The premise for effecting a one-state solution is, on its face, obscene, a thinly-disguised ploy to offer a diplomatic solution to an intractable problem, which its proponents know full well would be implemented only for the benefit of Palestinian self-affirmation and to the detriment, and destruction, of Israel. That is exactly why the participants of the Harvard conference are a retinue of the usual suspects in the hate-Israel crowd, a traveling road-show of politicized scholars, propagandists, and non-academic activists with only a thinly-veiled animus towards Israel and Jews. What this conference clearly is not is a true academic or scholarly exercise designed to reveal some rational and reasonable solutions in the Middle East; instead, it is yet another opportunity for ideologues with an anti-Israel, anti-Western agenda to trumpet their perverse views under a cloak of academic respectability, and here even with Harvard’s imprimatur.

As one example, the notorious Israeli historian Ilan Pappé is scheduled to speak at the Harvard conference. Already exposed for having invented history and contorting facts to suit his personal enmity toward Zionism, Pappé has nevertheless become the dream Jew of anti-Semites, someone who offers apologetics for terrorism against Israelis and justifies it as an understandable, and inevitable, response to “occupation.”  “Terrorism is not the essential question,” Pappé has said, oblivious to the murder of Jews riding on buses or sitting at cafes. “Israel expelled the Palestinians and colonized the area,” and this behavior is “far worse than suicide bombing and armed struggle.”

Pappé, and many on the Left, condone resistance by the oppressed Palestinians but despise self-defense by Israel in trying to prevent its citizens from being murdered. Another speaker at the Harvard conference, Diana Buttu, a former legal adviser to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, has repeatedly claimed, for instance, after some 8,000 rockets had rained into southern Israeli towns from Gaza, “that none of these rockets actually [had] an explosive head on them, unlike the Israeli weaponry,” and, in reality, “the reason that they have been launched,” is not because of any genocidal impulses on the part of Hamas but due to “the fact that Israel has maintained a siege and a blockade against the Gaza Strip for the past 3 years in addition to military operations in the Gaza Strip” — in other words, the rocket attacks were Israel’s fault.