23.09.26

Editorial Note

The Council for Higher Education in Israel published data on students enrolled in higher education institutions. Arab students amount to 63,140 in the upcoming academic year.

Earlier this month, Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, published a harsh report accusing Israeli higher education institutions of apartheid, titled “Apartheid in Israeli Academia: Palestinian Students After 7 October 2023.” 

Adalah received 132 inquiries from Palestinian students at around 40 institutions and provided legal representation or advice in 100 cases after universities began taking action over social media posts following the 7 October 2023 attacks. Out of the 132 inquiries, 20 students were either permanently expelled or suspended for between one and five years. Of 78 disciplinary cases examined, 52 resulted in convictions. 

The report provides examples. Here are two. At Ben-Gurion University, a student faced disciplinary proceedings for sharing a video on her Instagram account on December 20, 2023. The video contained three reports on the October 7, 2023 attacks, including “the alleged beheading of forty children, systematic sexual violence, and the mass killings at the Nova festival.” According to Adalah, the video presented these reports as “narrative parts of a broad strategy of atrocity propaganda and an information war, intended to dehumanize the Palestinians, and thereby to justify Israel’s violence and atrocities against them.” The university’s administration rejected the student’s version, and the disciplinary committee convicted the student of conduct unbecoming.

Tel Aviv University initiated disciplinary proceedings against a student for posting on October 10, 2023, a set of images titled, “8 Things about What’s Happening in Palestine.” Adalah explained that the post “included a series of images of an explanatory and political character with respect to the events of 7 October and their context.” The university’s disciplinary prosecutor argued that the images constituted a booklet “that praises Hamas… in these acts the accused committed an offense of conduct unbecoming the dignity of the university,” the various slides present “a distorted picture of the events of 7 October,” in which Israel “is presented as a satanic regime to justify the ‘liberation operation’.” Adalah explained that “The student and his defense team emphasized that the post’s purpose was to raise awareness of the other context of the war at a time when the voices in Israel called for revenge. The defense argued that the post does not support terror, nor does it encourage violence. The terminology, even if perceived as problematic by the university, is lawful and legitimate in its historical context, and is informative, and nothing more.” In the end, the Tel Aviv University committee convicted the student of an offense under the disciplinary code, and on 8 May 2024 imposed a penalty of a suspended sentence of expulsion.

The Adalah report attracted media attention. The New Arab, a Qatari-owned anti-Israel media outlet based in London, used the Adalah report to attack Israel. It reported that Palestinian citizens of Israel studying at Israeli universities are “being punished for expressions of Palestinian identity and opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.” The New Arab spoke to Lubna Tuma, the attorney with Adalah who represented many of the students in the Adalah report, who said that “universities had subjected Palestinian students to disciplinary proceedings in which they were effectively treated as supporters of ‘terrorism’ unless they could prove otherwise, while similar restrictions were not imposed on Jewish-Israeli students.” She said, in Israeli academia, “institutions have turned themselves into bodies policing private political expression, deciding which expressions of identity, religion, solidarity, and criticism are legitimate, and which are not.”

Tuma told the New Arab, “What that produces isn’t just individual punishment, it’s a chilling effect across the whole Palestinian student population.” Tuma described the hearings as “humiliation by design,” saying that the students were treated as if they were “a traitor or enemy from the outset… The committees’ starting assumption was often that the student supported terrorism and required the student to actively disprove it.”

Tuma also told the New Arab that the Palestinian students were “forced to demonstrate that their speech did not amount to support for ‘terror’.” Tuma described the proceedings as “sham processes from start to finish.” 

The New Arab stated that “The crackdown was encouraged by the Israeli government. Days after the 7 October attacks, the education minister demanded universities suspend students, report them to the Council for Higher Education and police, and expedite disciplinary proceedings. Jewish-Israeli student unions, campus political groups and outside organizations also monitored Palestinian students’ social media posts and reported them to university administrations.”

The New Arab also added that “Adalah found a starkly different approach towards Jewish-Israeli students. Universities largely preserved protections for their political expression, including in cases involving extreme speech, while the report said institutions ignored widespread calls for the annihilation and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and racist posts targeting Palestinian citizens and students. For Palestinian students, by contrast, universities expanded their disciplinary reach beyond campus and into private political expression.”

Tuma told the New Arab, “This is why we speak of apartheid. It is a completely different set of rules, applied on the basis of students’ ethno-national identity… This can’t be addressed case by case. Freedom of speech is an absolute precondition of academic life, not a privilege granted to some students and withheld from others.”

Adalah even told the New Arab “the crackdown has consequences beyond those formally disciplined, creating a ‘chilling effect’ in which Palestinian students increasingly censor themselves and feel less secure or welcome on Israeli campuses.”

Other media outlets also reported on the Adalah report. The Times Higher Education reported that “Harsh disciplinary sanctions against Palestinian students in Israeli universities amount to ‘apartheid’ in the country’s higher education system.” 

According to The Times Higher Education, “Palestinian students at Israeli universities have been suspended from their studies for merely ‘liking’ social media content that relates to Palestine.”

The Times Higher Education report also alleges that “Israeli universities are imposing increasingly harsh sanctions on Palestinian students, while Israeli Jewish students go without punishment for similar actions.”

The Times Higher Education received a response from The Technion. It said that the report was “part of a broader attempt to discredit Israeli academia and institutions”. The Technion “has more than 3,000 Israeli Arab students and that there have been six disciplinary cases involving them over the past decade, three of which resulted in guilty verdicts. Another two students chose to discontinue their studies before the proceedings were completed.“ The Technion also said, these were “Baseless accusations of discrimination undermine these efforts and risk damaging the delicate fabric of shared academic life that we strive to preserve on our campus every day.”

The Jerusalem Post also reported, stating that Adalah “clashed with Israeli universities.” It added that international supporters contributed nearly NIS 1 million to provide legal representation and assistance to dozens of students following the proceedings. The British NGO, the Galilee Foundation, provided support that enabled Adalah to write and publish. 

Worth noting that official data show that Israeli higher education institutions are hosting over sixty thousand Arab students. In the end, according to the Adalah report, of the 132 cases Adalah highlighted, only a small number were sanctioned by the universities for expressing support for Hamas.

Surely, at least 60,000 Arab students did not express support for Hamas. Arab students have also benefited from Israeli government grants since 2013, when it launched the Irteka scholarship programs to increase the number of Arab students in higher education institutions.

The claim that Israeli institutions of higher education “practice apartheid” against Palestinian students is false. Disciplinary action against particular students does not, by itself, establish the existence of an apartheid system. A careful analysis should distinguish between restrictions on political expression, alleged violations of university disciplinary rules, and systematic institutional discrimination based on ethnicity or nationality.

