cheered.
Gur officially began his talk at 5 p.m., thirty minutes after his scheduled start time. He expanded upon his earlier discussion of the historical oppression of the Jewish people, citing incidents such as the aftermath of the assasination of Czar Alexander II, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people from the Baghdad region. Gur explained that such events “crushed any hope of emancipation and liberation for Jews,” leading to the emergence of Zionism. “I’m not justifying what happened, I’m explaining what [my people] thought was happening to them,” Gur said.
In analyzing forced Jewish diasporic movements, Gur touched upon the American Jewish community. He explained that the majority of American Jewish people are descended from “the Jewish peasants” as “none of the culture-creating elites [of Europe] fled.” He continued, claiming that this was the reason “American Jews are… the most Jewishly ignorant community of Jews there has ever been in the history of Jews,” and referencing an episode of his podcast where he said he approached this assertion with more depth.
Approximately twenty minutes into Gur’s talk, a masked protester with a megaphone began walking through the auditorium, chanting, “free, free Palestine! Al-Qassam you make us proud, strike another soldier down. Death, death, death to the IOF.” Other protesters joined, though they remained standing along the walls or sitting on the floor. The protester continued, shouting, “shame on every single one of you celebrating the slaughter of 700,000 Palestinians. Shame, shame on you… When Gaza has burned you will all burn, too.”
Later, Gur responded to this chant by addressing the audience and asking, “you’re allowed to call for people to die on this campus? This is legal?” He continued his criticism of the protester, saying, “this is about her, you could be doing so much more for the Palestinians.”
Haverford College Campus Safety issued a statement the following afternoon in which they affirmed that neither party involved in the altercation were members of the Haverford College community.
The protester was violently interrupted when an unidentified man from the audience shoved and yelled at them. Their megaphone was confiscated and both the protester and audience member were removed from the auditorium by Haverford College Campus Safety officers. The protester attempted to reenter the lecture hall through a secondary entrance but was stopped by more Campus Safety officers, instead banging on the door and continuing to chant, “shame on you.”
As they were escorted out, one audience member arose and began demanding the prosecution of the protester, shouting, “prosecute these people… if you don’t prosecute, you’re perpetuating what these people do, you are part of the problem.”
Gur eventually resumed. Now focusing primarily on Zionism, he said, “to the Jews in America, Zionism really is a luxury belief… You know who doesn’t get to make statements against Zionism? Every single person east of Britain.”
Gur also condemned the Israeli army’s actions in Palestine in 1948, during which they forced Palestinians to flee the region. “I feel… that’s a stain on my country’s history. Did your country do something bad in the [1940s]? I’m a real person! It doesn’t cost me to say that my country is wrong, I think it’s super wrong now!” Gur also criticized the racism of the Israeli far-right and Israel’s “military rule over millions of people.” He maintained his position of not exonerating Israel of any of its wrongdoings, and affirmed that he was speaking in order to “rescue [the audience] from the stupid, ahistorical idea that [Israel] should not have existed.”
In criticizing what he feels is a biased obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from Western activists in comparison to other global conflicts, Gur asserted that his “only accusation… is that Western moral emotions don’t notice any other dead kids… only because the Jews matter to Western narratives in ways that Brown people do not matter in Sudan.”
The event moved into a Q&A period in which audience members had the chance to engage further with Gur’s stances on certain issues related to his work, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the treatment of student protesters.
As the event came to a close at approximately 7:30 p.m., Gur offered his final statement to the protesters, telling them that they had his “unbelievable respect.”
In response to the event, Haverford College President, Wendy Raymond, sent an email to the Haverford College community the following morning. In this email, Raymond criticized the actions of the protesters, asserting that “shouting down a speaker whom one does not agree with is never acceptable and stands outside of [Haverford’s] shared community values.”
Students’ Council Co-Presidents Ben Fligelman and Sarah Weill-Jones also emailed a statement to the Haverford student body in which they affirmed that “every student has the right to engage in expressive freedom activities on this campus” and that “violence in response to speech is unacceptable.” The presidents will also be organizing a discussion space next week to allow students to freely discuss their experiences with the event.
5 comments
Am I the only one who notices the specificity in this article and the Raymond communications about the protestors not being part of the “Haverford community”? That means they were Bryn Mawr students, correct? This is the BiCo newspaper after all. Such weak communications as usual from Haverford administration.
They were not Bryn Mawr students.
This is not journalism, all you have done is report the official story. You quote an unidentified masked man. Do some journalism, who was he? Also the woman with the bullhorn. Who was she? You failed to report on the security breach and the discomfort that caused in the room. Who were the masked intruders? Were they SJP? As you report, “other protesters joined in” during the megaphone interruption. Who were they? Why not get a quote from SJP? Why not ask them — was that you? Why not report that Prof Steven Lindell began the program informing the audience that disruptions of the sort that in fact followed his announcement are contrary to College’s policy on expressive freedom as well as Pennsylvania state law? You report that the protestor was “violently interrupted” by the only person with sense enough to take megaphone away.
This article is riddled with bias. Doesn’t even mention how the protesters snuck in through the back door of the auditorium, or how the one with the megaphone told attendees they would “all burn.” And it also selectively edits the statements by Raymond and the StuCo presidents to make them sound more reasonable. Raymond didn’t acknowledge the scale of the protests, making it sound like it was only one individual, and doesn’t make note how the protester made violent statements against attendees. For StuCo, they shockingly condemned one of the attendees of the event, and didn’t condemn the disruptive antisemitic activists at all. This article again shows that the Bico news is just a mouthpiece, sharing selective information to support the biased worldview of the colleges’ most extreme activists.
Has the article since been updated with that information? I would think an editor’s note would accompany such a big change
Reading this article at 4:02PM it’s very clear the protesters were in the wrong