Israeli academia accused of systemic apartheid against Palestinians

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.