For many years, segments of the social sciences and liberal arts have increasingly framed a wide range of controversies involving Israel through the conceptual lens of “apartheid,” and, more recently, “genocide.” The Adalah report illustrates this tendency: rather than establishing the specific conditions required to substantiate either designation, it employs the terminology as a generalized description of Israeli policies and institutional practices. The result is a methodological problem in which highly specific legal and historical concepts become interchangeable political labels. 

As can be seen, The New Arab provided the harshest reporting against Israel, and The Times Higher Education has followed suit. None questioned Adalah’s apartheid accusations.

REFERENCES:

https://www.newarab.com/news/inside-academic-apartheid-silencing-palestinians-israel

Inside the ‘academic apartheid’ silencing Palestinian students in Israel

Israeli universities are imposing academic apartheid on Palestinian students over Gaza and Palestinian expression, Adalah has found.

By Anam Alam

07 September, 2026

Palestinian citizens of Israel studying at Israeli universities are being pushed to self-censor and, in some cases, abandon their studies after being punished for expressions of Palestinian identity and opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a lawyer who represented many of the students has told The New Arab.

Lubna Tuma, an attorney with Palestinian rights group Adalah, said universities had subjected Palestinian students to disciplinary proceedings in which they were effectively treated as supporters of “terrorism” unless they could prove otherwise, while similar restrictions were not imposed on Jewish-Israeli students.

“Freedom of expression is supposed to be a foundational, universal principle of academic life, for all students,” Tuma, who co-authored a new report on the crackdown, told The New Arab.

“In Israeli academia, it plays quite the opposite role: institutions have turned themselves into bodies policing private political expression, deciding which expressions of identity, religion, solidarity, and criticism are legitimate, and which are not.”

Adalah’s report, Apartheid in Israeli Academia: Palestinian Students After 7 October 2023, found that Israeli universities and colleges had effectively established two disciplinary systems based on students’ ethno-national identity, which the rights group says amounts to apartheid within higher education.

The group received 132 inquiries from Palestinian students at around 40 institutions and provided legal representation or advice in 100 cases after universities began taking action over social media posts following the 7 October 2023 attacks and the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

More than 60% of those who approached Adalah were suspended before any determination of wrongdoing, while 20 students were either permanently expelled or suspended for between one and five years. Of 78 disciplinary cases examined, 52 resulted in convictions.

The posts targeted were not limited to statements about the 7 October attacks. Criticism of Israel’s government, military or war on Gaza, prayers and Quranic verses, images of Palestinian identity and expressions of concern about Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe all triggered proceedings.

In some cases, merely “liking” a post, displaying the Palestinian flag or the word “Palestine”, sharing a news report or posting a prayer for Palestinians in Gaza was enough to prompt a complaint.

“What that produces isn’t just individual punishment, it’s a chilling effect across the whole Palestinian student population,” Tuma said.

‘Humiliation by design’

Tuma, who represented many of the students before disciplinary committees, described the hearings as “humiliation by design”, saying students entered them treated as if they were “a traitor or enemy from the outset”.

“These processes carried a deep personal, emotional, and psychological cost,” Tuma said. “The committees’ starting assumption was often that the student supported terrorism and required the student to actively disprove it.”

The report documented cases in which students were not shown the posts behind complaints, universities relied on automatic translations of Arabic prayers and Quranic verses, and students were required to defend themselves against content they had not published.

Adalah said the result was a reversal of the usual burden of proof, with Palestinian students forced to demonstrate that their speech did not amount to support for “terror”. In some cases, university proceedings continued and ended in convictions even when law enforcement authorities found no basis to pursue criminal charges.

Tuma described the proceedings as “sham processes from start to finish”, saying some students chose not to appeal because of the anxiety caused by the process, while others abandoned their studies in Israel and pursued education abroad.

Some universities also reported their own Palestinian students to Israeli police, leading in certain cases to criminal investigations and arrests. Tuma said the University of Haifa was the first to suspend at least one Palestinian student after 7 October and filed a criminal complaint against one student.

The crackdown was encouraged by the Israeli government. Days after the 7 October attacks, the education minister demanded universities suspend students, report them to the Council for Higher Education and police, and expedite disciplinary proceedings. Jewish-Israeli student unions, campus political groups and outside organisations also monitored Palestinian students’ social media posts and reported them to university administrations.

‘A completely different set of rules’

Adalah found a starkly different approach towards Jewish-Israeli students. Universities largely preserved protections for their political expression, including in cases involving extreme speech, while the report said institutions ignored widespread calls for the annihilation and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and racist posts targeting Palestinian citizens and students.

For Palestinian students, by contrast, universities expanded their disciplinary reach beyond campus and into private political expression, according to the report.

“This is why we speak of apartheid. It is a completely different set of rules, applied on the basis of students’ ethno-national identity,” Tuma said.

“This can’t be addressed case by case. Freedom of speech is an absolute precondition of academic life, not a privilege granted to some students and withheld from others.”

Adalah said the crackdown has consequences beyond those formally disciplined, creating a “chilling effect” in which Palestinian students increasingly censor themselves and feel less secure or welcome on Israeli campuses.

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https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/11693

New Report by Adalah: “Apartheid in Israeli Academia: Palestinian Students After 7 October 2023”

07/09/2026

Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel publishes a new report today examining the discriminatory disciplinary policies pursued since 7 October 2023 by Israeli universities and colleges toward Palestinian students, predominantly citizens of Israel. Based on an analysis of the dozens of disciplinary proceedings opened against Palestinian students at around 40 academic institutions in response to the students’ social media posts, the report finds that Israeli academia has created a two-track disciplinary system, amounting to apartheid within higher education between Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian students.

The report was co-authored by Adalah Attorneys Lubna Tuma, Adi Mansour, and Attorney Mai Diab, and edited by Dr. Fady Khoury.

To read the full report

To read the executive summary
 

Israeli academic institutions began suspending Palestinian students in the days immediately following 7 October, opening disciplinary proceedings against them, and classifying their posts as “support for terror.” These actions occurred amid political pressure from state officials, including the Minister of Education, to suspend students and conduct expedited disciplinary proceedings against them. In some cases, academic institutions even reported their own students to the police, leading to arrests.
 

The consequences of this institutional policy were severe: Adalah received 132 inquiries from students at close to 40 academic institutions, most of which (76.5%) came from female students. Adalah legally represented or offered legal counsel to 100 students. In more than 80 cases, academic institutions imposed an interim suspension before any hearing took place, and in 20 cases permanently expelled students or suspended them for one-to-five years. In a number of cases, Adalah’s appeals led to the reversal of convictions or a significant reduction of penalties.
 

According to the report, a wide range of expressions triggered disciplinary proceedings, including criticism of Israeli government policy, the Israeli military, or the war in Gaza; content related to the 7 October attacks; the dire humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip; religious expressions including verses from the Qur’an; and visual symbols of Palestinian identity. In some cases, a mere “like” of a post, the display of a Palestinian flag or the word “Palestine” on a profile, sharing a news report, or posting a prayer for the residents of Gaza was enough to trigger a complaint or disciplinary proceeding.
 

