Nikhil Dharmaraj

Overview

Nikhil Dharmaraj has justified violence and spread hatred of Israel. 

Dharmaraj was an activist with the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) at Harvard University (Harvard PSC) in 2020, 2022 and 2023. PSC is an alternative name for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). 

Dharmaraj is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

As of April 2023, Dharmaraj’s personal website said he was a senior at Harvard studying history, literature and computer science. 

As of the same date, Dharmaraj’s LinkedIn page said he had worked as an Admissions Tour Guide Coordinator for Harvard since November 2019. Dharmaraj had also worked as a peer advising fellow for Harvard from August 2020 to May 2022 where he “served as one-on-one mentor for a group of first-year students.”

Also as of April 2023, Dharmaraj’s LinkedIn said he was the founding member and programming lead for the YX Foundation, which is described as “a hybrid coalition-design lab dedicated to high impact, high friction prototyping at the intersection of deep technology and critical race theory.”

As of the same date, Dharmaraj’s personal website said he was located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but that he grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Dharmaraj’s LinkedIn said he was located in Saratoga, California.

Justifying Violence

Dharmaraj retweeted a May 14, 2021, tweet that said: “palestinians are reminding us that decolonization is not abstract. it is material. it is violent. it is not popular, it will be resisted and debated by the entire structures of the monstrous colonial world. and it is the only way forward, and it is the only path of life.”

Dharmaraj wrote his tweet during Israel’s Operation Guardian of the Walls (OGW) against Hamas.

In May 2021, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorists fired over 4,300 rockets from Gaza at major population centers in Israel. Israel responded by launching OGW, carrying out targeted military strikes in Gaza.

Hatred of Israel

In August 2020, Dharmaraj organized a “Racial Justice & Technology Summer Fellowship,” which was co-sponsored by Harvard PSC.

Originally, the fellowship was supposed to be co-sponsored by the Harvard Technology Review (HTR). In August 2020, Harvard PSC published a letter they had sent to HTR. The letter demanded that HTR “Take an explicitly anti-Zionist stance throughout this Racial Justice & Technology fellowship and beyond…” The letter also said: “This includes explicitly denouncing Zionism as a inhumane and illegitimate ideology.”

Zionism is the belief that Jews have the right to self-determination in their own national home, and the right to develop their national culture.

The Harvard PSC letter was in response to complaints from an HTR board member regarding two anti-Israel sponsors for the event and that anti-Israel professor Melina Abdullah was scheduled to speak.

Dharmaraj was quoted in the letter saying: “I refused to allow Zionist perspectives to overtake the months of labor I had put into organizing this fellowship.” He continued: “...I still stand firm in my conviction that there is no room for any sort of productive or respectable discourse when it comes to clearly hateful and racist ideologies.”

Also in August 2020, Harvard PSC published an anti-Israel statement written by Dharmaraj. Hewrote: “It is morally objectionable to refer to the 72-year long Zionist occupation of Palestine as the ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’ — this phrase is a carefully crafted euphemism to deny and cover up the material reality of Israeli occupation and is circulated by the settler state itself, for it diminishes the severity of the settler-colonial, apartheid, and genocidal reality that has been waged against the Palestinian people…”

Dharmaraj also wrote: “Supporting genocide and settler colonialism in any form — including Zionism — does not align with the basic paramountcy of human rights.”

Dharmaraj continued: “Rhetoric without action is meaningless; although the HTR board says they ‘stand for anti-Zionism,’ affirming anti-Zionism in word simply is not enough. There must be a clear commitment to rooting it out in every space and pushing back with the likes of which genocidal ideologies merit.”

Dharmaraj also said: “As stated in our original letter, Zionism is settler-colonialism. HTR’s response statement is thus equivalent to entertaining white supremacy…”

On August 3, 2020, following the release of the statements, Dharmaraj tweeted: “pls read through to see how insidiously easy it is for zionism to infiltrate racial justice spaces & why we should never let it (Black & Palestinian liberation are inherently linked)! ”

Dharmaraj’s tweet included a thread from the anti-Israel organization Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) discussing the complaint and eventual pairing with Harvard PSC.

Dharmaraj replied to his tweet, writing: “white supremacy is a global phenomenon. thank you for sharing @HarvardOOP.”

Dharmaraj retweeted a March 13, 2022, tweet that said: “all of you on the israel trek are ugly <3.”

Israel Trek is a ten-day peer-led trip to Israel during which Israeli student leaders “share their country with non-Jewish members of their Harvard community.”