Interestingly, the Crimson never mentions that "Joachim Martillo" is himself Jewish, though he apparently at some point converted to Islam. He posts on twitter as "ThorsProvoni" and has a blog (now behind a google sign in page) on blogspot called Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel (but not 9/11 truth!). Possibly Adam Pearlman lite?

You Say You Want a Resolution?
By Daniel J. Hemel, CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Published: Thursday, December 04, 2003

A fragile peace prevails in Lowell House small dining room, site of a student-led Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, last Monday night. But Joachim C. S. Martillo ’78 promptly shatters it.

The others have barely finished exchanging pleasantries when Martillo drops his first rhetorical bombshell.

“Emerson supported terrorism against slaveholders, and I don’t see much of a difference between Zionism and slavery in terms of the evils they cause,” says Martillo, formerly a physics concentrator in Adams House.

To some participants in the dialogue, a fledgling effort to engender friendlier Arab-Jewish relations on a campus frequently polarized by Middle Eastern conflict, Martillo is a known commodity. With the approach of his 25th Harvard reunion last year, Martillo began to mull a donation to his alma mater, and started carefully observing campus debate over Israeli-Palestinian issues. He didn’t like what he saw, so he jumped into the fray. Since then, he’s gained notoriety for his incendiary comments at pro-Israel events and his provocative posts on e-mail list-serves.

“He’s pretty nuts,” says David B. Adelman ’04, former president of Harvard Students for Israel (HSI). But Martillo, a Boston-based entrepreneur who started selling computer products in the Palestinian territories after the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, is no dilettante when it comes to Middle Eastern issues, although his views lie well beyond the mainstream. “The first time I went through a checkpoint and had to experience this as Palestinians did... I began to believe that we [in the United States] were on the wrong side,” he says.

Last spring, Martillo and HSI secretary Eric R. Trager ’05 sparred in a volley of e-mails on HIPJ-Open, the now-abolished e-mail list hosted by the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice, a student activist group. The heated exchanges between Martillo and Trager underscore the deep rift between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian activists on campus.

At an institution that prides itself on facilitating free discourse, the debate over Israel tests the limits of tolerance and the possibility of dialogue. As Adelman asks, “If we can’t do this at Harvard, what does that say about the people who are trying to do it in Tel Aviv and Ramallah?”

Harvard students may not reach a peace treaty resolving Israeli-Palestinian conflict—at least not before graduation—but they can arrive at a cease-fire to defuse the tension that has marred on-campus debate. To accomplish this, the brash ideologues on campus must make room for more measured voices to set the tone of discourse.

More than a year since his September 17, 2002 address in Memorial Church grabbed headlines nationwide, University President Lawrence H. Summers’s words still reverberate on campus, casting an expansive shadow over Israeli-Palestinian discourse.

On that autumn morning, Summers told congregants, “Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.” He specifically referenced a petition signed by 75 Harvard faculty members calling on the University to divest from companies with holdings in Israel.

Summers’ remarks drew mixed reactions within the Harvard community. “I was unhappy with the statement because it made people afraid to talk about Israel and Palestine,” says Ilana J. Sichel ’05, a literature concentrator in the Dudley Co-op who describes herself as a “leftist-Zionist.” She says that Summers’ speech “made me afraid to voice criticism of Israel for fear of being labeled a self-hating Jew.”

But for Trager, Summers’ Memorial Church address was a rallying cry. “Larry Summers, he makes me so proud to be a Jew,” says Trager, who after the speech went to Summers’ office hours to congratulate him personally. “He is willing to stand up to sentiments that—when accepted on the academic level—challenge the Jewish people and their international existence.”

Trager, a government concentrator in Kirkland House, spent the summer after his freshman year in Jerusalem as an intern for a right-of-center member of the Israeli parliament. The sharp-tongued Queens, N.Y. native is now on a mission to expose what he sees as HIPJ’s sordid underside.