The report points to structural, recurring flaws in the manner in which academic institutions handled these proceedings, finding that the burden of proof shifted: instead of institutions having to prove that an offense had occurred, students had to prove that their posts did not amount to support for terror. Institutions also expanded their disciplinary authority into private posts unrelated to academic studies almost exclusively by Palestinian students, while refraining from doing so for Jewish-Israeli students, even in cases involving extreme, inciting, and racist speech.
 

As a result, the report argues, Israeli academia has been transformed from a body regulating students’ conduct in connection with their studies into a body policing private expression of their students and determining which expressions of Palestinian identity, religion, solidarity, and criticism are legitimate.
 

The report concludes that, after October 2023, Israeli academic institutions established two distinct tracks of disciplinary law de facto: an administrative track and a constitutional track. For Palestinian students, the institutions established an emergency “administrative track”, characterized by the expansion of academic institutions’ authority, the curtailment of procedural protections, the use of vague tests, and the examination of statements within a securitized discourse predicated on concepts of loyalty and “enemy”. Alongside this track, the institutions applied a “constitutional track” for Jewish-Israeli students, in which the boundaries of authority and freedom of expression were largely preserved, even in relation to extreme expression. Notably, Israeli academic institutions ignored students’ widespread calls for the annihilation and genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and racist posts directed against Palestinian citizens of Israel in general, and their fellow Palestinian students in particular.
 

The report warns that this policy creates a “chilling effect” among Palestinian students, encourages self-censorship, and undermines their sense of security and belonging on campus.

To watch an explanatory video about the report

To view an infographic by Visualizing Palestine which visualizes the findings of the report.

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https://www.ioehighereducation.com/News/IT/4202

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/palestinian-students-victims-two-track-discipline-israel

Palestinian students ‘victims of two-track discipline’ in Israel

Legal centre says Israeli universities have suspended students for simply ‘liking’ Palestinian flags

Published on 

September 8, 2026

Last updated 

September 8, 2026

Juliette Rowsell

Harsh disciplinary sanctions against Palestinian students in Israeli universities amount to “apartheid” in the country’s higher education system, a legal and human rights centre claims.

In a report, Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, says that Palestinians studying at Israeli universities have been suspended from their studies for merely “liking” social media content that relates to Palestine.

A “two-track” disciplinary route is opening up in the country, the report alleges, saying that Israeli universities are imposing increasingly harsh sanctions on Palestinian students, while Israeli Jewish students go without punishment for similar actions.

Apartheid in Israeli Academia is based on 132 enquiries that Adalah received from Palestinian students relating to disciplinary proceedings tied to social media posts on private accounts. In 61.3 per cent of all the enquiries received, institutions imposed interim suspensions, barring individuals from their studies before any determination of culpability had been made, the report says.

Law enforcement authorities became involved in 20 cases, some entailing arrests, with institutions at times directly reporting their own students to the police.

About 24 per cent of the posts reviewed contained criticism of Israeli government policy or of the war in Gaza; 23 per cent contained content related to the Hamas attacks of 7 October; 22 per cent addressed events in Gaza and civilian suffering; 21 per cent featured religious expressions, including prayers and verses from the Koran; and 16 per cent contained visual symbols of Palestinian identity.

Some students were suspended for displaying a Palestinian flag in their social media biographies, the report claims. In one case, Adalah says, a university allegedly took action against a student for a post made in 2022 about the football World Cup in Qatar. The post read: “The World Cup is in Qatar, while the cup of manhood, resistance, and pride is being played here in Palestine.”

One student who had been suspended, and who wished to remain anonymous, told Times Higher Education that they felt “lost and anxious” after being investigated by their university, adding that “the hearings themselves were extremely humiliating”.

The incident, which also involved them being arrested, put them off further study in Israel. They have since applied to institutions in Europe for postgraduate studies.

The most common form of discipline for students was suspension for one academic year, which 25 per cent of the students in the report received. This was followed by educational sanctions (including reprimands, obligatory educational courses and the revocation of academic credits), at 21.67 per cent; permanent suspension (18.33 per cent); and suspension for one to five years (16.67 per cent).

Adalah says there was a “relatively high volume” of disciplinary proceedings from some institutions, including the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem (nine), the University of Haifa (nine) and Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa (six).

In its report, Adalah warns that there are “two separate disciplinary tracks”, one for Palestinian students and one for Israeli Jewish students.

The paper says: “To the best of our knowledge, there is not a single case of a disciplinary prosecution of an Israeli Jewish student for having published a social media post, for example, showing support for genocide, for the ‘flattening’ of Gaza, or a racist statement against the Arab public in Israel.”

This discrepancy “created a reality of apartheid in the disciplinary law of Israeli academia”, says Adalah, which describes it as a “racist policy” that sees higher education institutions “violate international law”.

“This policy produces collective harm, in which religious, political, or identity-based expression by Palestinian students may result in sanctions and academic penalties,” the report says.

“It creates a ‘chilling effect’ within the Palestinian student body in Israeli academia, fostering fear, incentivising self-censorship, and discouraging legitimate expression. By contrast, such fears do not exist for the Jewish Israeli student.”

THE approached the universities named for comment. Technion said the report was “part of a broader attempt to discredit Israeli academia and institutions”.

It said that it has more than 3,000 Israeli Arab students and that there have been six disciplinary cases involving them over the past decade, three of which resulted in guilty verdicts. Another two students chose to discontinue their studies before the proceedings were completed.

“The reality is that the Technion has worked diligently to support all of its students, including its Arab students, during an exceptionally difficult and emotionally charged period,” the institution said.

“Baseless accusations of discrimination undermine these efforts and risk damaging the delicate fabric of shared academic life that we strive to preserve on our campus every day.”

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com

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https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-908378

Adalah clashes with Israeli universities over alleged discrimination against Arabs after Oct. 7

The report reviews proceedings against Arab students at around 40 academic institutions, primarily over posts published on their private social media accounts.

ByYOAV ETIEL, AVIHAI CHIIMSEPTEMBER 11, 2026 11:41

The Adalah organization, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, clashed with Israeli universities after it published a harsh report on Monday titled “Apartheid in Israeli Academia: Arab Students After October 7, 2023,” which claims that Israeli higher education institutions have implemented discriminatory disciplinary policies since the start of the war.

Adalah claimed that the universities effectively created two separate tracks: a stricter track for Arab students, referred to as “Palestinian” students in the report, most of whom are Israeli citizens, and a more lenient track for Jewish students.

