TEHRAN – Leen Ezzeddine’s Harvard Medical School graduation speech presents a critique of how the global system values human life and intellectual freedom. It compares the physical destruction of life and education in Lebanon and Gaza with the institutional suppression of speech in the West.

There exists a profound and tragic paradox. The plight and ambition of Lebanese and Gazan students who study under fire is a telling story.

Academic ambition and capability are universal, but safety and the luxury of a normal student life are dictated by geography.

Ezzeddine fundamentally deconstructs the idea that her graduation from Harvard was solely due to hard work, disputing the myth of pure meritocracy. She acknowledges that her peers in Lebanon and Palestine possess the exact same discipline, devotion, and intellect. The only differentiator is luck, the arbitrary border that spared her from studying under the buzz of drones and the collapse of civil infrastructure.

While students in the West and some other parts of the world are busy with their exams and jobs, students in Gaza and Lebanon face an existential struggle. 

Ezzeddine’s own family home in southern Lebanon was leveled by an Israeli strike in October 2024, forcing her elderly grandparents to flee to Beirut.

Mention of Gazan medical students like Ezz Lulu, who continued to pursue medicine despite his family being killed in an airstrike, underscores a terrifying reality. In these regions, studying medicine isn't just a career path; it is an act of defiance carried out amid the literal bombing of the hospitals where they train.

Ezzeddine uses her platform to combat what activist Assata Shakur calls the "precondition for violence": dehumanization. By naming specific students like Ezz Lulu and physicians like Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, she argues that these are not merely statistics, geopolitical casualties, or "politically inconvenient" anomalies. They are full human beings with sacred lives and brilliant dreams.

For students in Gaza and Lebanon, education is a battleground of survival. Their academic pursuits require them to compartmentalize the constant threat of death, infrastructure collapse, and personal grief, externalities that are entirely unimaginable to their Western counterparts.

Silencing dissent in Western universities

The remarks by Ezzeddine also reveal a stark disconnect between the ethical values institutions teach and the political interests they protect. 

Her speech paints American campuses not as sanctuaries of free thought, but as highly policed battlegrounds. When students held rallies to protest the relentless attacks on Gaza and demand financial divestment, the institutional response was swift and punitive.

The world, especially academia, won’t forget police crackdowns on peaceful encampments in American universities, including Columbia, Harvard, Pennsylvania, UCLA, and USC. Harvard officially barred 13 undergraduate seniors from receiving their degrees in May 2024, just one day before their scheduled commencement ceremony.

To justify this silencing, institutions and critics framed student activism not as legitimate political dissent or a defense of human rights, but as "campus disorder" or "antisemitism." This tactical labeling effectively shifts the public conversation away from the atrocities in Gaza and onto the "comfort" and logistics of campus life.

Ezzeddine’s speech exposes a glaring moral vacuum in elite education. Universities heavily promote curricula on "health equity" and "the social determinants of health." Yet, when students try to apply these exact frameworks to the destruction of Gaza’s medical system, the institutions pull the emergency brake. They treat silence as "neutrality" and moral clarity as a professional liability.

Ultimately, the speech connects these two disparate worlds through the definition of medicine itself. Ezzeddine argues that politics is merely medicine on a larger scale.

If a doctor’s job is to protect health, they cannot ignore the political decisions that bomb hospitals, cut off clean water, or deny food to entire populations. 

By speaking out at the risk of her own career, Ezzeddine channeled the radical tradition of thinkers like Audre Lorde ("Your silence will not protect you"), reminding the elite audience that professional prestige is meaningless if it requires turning a blind eye to the systems that decide which bodies are worthy of care—and which students are allowed to survive.