Israeli Universities Suspended 60% of Palestinian Students Before Any Finding of Wrongdoing, Adalah Report Says

Adalah, the Palestinian legal rights group, has published a report documenting what it calls a parallel disciplinary system inside Israeli higher education, built to punish Palestinian citizens of Israel for expressions of identity and political speech after October 7, 2023.

The report, Apartheid in Israeli Academia: Palestinian Students After 7 October 2023, is based on 132 inquiries the group received from Palestinian students at roughly 40 Israeli institutions, and legal representation or advice provided in 100 of those cases. According to the report's findings, more than 60 percent of the students who approached Adalah were suspended before any determination of wrongdoing had been made. Twenty were permanently expelled or suspended for one to five years. Of 78 disciplinary cases the group examined, 52 ended in conviction.

The conduct that triggered proceedings, according to the report, went well beyond statements about the October 7 attacks themselves. It included criticism of Israel's government, military, or war on Gaza; prayers and Quranic verses; images tied to Palestinian identity; and expressions of concern about the humanitarian toll in Gaza. In some instances, the report says, a single "like" on a post, displaying the Palestinian flag or the word "Palestine," sharing a news article, or posting a prayer for Gaza was sufficient to prompt a complaint.

Lubna Tuma, the Adalah attorney who co-authored the report and represented many of the students before disciplinary committees, described the hearings as built around a presumption of guilt.

"The committees' starting assumption was often that the student supported terrorism and required the student to actively disprove it."

The report documents procedural breakdowns in specific cases: students who were never shown the posts underlying the complaints against them, universities that relied on automatic machine translations of Arabic prayers and Quranic verses, and students made to answer for content they had not authored. Adalah says the effect was to invert the ordinary burden of proof, forcing Palestinian students to demonstrate their own speech was not support for terrorism rather than requiring the university to prove it.

In some cases documented in the report, disciplinary proceedings continued and ended in conviction even after police or prosecutors had found no basis for criminal charges. The report identifies the University of Haifa as the first institution to suspend a Palestinian student after October 7 and to file a criminal complaint against a student. Tuma told The New Arab some students dropped appeals rather than continue enduring the process, while others left Israeli universities to study abroad.

The crackdown, according to the report and Tuma's account, had government backing. Days after October 7, Israel's education minister called on universities to suspend students, refer them to the Council for Higher Education and police, and speed up disciplinary proceedings. Jewish-Israeli student unions, campus political groups, and outside organizations also monitored Palestinian students' social media accounts and forwarded posts to administrators, the report states.

Adalah's central finding, disputed by no university named in the excerpted material provided to The New Arab, is comparative: that protections extended to Jewish-Israeli students' political speech, including extreme rhetoric, were not extended to Palestinian students expressing solidarity, grief, or criticism of the war.