The report, authored by Adalah attorneys Lubna Touma, Adi Mansour, and Mai Diab, and edited by Dr. Fadi Khoury with assistance from Tom Mahager and Dr. Hassan Jabareen, reviews proceedings against Arab students at around 40 academic institutions, primarily over posts published on their private social media accounts.

Adalah said that international supporters contributed nearly NIS 1 million to provide legal representation and assistance to dozens of students following the proceedings. According to the report, the Galilee Foundation provided support that enabled its writing and publication.

According to the report, on October 8, 2023, less than 24 hours after the massacre carried out by Hamas and other armed groups in the Gaza border communities and the start of what the report calls the “war of extermination of the nation over the Gaza Strip,” the University of Haifa issued its first decision to suspend Arab students from their studies.

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https://www.adalah.org/uploads/uploads/4297aea7c5ee9689d89809c3415c14b0.pdf

APARTHEID IN ISRAELI ACADEMIA: PALESTINIAN STUDENTS AFTER

7 OCTOBER 2023

_{September 2026}

             w w w . a d a l a h . o r g

Authors: Lubna Tuma, Adi Mansour, Mai Diab Main Editor: Dr. Fady Khoury

Contributing Editors: Dr. Hassan Jabareen, Tom Mehager

Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel

Cover & Report Design: Underground Studio

September 2026

Table of Contents

5                  Acknowledgments

6                  Introduction 

14 Chapter 1:_{An Overview}  

21 Chapter 2:Due Process Rights Violations

31 Chapter 3:Expanding the Boundaries of Surveillance and _Enforcement

40 Chapter 4:Narrowing the Scope of Freedom of Expression  

77 Summary and Conclusions

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Adalah wishes to express its appreciation and gratitude to the attorneys and legal interns who accompanied, assisted, and devoted significant professional and personal effort to the legal representation of over 100 Palestinian students, citizens of Israel and residents of Jerusalem, against whom disciplinary proceedings were brought by academic institutions in Israel over their social media posts published after 7 October 2023. This work was carried out under enormous pressure, over many long months, and included legal representation, research, the preparation of pleadings, and appearances before disciplinary committees, as well as personal support. Special thanks go to Ismail Sarsour, as well as to the volunteer attorneys Omar Khamaisi, Rawan Aghbaria, and Wisam Yazbak.

Finally, we wish to express deep gratitude and appreciation to the members of our community and international supporters, who mobilized in an extraordinary way and contributed close to one million shekels toward the representation of the Palestinian students. This support made it possible to provide legal assistance to the students during an unprecedented period. Adalah also wishes to thank the Galilee Foundation for its generous support toward the writing and publication of this report.

Introduction

On 8 October 2023, less than twenty-four hours after the deadly assaults carried out by Hamas and other militant groups in the communities surrounding Gaza and the opening of the war on the Gaza Strip, the University of Haifa issued its first decision to suspend Palestinian students. The decision was made by the university’s rector, with no preliminary procedure and no hearing, based on social media posts by the students on their private social media accounts in the hours before the decision.^[1] Within a few days, other academic institutions followed suit and by mid-October 2023, a pattern was already discernible: the immediate suspension of Palestinian students from their courses. The opening of disciplinary proceedings against them and the characterization of their posts as constituting support for terror or identification with the Hamas attack.

Adalah received 132 inquiries from students,^[2] 131 of whom are Palestinian students against whom disciplinary proceedings were opened, by approximately 40 Israeli universities, regional colleges, and private colleges. The phenomenon also continued through 2024 and 2025.^[3] This report examines those disciplinary proceedings, focusing on the cases that Adalah handled, and continues to handle, on behalf of these students.^[4]

The facts presented in this report reveal a wide-ranging suppression of the freedom of expression of Palestinian students in Israel. The affected students are mostly young Palestinian women (76.5% of the inquiries). The social media posts for which they were disciplined included verses from the Qur’an, prayers for the safety of the residents of Gaza, expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, shares of news reports, and expressions of national identity such as the Palestinian flag or the word “Palestine” in a profile. Many of the posts were published from private accounts with a limited audience, outside the academic space, and in some cases even in periods that preceded 7 October. The sanctions imposed in 20 cases included permanent expulsion or prolonged suspension from studies. This pattern, in its scope and its features, was unprecedented in the disciplinary mechanisms of academic institutions.

The Israeli institutions of higher education did not act in a vacuum. They operated within a wider policy of persecution pursued in workplaces, hospitals, the Israel Bar Association, and elsewhere. This policy treated Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI) as an “enemy from within,” one whose every identification with Palestinians in Gaza was perceived as an illegitimate expression that justified silencing. A clear illustration came on 18 October 2023, when the Police Commissioner, Yaakov Shabtai, announced a sweeping ban on Arab demonstrations in support of the residents of Gaza, alongside a policy of “zero tolerance for any incident. Anyone who wants to be a citizen of Israel, ahlan wa sahlan (welcome). Anyone  who wishes to identify with Gaza, is welcome to — I will put him on the buses that are heading there now.”⁵ This rhetoric did not emerge on 7 October; it is part of a long-standing perception of PCI as an internal threat to the state. After 7 October, however, with the ongoing genocide in Gaza and massive violence in the West Bank, it acquired an unprecedented official and public legitimacy, one that enabled the political persecution with which this report is concerned.

The same was true at institutions of higher education. On 12 October 2023, only five days after the war began, the Minister of Education, Yoav Kisch, sent a letter to the heads of higher education institutions titled “Handling Cases of Incitement to Terror by Students and Employees at Academic Institutions.”⁶ The letter demanded that the universities take immediate steps, including the immediate suspension of students, reporting every case to the Council for Higher Education and to the Israel Police, and conducting expedited disciplinary proceedings. A few days later, on 18 October, the Council for Higher Education approved a decision requiring the institutions to report on their treatment of complaints received. In response, the heads of the universities expressed collective and public opposition to these requirements, arguing that the decision “could create an atmosphere of McCarthyism and mutual informing on campuses.”⁷ This rhetorical opposition, however, did not translate into a refusal to conduct the proceedings.

Organized public pressure accompanied the political pressure. Student unions, right-wing student cells, and extra-institutional organizations worked to locate social media posts by Palestinian students, transfer them to the universities’ administrations, and apply public pressure for stricter measures. At several institutions, the complaints that reached the disciplinary committees did not originate with a faculty member or a student who had been directly harmed, but

5         Ran Shimoni, Diaa Hajj Yahya, and Adi Hashmonai, “Israel Police Commissioner: ‘Those Who Identify with Gaza can be Escorted There on Buses,’” Ha’aretz English Edition, 19 October 2023.

6         Letter of the Minister of Education, Yoav Kisch, to the heads of higher education institutions, dated 12 October 2023, “Handling Cases of Incitement to Terror by Students and Employees at Academic Institutions.”

