A Harvard College senior and newly minted Rhodes Scholar lauded Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, describing the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust as an example of Palestinians “daring to resist” Israeli “colonialism.”
Sazi Bongwe, an international student from Johannesburg studying English, included the remarks in a September 2024 op-ed that accused Israel of using the terrorist attack as a pretext for “starvation.”
“Israel, with the support of the United States, has turned October 7 into the sole reason for the Palestinian people’s continued suffering and slaughter,” Bongwe wrote. “The Palestinian’s suffering, Israel declares to the world, is all the fault of the Palestinians for daring to resist.”
The op-ed goes on to criticize those who “insist that Hamas’s attack was outside the bounds of the right to resist” as “nullifying Palestinian resistance.” It also includes a rebuke of “Gandhi-style nonviolence” and invokes Frantz Fanon, a far-left scholar who argues that violence is “a necessary response to the systemic violence of colonialism.”
“Fanon did not rejoice at acts of armed struggle he might have found reprehensible, but he did not condemn them either. He understood where they came from, and where those who carried them out thought they were going: the destruction of colonialism,” wrote Bongwe. “Fanon, too, might have recoiled at the violence he saw, but his mission was, nonetheless, to authorize it, because ultimately he wanted every act of violence—that of the colonizer and the colonized—to end.”
Harvard students can only apply for the Rhodes Scholarship if they obtain the Ivy League school’s formal endorsement, a selective process in which half of Harvard’s prospective applicants are rejected.
Bongwe has played an active role in anti-Israel activism at Harvard. He participated in the school’s anti-Israel encampment in April 2024 and attended a “Palestine study-in” at the Harvard Law Library six months later. One of the encampment’s lead organizers, Asmer Asrar Safi, was himself named a Rhodes Scholar in 2023, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Bongwe’s Rhodes Scholar status comes as the program faces scrutiny over its political bent. A 2024 analysis from the American Enterprise Institute found that just 1 of the 157 Rhodes scholars over the past 5 years expressed interest in a conservative issue. Immigrants’ rights, for example, received more interest from Rhodes Scholars than cybersecurity, mental health, and national security combined.
Bongwe also served as a writer and editor for both the Harvard Crimson and the Harvard Advocate and was the president of the Harvard Undergraduate South African Society. At the University of Oxford, he “hopes to pursue two one-year master’s degrees, one in literature and another in visual arts.”
Harvard’s Center for European Studies congratulated Bongwe on his selection Monday in a post on X.
Neither Bongwe nor Harvard responded to requests for comment.
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