New Report Accuses Israeli Academia of Enforcing Systemic Apartheid Against Palestinian Students

Palestinian students walking down a closed shopping street in occupied East Jerusalem's Old City face severe repercussions in Israeli higher education, according to a recent report. One Palestinian student at Zefat Academic College in Israel faced permanent expulsion and the revocation of all academic credits after posting a video of a religious preacher praying for the people of Gaza. Similarly, another Palestinian student at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa was suspended for posting a Quranic verse.

These individual cases reflect a sweeping institutional crackdown documented in a report released by Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, since Israel’s military campaign in Gaza began in October 2023. Adalah received more than 130 inquiries from Palestinian students facing disciplinary proceedings across approximately 40 institutions, with more than three in four of the targeted students being 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 characterized by the suspension of standard procedural protections and the presumption of innocence, while Jewish Israelis benefit from constitutional track protections grounded in the rule of law.

The report also revealed systemic procedural flaws in monitoring 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, described this as institutional incompetence combined with an unwillingness to understand the complexity of language and discourse.

Historically, Article 17 of Israel’s Students’ Rights Law limited disciplinary powers to conduct connected to academic studies, but institutions expanded their jurisdiction after the war on Gaza began. They employed catch-all provisions such as unfitting conduct and harm to public peace, replacing legal thresholds with tests evaluating public sensibilities which were interpreted according to Jewish Israeli sentiment.

According to Mansour, this approach resulted in a state of conditional inclusion for Palestinian students in Israeli universities, where they remain students only as long as their expression stays within boundaries set by the comfort of the majority. Meanwhile, the report documented that Israeli academic institutions ignored widespread calls by Jewish-Israeli students for the annihilation and genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. In response, the Technion told the Times Higher Education that the report was part of a broader attempt to discredit Israeli academia and institutions and called the accusations baseless.

To justify these measures, institutions such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem invoked the 1965 Yardor ruling, a militant democracy doctrine. Mansour called upon international human rights bodies to hold Israeli universities accountable for breaches of international law, demanding that academic freedom and adherence to international law be absolute preconditions for any academic partnership or collaboration.