7         Letter of response sent by the heads of higher education institutions to the Minister of Education, dated 18  October  2023.

with external organizations that monitored students’ posts, or with students who followed the accounts of Palestinian students and forwarded screenshots.⁸

These developments drew international criticism from human rights organizations, groups that work to protect academic freedom, and human rights experts. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, determined that the violations in question constitute breaches of international human rights law, including the right to hold opinions, freedom of expression, and the right to education. The Commission further determined that the targeted harm to Palestinian women faculty members and students, through disciplinary proceedings and dismissals that deterred them from activity in the public sphere, constitutes a violation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).⁹ In a formal communication to the Government of Israel in 2024, eight UN special rapporteurs expressed concern over “increased criminalization, surveillance, harassment and attacks,”¹⁰ and also addressed the disciplinary proceedings taken against Palestinian students at academic institutions as part of what they described as “the suppression of freedom of expression since 7 October.”¹¹

The practices described in this report began with the universities’ expansion of their  disciplinary powers. Article 17 of the Students’ Rights Law, 2007 provides that an academic institution may set rules “relating to the conduct of candidates

8         These actions included demands on the part of student movements, national student unions, and extrainstitutional organizations. See, for example, the actions of organizations such as Im Tirtzu and Btsalmo, which set up independent mechanisms for monitoring students’ social media posts and transferred lists of names to the administrations of academic institutions. This pattern of action did not previously exist within Israeli academia, and it was documented for the first time after 7 October.

9         UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, report under the resolution of the Human Rights Council, UN document A/ HRC/59/26 (June 2025), paras. 35-39 and 85.

10      Formal communication of special rapporteurs of the UN Human Rights Council to the Government of Israel, AL ARE 2/2024, 18 April 2024, p. 1. The communication was submitted on behalf of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression; the Special Rapporteur on freedom of assembly and association; the Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers; the Special Rapporteur on minority issues; the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory; the Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy; the Special Rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism; and the Working Group on transnational corporations.

11      Ibid., pp. 2-4.

and students in connection with their studies at the institution.” The law circumscribes the universities’ disciplinary powers and limits them to a connection to the institution or to the student’s studies there. The law was never intended to serve as an institutionalized enforcement mechanism for speech offenses or for conduct off campus that has no direct connection with what takes place on it.^[5]

Despite this, since October 2023, Israeli academic institutions have assumed new powers, beyond those granted to them under the law. They defined what constitutes an expression offense. They decided what evidence is required for a conviction. They developed, at their own initiative, new legal tests, such as the test of “the reasonable person entrusted with the foundational principles of the state,” the “reasonable listener” test, and the “reasonable reader” test. They decided, as they saw fit, which interpretations of Qur’anic verses, religious expressions, or national symbols would receive protection, and which would be defined as reflecting support for terror. In doing so, they significantly expanded the boundaries of what is proscribed by Israel’s penal laws.

These proceedings created a reality of apartheid in the disciplinary law of Israeli academia. The assumption of this power, and its expansion, was directed exclusively against Palestinian students and against expressions with proPalestinian content or affiliation. To the best of our knowledge, there is not a single case of a disciplinary prosecution of an Israeli Jewish student for having published a social media post, for example, showing support for genocide, for the “flattening” of Gaza, or a racist statement against the Arab public in Israel. On the contrary, disciplinary committees did not see these targeted sanctions as selective enforcement and justified the distinction between filing a disciplinary indictment against Palestinian students over an expression that, in their view, was tainted by “support for terror,” and the cases of calls for annihilation, genocide, and racist expressions against Palestinians.

The report points to numerous procedural failures in the way the institutions conducted the proceedings. Many of the proceedings, for example, took place without the presentation of any proper evidentiary basis or witnesses, afforded no right to cross-examine prosecution experts, and at times, did not  even present the social media post of the accused student at issue. In a considerable number of cases, the universities imposed an immediate interim suspension before the student’s account was even heard, and the burden of proof was reversed, so that the students themselves were required to prove their innocence rather than the institution being required to establish their guilt. Beyond the harm to freedom of expression, the universities violated the students’ right to education, among other rights.¹³

As noted, the students against whom disciplinary proceedings were opened are overwhelmingly Palestinian citizens or residents of Israel. For the most part, the posts in question were written in Arabic, and many of them are routine, everyday posts with religious and cultural meanings and contained no direct call to terror or direct support for the 7 October attacks.¹⁴

By contrast, the people in whose name the universities exercised their disciplinary power, those whose feelings and sense of security were allegedly the basis for disciplinary committees’ decisions, are Jewish Israeli students, Jewish Israeli faculty members, or “the Israeli public” as an abstract collective. The category of “the academic community” or “the student body” of which many decisions spoke did not include the Palestinian students themselves. They, in effect, became a threat to the community rather than part of it. The universities defined their expressions as harming “the fabric of shared life,” a fabric defined by the comfort zone of the ethno-national majority and its sensibilities.

13     Notably, in several cases, the disciplinary proceedings took place in parallel with criminal investigations that the institutions themselves initiated or took an active position to advance. In addition, in cases where the police decided not to prosecute, some of the institutions continued with the disciplinary proceedings, while applying prohibitions on expressions that the state itself did not regard as a criminal offense.

14      As noted, most of the posts at issue were published by the students from their private social media accounts, outside the academic space. In some cases, these posts were meant for small groups, posts that had already been deleted, or posts that were not written by the student at all but only shared by them (a “story,” a “like” mark, passive participation in a public group). Some posts were published long before the events of 7 October.

The report contains four chapters. Chapter 1 presents a quantitative overview of the 132 cases received by Adalah following measures taken against Palestinian students after 7 October,¹⁵ including 100 cases in which legal consultation or representation was provided. The chapter examines the timing of the inquiries, the institutional distribution, the gender breakdown, the interim suspensions imposed, arrests, general features of the posts, and the outcomes of the proceedings. Chapter 2 examines the structural failures in the disciplinary proceedings themselves: the initiation of proceedings without an evidentiary basis, reliance on automatic translations, the attribution of posts to students who did not publish them, the reversal of the burden of proof, the absence of reasoning, and the widespread use of interim suspensions. Chapter 3 addresses the question of authority, and the way in which academic institutions expanded the boundaries of their disciplinary powers to apply it to posts that were published with no connection to studies or to the institution. Chapter 4 examines the outcomes: the definition of expressions of concern, solidarity, identity, and religion as speech offenses warranting sanctions, and the new legal tests formulated in these proceedings.

The report is based on cases in which Adalah directly represented students, as well as on information from additional sources. The full scope of the phenomenon is broader than what appears in this report.¹⁶ The report does not address disciplinary proceedings taken against academic faculty members, which form part of the same broad dynamic of narrowing the institutional space for expression.¹⁷

The report illuminates the way in which Israeli academia created a system of enforcement and punishment that rests de facto on ethnic distinctions, advancing a policy with apartheid characteristics toward Palestinian students while using administrative tools drawn from the field of counter-terrorism. In so doing, it

15      See footnote 2.

16      For example, the website Arab48 reported on about 160 cases of persecution and silencing in academia in Israel since October 2023. See: Amir Ali Buirat, “Israeli universities summoned 160 Arab students during the war in Gaza,” Arab48, 15 November 2023 [Arabic].

