Ivy League university students who took part in a spring break trip to Palestine organized by a New York nonprofit returned to their college campuses and later formed anti-Israel groups that have targeted Jewish students and celebrated Hamas’s genocide against Israel.
Many of the students who participated in the Palestine Trek trip during spring break this year returned to Harvard University to establish Graduate Students 4 Palestine (GS4P) a month later, according to the Harvard Crimson.
The student group was one of the organizers of a pro-Palestinian demonstration at the elite school recently.
One of GS4P’s founders, 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 being investigated by campus police and the FBI, according to a report in the Washington Free Beacon. Neither Harvard nor Tettey-Temalko responded to The Post’s request 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 the Jewish group Canary Mission.@canarymission/X This is Tettey-Tamoko during a visit to Palestine in 2020. He reportedly under investigation by FBI.pym.org Elom Tettey-Temalko is the founder of Harvard’s Graduates 4 Palestine, which was founded a month after PalTrek’s trip to Palestine this year. He previously had a summer internship at the Carter Center and was photographed with former President Carter and his wife Rosalynn.Carter Center
Tettey-Temalko is also a proctor, a staff member who advises students and lives in their dorms.
More than 170 Harvard graduate students participated in this year’s PalTrek trip, according to a post on the Harvard Law School website, which invited students to “share-back” in April.
“Come join a sharing session with PalTrek Bear Witness to learn about what they saw while in occupied Palestine, how it affected them, and how their experiences relate to the broader struggle for Palestinian liberation,” the post said.
Some of the students said they felt a “new sense of urgency” to help the Palestinians after their week-long tour of refugee camps and meetings with politicians and human rights activists in the area. The cost of the trip is $1,400 per person, according to the travel website.
Tettey-Temalko participated in the “mass death” on October 27 when an alleged attack on an Israeli student took place.@harvardpsc/Instagram
“Back after PalTrek, there’s a renewed sense of urgency around organizing around Palestine,” Maya RF 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 homes, on their own terms, in their own words about their stories was very powerful for me, so I felt the call to tell more stories very urgently. “
At the University of Virginia, PalTrek participant Catie Haddad urged her fellow students “to become acutely aware of the terrorizing occupation of the Palestinian people and how they are resisting it,” in an April article for Virginia Law Weekly, a student paper.
Berkeley Law students on PalTrek trip to Palestine. The New York nonprofit has been organizing the trip since 2019. Berkeley Law
PalTrek was founded in 2018 and is based in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, according to its most recent tax filing with the IRS. Its website says it is “Witnessing Human Rights Abuses in Palestine.”
The group reported contributions of $135,571 in 2019, according to the filing. It’s unclear who funded the group but a 2019 tax form reviewed by The Post said the trip was organized by PalTrek in conjunction with a “top-tier graduate program,” which it did not name.
“They each plan and conduct customized trips to Palestine with our guidance and support,” according to the tax filing.
Zena Agha is one of the founding board members of PalTrek, whose office is located in a residential building on the Upper East Side.
Among PalTrek’s four board members are 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, the two women organized a “teach-in” on the “Ongoing Nakba in Palestine” at the People’s Forum, a New York nonprofit that helped organize the All Out for Palestine rally in Times Square the day after Oct. 7. genocide in Israel.
“Nakba,” meaning catastrophe, refers to the displacement of some 700,000 Palestinians when Israel gained independence in 1948.
Wahbe, who is listed as PalTrek’s president, did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
Randa Wahbe is one of the founding board members of PalTrek. He 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 journey begins with an orientation day in Jerusalem, where students receive a tour of the Old City and are first exposed to the reality of the Occupation,” says a post on PalTrek’s website.
“From there, we spent most 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 nonprofit that has organized trips for graduate students to Israel since 2012 to “educate the next generation of leaders about Israel’s global value and contribution.”
“Tours like Itrek offer vacations in Palestine/Israel to foreign students, while Palestinian refugees are barred from returning to their homes in the same area,” Columbia Law’s position said.
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