Ivy League students went to Palestine and 'targeted Israelis'

Publish date: 2024-06-13

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Ivy League university students who participated in spring break trips to Palestine organized by a New York non-profit returned to their college campuses and then set up anti-Israel groups that have targeted Jewish students and celebrated the Hamas massacre of Israelis.

Many of the students who participated in a Palestine Trek trip over spring break this year returned to Harvard University to set up Graduate Students 4 Palestine (GS4P) a month later, according to the Harvard Crimson.

The student group was one of the organizers of the recent pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the elite school.

One of the founders of GS4P, Elon Tettey-Temalko, a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School was filmed this week allegedly assaulting an Israeli Harvard Business School student who was filming a pro-Palestinian demonstration.

Tettey-Temalko is under investigation by campus police and the FBI, according to a report in the Washington Free Beacon. Neither Harvard nor Tettey-Temalko returned The Post’s requests for comment Friday.

Harvard Divinity School student Tettey-Temalko (right) allegedly assaulted an Israeli business student at a Harvard protest this week, in video footage shared by Jewish group Canary Mission. @canarymission/X
This was Tettey-Tamoko during a trip to Palestine in 2020. He is reported to be under investigation by the FBI. pym.org
Elom Tettey-Temalko is a founder of Harvard’s Graduates 4 Palestine, founded a month after a PalTrek trip to Palestine this year. He previously had a summer internship at the Carter Center and posed with former President Carter and his wife Rosalynn. Carter Center

Tettey-Temalko is also a proctor, a staff member who advises undergraduates and lives in their dorm.

More than 170 Harvard graduate students took part in the PalTrek trip this year, according to a post on the Harvard Law School’s website, inviting students to a “share-back” in April.

“Come join PalTrek’s Bear Witness share-back session to learn about what they saw while in occupied Palestine, how it affected them, and how their experiences connect to the broader struggle for Palestinian liberation,” the post said.

Some students said they felt “a new sense of urgency” for helping Palestinians after their week-long tour, of refugee camps and meetings with politicians and human rights activists in the area. The cost of the trips was $1,400 per person, according to a travel website.

Tettey-Temalko was taking part in a “mass die-in” on October 27 when the alleged attack on an Israeli student happened. @harvardpsc/Instagram

“Coming back after PalTrek there’s been a renewed sense of urgency around organizing around Palestine,” Maya R.F. Alper, a student at the Harvard Kennedy School told the Crimson in April.

“The opportunity to be in Palestine, to hear from Palestinians in their own home, on their own terms, in their own words about their story was incredibly powerful for me, and so I felt that call to relay more stories really urgently.”

At the University of Virginia, PalTrek participant Catie Haddad urged her fellow students “to become violently aware of the subjugation that terrorizes Palestinians and the ways in which they resist it,” in an April article for the Virginia Law Weekly, a student paper.

Berkeley Law students on a PalTrek trip to Palestine. The New York non-profit has been organizing the trips since 2019. Berkeley Law

PalTrek was set up in 2018 and is based out of an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, according to its most recently available tax filings to the IRS. Its website says it is “Bearing Witness to Human Rights Abuses in Palestine.”

The group reported donations of $135, 571 in 2019, according to the filings. It’s not clear who finances the group but a 2019 tax form reviewed by The Post said that the trips are organized by PalTrek in conjunction with “top-tier graduate programs,” which it did not name.

“Each designed and ran a customized trek to Palestine with our guidance and support,” according to the tax filing.

Zena Agha is one of the founding board members of PalTrek, whose offices are located in a residential building on the Upper East Side.

Among PalTrek’s four board members is Rande Wahbe, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Harvard and Zena Agha, an Iraqi-Palestinian writer who completed her master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard.

In 2019, both women organized a “teach-in” on the “Ongoing Nakba in Palestine” at the People’s Forum, a New York non-profit that helped organize the All Out for Palestine rally in Times Square a day after the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel.

“Nakba,” meaning catastrophe, refers to the displacement of about 700,000 Palestinians as Israel became independent in 1948.

Wahbe, who is listed as president of PalTrek, did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

Randa Wahbe is one of the founding board members of PalTrek. She is also a PhD candidate in anthropology at Harvard. The People's Forum

The inaugural PalTrek trip organized by the group took place in 2019 with 11 students from Columbia University.

“Our trip started with an orientation day in Jerusalem, where students received a tour of the Old City and were first exposed to the realities of the Occupation,” said a post on PalTrek’s website.

“From there, we spent the vast majority of their time in the Occupied West Bank, volunteering with Palestinian human rights organizations and meeting Palestinians from all walks of life.”

PalTrek was organized in response to itrek, a New York non-profit that has been organizing trips for graduate students to Israel since 2012 in order to “educate a generation of leaders about Israel’s values and global contributions.”

“Trips like Itrek offer vacations in Palestine/Israel to foreign students, while Palestinian refugees are barred from returning to their homes within the same area,” said the Columbia Law post.

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