17      These phenomena are part of that broader pattern of narrowing the space of expression at institutions of higher education after 7 October. Academia for Equality details these proceedings in its report “Silencing, Censorship, and Free Speech Violations in Israeli Academia,” 16 June 2025.

produced a reality in which Palestinian students at academic institutions in Israel are not categorically excluded but are conditionally included: they are admitted as students, yet they are subject to a Foucauldian disciplinary apparatus that polices their political subjectivity, monitors their activity and their expressions off campus, and punishes their political expressions and protests in ways that are not applied to Israeli Jewish students. The institutional form of the disciplinary proceeding is indeed universal, but its application is split along ethno-national lines. Further, it reinforces the ethno-national supremacy that lies at the foundation of the Israeli constitutional order, in that it devotes its full resources to policing the minority while systematically ignoring calls for the annihilation and genocide of the Palestinian people and racist posts directed against the Palestinian population in Israel in general, and Palestinian students in particular.

Chapter 1: An Overview

This chapter presents an overview of the phenomenon covered by the report, drawing on data gathered by Adalah. The analyses presented in this chapter are mostly based on the 100 cases in which Adalah provided legal advice or representation.^[6]

The timing of the academic institutions’ initial actions against students: The first inquiries from students to Adalah came immediately after 7 October and from those at the University of Haifa, as early as 8 October 2023. In the weeks that followed, there was a rapid spread of disciplinary actions initiated by additional institutions. Even after the initial “peak,” academic institutions continued to target Palestinian students’ expressions during November and December 2023, as well as in 2024 and 2025.

Institutional distribution: Inquiries from students to Adalah came from close to 40 different academic institutions, of a total of 61 operating in the country.^[7] Adalah documented several institutions with a relatively high volume of disciplinary proceedings, including Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem (nine cases),^[8] the University of Haifa (nine cases), the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa (six cases – although, according to the disciplinary committee’s database, there were seven), and the various branches of the College of Management Academic Studies (COLMAN) (eight cases). Adalah also documented several cases from institutions such as Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art in Ramat Gan and WIZO Haifa Academy of Design and Education.

Gender breakdown: Of the 132 students who turned to Adalah, 101 were women (76.5%)  and 31 were men (23.5% ).

Chart 1: Gender distribution of students in the inquiries received by Adalah

Initial inquiry and additional measures: In 30 cases, the institutions approached the students after receiving the complaint and conveyed its content to them, together with a demand for a response as part of an initial inquiry, before deciding whether to undertake additional measures. Of these 30 cases, the institutions decided in 22 to dismiss the complaint and take no further measures, and in eight decided to continue with disciplinary proceedings. In 70 cases, no distinct stage of initial inquiry was documented, and the handling of the complaint advanced directly to the disciplinary proceeding or to other formal measures, without the student being given an opportunity to present his/her account before the decision to proceed with disciplinary action was taken.

The use of interim suspension in handling the complaints: Most academic institutions took immediate measures at the early stages of considering a complaint. In 61.3% of the cases (involving the 132 students who approached Adalah), the institutions ordered an interim suspension, and therefore many students were suspended before any adjudication. The University of Haifa was the first institution at which Adalah documented cases of interim suspension, as early as 8 October 2023.

Arrests of students: Of the 132 students who approached Adalah, law enforcement authorities engaged with 20, including by arresting them over alleged offenses of “support for terror” or “identification with a “terrorist organization” as defined under Israeli law. At times, the criminal proceeding began at the initiative of the institutions themselves, through representatives, faculty members, or security officers filing complaints with the police.^[9]

These data fit within the broader context in which the academic institutions operated during this period. In a letter sent by the Minister of Education, Yoav Kisch, as noted above, the institutions were called upon to take immediate steps, including the immediate suspension of students and the submission of reports on every such case both to the Council for Higher Education and to the Israel Police.^[10] Subsequently, in a further letter dated 26 October 2023, the Governmental Institute for Technological Education and Training at the Ministry of Labor instructed institutions that whenever college staff encountered posts that might prove to be unlawful, a complaint should be filed to the police in order to ensure that the matter was also examined through the criminal process.^[11]

Features of the posts on which complaints and disciplinary proceedings were based: The complaints filed against the students were based on various types of social media posts.^[12] Approximately 24% of the posts criticized the State of Israel, the army, and the commission of alleged war crimes in Gaza, and included references to terms such as “decolonization,” “occupation,” “ethnic cleansing,” or “genocide.” About 23% of the posts concerned the events of 7 October and included photographs or videos from the events, direct references to the attack, or content contesting the prevailing interpretations or portrayals of them in Israel. Around 22% of the posts referred to events in Gaza and included the sharing of content documenting conditions on the ground, descriptions of destruction and harm to civilians, and expressions of solidarity with the people of Gaza. Approximately 21% of the posts were religious in nature and included prayers for Gaza, verses from the Qur’an, and other forms of religious expression. Around 16% involved the use of visual symbols, such as the Palestinian flag, maps of historic Palestine, the figure of Handala, and photographs of the separation wall. In several cases, the mere act of “liking” social media posts was itself cited as a basis for filing complaints and opening disciplinary proceedings.

Outcomes of the disciplinary proceedings: The analysis below relates to 78 cases in which proceedings were conducted before disciplinary committees and does not include cases in which complaints were closed after an initial inquiry. The proceedings resulted in a range of outcomes, from disciplinary convictions to acquittals.^[13] In 52 cases, the proceeding ended in the student’s disciplinary conviction. In 14 cases, the students were  acquitted, most often on the basis of reasonable doubt. In these cases, the disciplinary committees found that the posts at issue were open to differing interpretations. The decisions generally reflected a divergence between the interpretation advanced by the student represented by Adalah and that of the prosecution. The committees determined that the interpretation presented by the defense was plausible and reasonable, and that, given the existence of differing interpretations, disciplinary responsibility had not been established to the required standard. In three cases, the proceedings were discontinued after the students’ chose to end their studies. Six cases were resolved through mediation, according to agreements under which the students would perform community service, chosen by the defense and approved by the prosecution. Five of these agreements were given the force of a decision by the disciplinary committee. In the sixth case, at the University of Haifa, the committee declined to approve the agreement and instead acquitted the student on the basis of reasonable doubt (see Chapter 4, below). In three other cases, the prosecution withdrew the disciplinary indictment after it became apparent that the posts could not be attributed to the accused students.