“For a group like [HIPJ] to display a significant amount of anti-Israel sentiment to the point where it embodies anti-Semitism is disturbing,” he says. “If you don’t believe Israel has a legitimate right to use its army amidst this clear threat, then you oppose its secure existence, and that’s anti-Semitic.”

Trager claims that Martillo’s posts “came without any rebuke or organizational distancing from HIPJ,” although some suggest that may simply reflect HIPJ’s non-hierarchical power structure.

But active HIPJ members note that neither Trager nor Martillo is actually affiliated with the group. “These two nutcases essentially had a fight on our list, and it had nothing to do with us,” says Suvrat Raju, a HIPJ member and second-year physics doctoral candidate.

The antics of Trager and Martillo led HIPJ moderators to shut down the list last spring, but Trager remains dogged in his battle with the group. In the most recent round, Trager seized upon an e-mail Raju sent to HIPJ members upon his return from an Oct. 25 Washington, D.C. rally protesting America’s presence in Iraq.

“At various points, chants like ‘the only solution: revolution’ and ‘long live the intifada’ were taken up enthusiastically,” Raju wrote in that e-mail. “If 50,000 people could turn out for a largely socialist rally that wasn’t afraid of cheering the intifada then what would happen if we had large organizational structures and some time to build the movement? The mind boggles!”

The term “intifada,” Arabic for shuddering, is widely used in reference to the waves of anti-Israel violence and suicide bombings that have left thousands dead. From that perspective, Raju’s remarks bolster Trager’s case. But Raju maintains, “Intifada to me means resistance. It doesn’t mean support for terrorism. I hope that’s completely clear.”

The fastidiously polite Raju, who hails from Delhi, India, is a relative newcomer to Middle Eastern issues. “I feel really badly about what is happening there,” he says. “The occupied territories are on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe.” As he settles into his new role as a pro-Palestinian activist, he seems shell-shocked by the ad hominem attacks that characterize debate at Harvard, including a recent e-mail from Trager:

“Suvrat, I would be very interested in knowing why you, personally, hold such enmity for the State of Israel,” Trager writes. “Are you Palestinian? Are you Muslim? Are you Arab? Are one of your parents one of the above? Are you dating/married to one of the above? Have you been to the West Bank or Gaza or Israel? Or are you just a run-of-the-mill Marxist Jew-hater?”

Raju does characterize himself as a Marxist, but he emphasizes that the ideological label does not extend to HIPJ as a whole. According to a statement on its website, the organization was founded hours after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks as “a group of people working to…do our part to stop the ill-conceived wars that now surround us.”

Raju says that the group’s foray into Israeli-Palestinian issues accelerated this fall as a “reactive process,” spurred by clashes with HSI. On Nov. 3, HIPJ and the Society of Arab Students (SAS) hosted Amer Jubran—a local activist then facing deportation to Jordan—in a Science Center auditorium, where he delivered a speech decrying the USA Patriot Act. Jubran, who refuses to condemn Palestinian suicide bombings against Jewish targets, provoked protests from pro-Israel groups. HSI members emphasized that their objection was to Jubran’s appearance, not HIPJ’s civil libertarian agenda. One HSI sign read, “Patriot Act, No; Support for Terrorism, Never.”

The HSI-HIPJ rift widened on Nov. 22 when first-year physics doctoral candidate Phil Larochelle, a 2003 MIT grad, launched a “HIPJ Weblog” tracking human rights abuses and progressive movements worldwide. The Weblog’s first news summary featured a link to a Zmag.org article comparing the Israeli Defense Forces to the Nazi military. Bur Larochelle stresses that his controversial weblog isn’t specifically aimed against Israel, and that it levels even harsher criticism against other U.S.-backed regimes with checkered human rights records.

As Trager pushed for a publicity campaign aimed at exposing HIPJ’s anti-Semitic leanings, HSI President Joshua Suskewicz ’05 intervened in the row. “I sincerely hope that our clubs do not reach a point of confrontation,” Suskewicz wrote in an e-mail to HIPJ leaders.