Harvard and MIT have the final protester camps in Greater Boston after Tufts site shutters Friday

Cambridge’s MIT and Harvard became over the weekend the only two campuses with pro-Palestinian encampments remaining in Boston. Though other protests of violence in Gaza continue around the nation and globally, a U.S. crackdown and series of arrests have shrunken the numbers in a wave of college actions that have been numbered at more than 80.

Tufts students shut down their camp on Friday without an agreement with administrators, according to the student campus newspaper. Camps at Northeastern and Emerson were gone even earlier, cleared by police April 27 and April 25, respectively, with more than 200 arrests between the two.

While Harvard students on Friday gave their administration until Monday to begin negotiating demands, activists at MIT’s camp – called the Scientists Against Genocide Encampment and established April 21 by the school’s Coalition for Palestine – called for a rally at 11 a.m. to oppose one held across the street by the New England chapter of the Israeli American Council.

Activists from across Boston arrived at MIT’s campus to find that the police had fenced off the Kresge Oval with opaque tarps stretched across sections of chain-link fence. Signs from each side of the debate, ranging from professionally made graphic prints to hand-drawn pictures on torn cardboard, were taped and wired across the fence in a kind of dueling art exhibit stretching around the camp.

MIT police stationed at the Massachusetts Avenue entrance turned away all members of the press, and TV channels set up cameras on the sidewalk to film the events of the afternoon. An organizer who gave his name as Muhammed led a circle of news crews onto campus, delivering a quick statement to the cameras before police stopped the group and ushered them back to the street. Activists circulated in and out of the camp, and aside from a few arguments between the sides as they placed posters on the fence, the pro-Palestinian rally was a low-key affair.

After a pro-Israel rally at 1 p.m. on the steps of MIT’s School of Engineering that included a speech by Meron Reuben, Israel’s consul general to New England, an MIT student and a Harvard graduate, debates between the sides took place outside the fenced perimeter of the camp. 

Shabbos Kestenbaum, who is suing Harvard for allegedly failing to crack down on antisemitism during his time there, tried to enter the camp and, after a long argument with police, was able to tour it briefly. By 3 p.m., nearly all the protester supporting Israel’s actions in Gaza had left the campus. 

Cambridge police had been at MIT on Friday, but had no role in clearing journalists off the campus and were never told of the policy or were asked to help enforce it, department spokesperson Robert Goulston said. There were no arrests reported from the rallies.

Meanwhile, the organizing coalition behind Harvard’s camp – Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine – delivered an ultimatum to the university, giving administration a 5 p.m. Monday deadline, according to The Harvard Crimson, without specifying what would happen if the university did not establish negotiations by then.

The camp on Harvard’s campus was established early April 24 and has endured small counterprotests, bad weather and even a streaking incident by other students, a Harvard tradition. Harvard Yard has been sealed around the camp since that day to anyone without school ID.

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