Types of penalties imposed upon disciplinary conviction: The institutions imposed a range of penalties on the students. The most common penalty was suspension for varying periods: for one semester (five cases); for two semesters or one academic year (15 cases);^[14] for a period of between one and five years (nine cases); and permanent expulsion (11 cases).^[15] Other penalties included an obligation to perform community service (two cases), educational sanctions, including reprimands, warnings, and obligatory educational courses (13 cases) and the revocation of academic credits (one case). In three cases, the disciplinary committees accepted the initial temporary suspension imposed by the institutions as sufficient.^[16]

Suspension for one semester

Suspension for 2 semesters/1 year

Suspension for 1-5 years

Suspension permanently

Community service

Educational Sanctions

Temporary Suspension Deemed Sufficient

Deprivation of academic rights

Chart 2: Distribution of disciplinary sanctions imposed

Appeals: Adalah filed 17 appeals, some of which resulted in a change in the outcome. In one case, the appeal was accepted in full and the student was acquitted. This decision reversed a conviction and a sentence of a one-year suspension. In two cases, a penalty of permanent expulsion was commuted to a suspension for one year; in three cases, penalties of prolonged suspension were reduced, including one of suspension for five years and two cases of permanent expulsion, to shorter periods of suspension; and in a further case a permanent expulsion, combined with the revocation of their academic credit, was reduced to suspension for a period of ten years, while maintaining the penalty of revoked credit. In four cases, the appeals were rejected, and in four other cases, the students decided to withdraw the appeal. In one further case, the penalty was commuted to an educational penalty. In one case, a decision is still pending. The disciplinary prosecution filed three appeals against sentences it regarded as lenient. Two appeals submitted by the prosecution were accepted and led to a significant increase in the penalty, and in a further case, the student decided to discontinue his studies.

Chapter 2: Due Process Rights Violations

The disciplinary committees’ proceedings were marred by numerous procedural flaws that violated the students’ due process rights and impaired their ability to defend themselves against the charges leveled at them.

Opening a proceeding without identifying the post at issue: At several institutions, students were summoned to inquiries or to disciplinary committee hearings without being informed about the social media post at issue. At the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College (formerly Hadassah Academic College), for example, a student was required to submit a written response to the accusations without being informed about the specific post in question. On 18 October 2023, she received a letter from the college president ordering her immediate expulsion “in light of information that has reached us regarding an offensive post that constitutes support for terror and the murder of innocents.” When Adalah requested information about the post, the institution replied that “the request to receive the ‘evidentiary material’ at this stage is somewhat puzzling, since your client should have information about posts that were published, or not […] and it is unclear what the difficulty is in providing an initial response.”^[17]

Failure to verify the identity of the publisher: A further procedural flaw that arose in several cases was the absence of any verification of the identity of the posts’ publishers, in a way that led to the attribution of posts to students who had not published them. ORT College Jerusalem opened a disciplinary proceeding against a student over a profile picture showing a person holding a pistol. The profile, however, did not belong to the student.^[18] Adalah documented similar patterns at other institutions.^[19] In some of the proceedings, institutions relied on the mere existence of a complaint or with an indirect and tenuous connection between a student and the content in question, without conducting even a minimal check before initiating a proceeding, imposing a suspension, or summoning the student before a disciplinary committee. In this way, the suspicion preceded the inquiry, and the accusation preceded the factual examination.

Failure to check the date of the social media post and retroactive attribution: A further defect was the institutions’ failure to check the date of the post and its context, in a way that led to the attribution of support for the 7 October attack on the basis of posts that preceded it. The Peres Academic Center in Rehovot initiated a proceeding against a student over a post from 2022, from the period of the World Cup in Qatar, that read “The World Cup is in Qatar, while the cup of manhood, resistance, and pride is being played here in Palestine.” Despite the clear reference to the sporting event, the Center argued in the proceeding that this post constituted support for the attack. Only after Adalah’s intervention did the institution reverse course.^[20] Similarly, the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College opened a proceeding over a post from January 2023; there, too, the institution amended the indictment after the fact and tried to link the post to a different security-related event.^[21] Instead of examining posts in their original context, institutions ascribed new meanings to them in line with the post-7 October climate.

Attributing to students content from others’ accounts: In certain cases, the mere existence of an indirect connection between a student and a social media page or account that the institution viewed as “problematic” was enough to arouse suspicion. At the ORT Braude College in Karmiel, for instance, a student posted a Qur’anic verse against a blue-sky background: “O you who have believed, persevere and endure and remain stationed and fear Allah that you may be successful.”^[22] Although the post contained no mention of the war, the attack, or the Palestinian issue, the college required the student to explain its meaning and to prove that he did not support terror. The institution later argued that the student had not “met the burden of proof” because the page from which the verse was shared also contained other posts that allegedly supported terror, even though the page did not belong to him. In this way, the college required the student to defend himself with respect to posts made by others. Adalah documented a similar pattern at additional institutions, including the Achva Academic College in Be’er Tuvia.^[23]

Automatic translations and erroneous interpretation of Arabic posts: The question of translations from Arabic was key in many proceedings. In most cases, institutions relied on automatic translation software (such as Google Translate or built-in translation features on social media platforms), even when verses from the Qur’an, religious expressions, or texts with complex cultural meanings were involved. The Kaye Academic College of Education in Beer’ Sheva, for example, opened a proceeding against a student who posted the Qur’anic verse إذا جاء نصر الله والفتح (“When the victory of Allah has come and the conquest”).^[24] The verse was translated using Google Translate as “if Nasrallah comes and conquers,” reading the words نصر الله (Naṣr Allāh, “the victory of Allah”) as the name of the former Hezbollah secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah. In this way, the translation created the erroneous impression that the post referred to him. ORT College Tel Aviv initiated a proceeding following the sharing of a scene from a Turkish historical drama series tracing the reign of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid and the land purchases made by Herzl and the Zionist movement in Mandatory Palestine, and on the basis of the translation, it was argued that the scene contained a call “to conquer Israel.”^[25]

Opening disciplinary proceedings without specifying the offense: Another flaw involved summoning students to inquiries and disciplinary committee hearings without specifying the offense with which they were charged. In some cases, the institutions did not even refer to the catch-all offenses set out in their regulations, and sufficed with general statements that there was a concern that the student “supports terror” or “identifies with the acts of 7 October.”^[26] The absence of any reference to concrete disciplinary offenses undermined the students’ ability to understand the legal claims against them and to defend themselves. In these situations, the proceeding became a vague and general discussion of what is “fitting” and “unfitting,” rather than a disciplinary and legal inquiry grounded in objective standards.

In several proceedings, expert opinions were submitted after it emerged that the dispute turned on the interpretation of the post and its context. Yet, although these questions stood at the heart of the decision, they were often decided without professional inquiry. Sometimes committees relied on the prosecution’s expert opinion without giving the defense a real opportunity to cross-examine the expert, and at other times, the committees refused to hear from experts.

