One Palestinian student found herself facing permanent expulsion and the revocation of all her academic credits at Zefat Academic College in Israel, after posting a video of a religious preacher praying for the people of Gaza. Another Palestinian student, at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, was suspended for posting a Quranic verse. The individual cases reflect a sweeping institutional crackdown documented in a report this week by Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023.
Adalah received more than 130 inquiries from Palestinian students facing disciplinary proceedings across approximately 40 institutions. More than three in four of the targeted students were women. The report concluded that Israeli academia has established a two-track disciplinary system amounting to apartheid within higher education.
Palestinians go through an “administrative track”, characterised by the suspension of standard procedural protections and the presumption of innocence. Meanwhile, Jewish Israelis have “constitutional track” protections, grounded in the rule of law. The report revealed a host of systemic procedural flaws in the monitoring of Palestinian students, notably the reliance on automated software like Google Translate to interpret Arabic texts, prayers, and cultural expressions.
Adi Mansour, an Adalah affiliate attorney, European University Institute PhD researcher and co-author of the report, said this shouldn’t be viewed as a calculated tactic. But the proceedings against students were structured to prevent Palestinians from sharing their perspective or defence. But institutions expanded their jurisdiction over students’ lives after the war on Gaza began.
They employed catch-all provisions like “unfitting conduct” and “harm to public peace”, as well as replacing legal thresholds with tests evaluating “public sensibilities”. Meanwhile, the Adalah report documented that Israeli academic institutions ignored widespread calls by Jewish-Israeli students for the annihilation and genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Commenting to the Times Higher Education on Wednesday, the Technion said the report was “part of a broader attempt to discredit Israeli academia and institutions”, and called the accusations “baseless”.
To justify these severe measures, institutions such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem invoked the 1965 Yardor ruling, a “militant democracy” doctrine originally used during periods of military rule to suspend the protections of the law against perceived internal enemies. Mansour explained that this legal manoeuvring is part of a broader, deeply entrenched system weighed against Palestinians in Israeli academia. Mansour called upon international human rights bodies to hold Israeli universities accountable for breaches of international law.
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