In one of the cases examined in this report, the translation and interpretation of an Arabic-language post lay at the heart of the disciplinary proceedings. Because the proceedings were conducted in Hebrew, the defense submitted an expert linguistic opinion addressing the translation of the publication, its linguistic and cultural meanings, and its interpretation in context. The prosecution submitted a competing expert opinion attributing a different meaning to the publication and relying on that interpretation to argue that it constituted support for the attack.^[27] The disciplinary committee favored the prosecution expert’s opinion, and did not give the defense the opportunity to cross-examine the expert, to examine his expertise or the methodology on which he relied, or the interpretive assumptions underlying his opinion and conclusions. In this way, the committees decided professional questions central to the proceeding without the defense being given an effective opportunity to examine the key piece of evidence on which the conviction rested.

At Zefat Academic College, the disciplinary committee, and later the appeals committee, were called upon to decide the case of a student who posted a du’a (religious supplication) for the residents of Gaza.^[28] The defense submitted an opinion by an expert in Arabic translation and literature, which explained the religious and cultural meaning of the text. However, the committee rejected the opinion, in favor of a translation produced by Google Translate, asserting that there was no need for a “convoluted interpretation,”⁴¹ and that the post should be examined under the “reasonable listener” test, drawn from defamation law, and not based on “a professional inquiry by experts in linguistics.” In the words of the decision: “how an ordinary person would have received, interpreted, and understood the post in question. That is the only test.”^[29]

At the College of Management Academic Studies, on the morning of 7 October, a student posted a du’a that, according to the defense expert’s translation, asked that this day be “a day of salvation and victory” and “a day of empowerment and resolve.” The du’a contained no symbol or image linking it to the attack. The only connection between the post and the events of 7 October was its timing.^[30]

The prosecution submitted an expert opinion arguing that the very use of the same du’a by figures associated, in his view, with support for terror demonstrated that any use of it constituted support for terror. The disciplinary committee rejected this position and argued that the opinion had tried to “impose a context on the du’a,” and that the use of the prayer by certain figures does not turn the prayer itself into an expression of support for terror. The committee stressed that most of the examples presented by the expert included images or additional text connected to 7 October, which was not the case in the student’s post. On this basis, the student was acquitted. However, the appeals committee reversed the decision and held that it was enough that one of the post’s possible interpretations was support for terror, and that the student’s mere awareness of the security events was sufficient grounds for a disciplinary conviction.

These cases illustrate how, rather than carefully examining the meaning and context of Arabic posts, disciplinary committees at times relied on intuitive and incriminating interpretations. Among the interpretative tools used was the aforementioned “reasonable listener” test, even when this listener neither spoke Arabic nor had familiarity with the cultural and religious contexts of the post, and even when experts contradicted these interpretations. As a result, disciplinary responsibility was repeatedly determined according to the institution’s preferred reading of the post, rather than its actual meaning.

In many cases, institutions did not explain, let alone prove, how the post attributed to the student in fact constituted a disciplinary offense; they sufficed with populist rhetoric of “support for terror,” “incitement,” or “identification with the enemy.” Within this framework, the students themselves were required to explain, and even to prove, that the post had a different meaning protected by the right to freedom of expression. Thus, in the case of a student at the College of Law and Business, Ramat Gan, content was posted describing the bombing of residential complexes and harm inflicted on civilians in Gaza during the war, alongside expressions of distress and fear.^[31] Although the post was explicitly related to the civilian population, a disciplinary committee member argued that the post could nonetheless be interpreted as support for terrorists. When asked, “Where does it say that this is about terrorists?,” he replied: “It also doesn’t say that it isn’t about terrorists.”^[32] In this way, the committee required the student to explain an interpretation that did not even appear in the post.

A similar approach arose with respect to expressions of Palestinian national identity. The College of Management Academic Studies initiated a disciplinary proceeding against a student over the use of a Palestinian flag symbol in his Instagram bio.^[33] Kaye College convicted another student because she “liked” a post that read: “Al-Quds [Jerusalem] is in our eyes, it has never lost its dignity and never will.”^[34] Zefat College opened a proceeding against a student over the words “Palestine, Sakhnin” in her bio on a social media platform.^[35] In its decision, the disciplinary committee added interpretations and slogans that did not appear in the post, including a reference to the slogan “from the river to the sea,” even though this matter had not been raised during the hearing.^[36] The conviction thus rested on meanings that the committee itself assigned to the post.

The expansion of the boundaries of suspicion did not end with political, religious, or identity-related posts. The Technion initiated a disciplinary proceeding against a student because she was arrested for a social media post, and was later released from detention as part of a prisoner-and-hostage exchange deal with Hamas. The Technion argued that her very release offended the feelings of other students and constituted “unfitting conduct,” even though she had no control over the release deal and had been detained only for a social media post.^[37] In another case, a student studying at Meir Hospital was summoned to a disciplinary conversation over the posting of a photograph of a cake on the evening of 7 October, on the grounds that the post offended her classmates.^[38]

These cases illustrate how, in some of the proceedings, almost any post by a Palestinian student, whether routine, everyday, or naive, could become a basis for suspicion and accusation. Instead of limiting prohibited posts to those containing a direct call to violence, the posts were assumed suspect until proven otherwise.

In many cases, the disciplinary committees’ decisions contained no factual or legal analysis of the elements of the offenses, nor did they set out the evidence on which the decisions rested, or explain how the post constituted a disciplinary offense. At some institutions, among them the College of Management Academic Studies and the Western Galilee College, the decisions consisted only of an acquittal or conviction, without any accompanying explanation.^[39]

At some institutions, disciplinary decisions were not made public. In most proceedings, no full and orderly record was kept, and in some cases, the records were not transferred to the students or to their legal representatives. At one institution, the entire proceeding was kept confidential, and students were barred from disclosing what had transpired during the disciplinary hearing. The absence of reasoning, documentation, and transparency is not merely a procedural defect; when a decision fails to explain what facts were established, how a post was interpreted, and on what basis the conviction was determined, students cannot understand the grounds for their conviction. They cannot challenge the proceeding or file an effective appeal, especially in cases involving vague, catch-all offenses and expression offenses based on interpretation and contextualization. In such cases, the disciplinary committees became an institutional “black hole” that shielded the reasoning behind their decisions from scrutiny.

One of the clearest structural flaws of the disciplinary proceedings after 7 October was the institutions’ widespread and hasty use of interim suspensions, before any factual inquiry had taken place. In many cases, the institutions suspended the students immediately after initiating a disciplinary proceeding. As noted above, the University of Haifa was the first institution to make extensive use of this measure, immediately after 7 October. The university argued that without the suspensions, “the campus would have been on fire,” that “a post went out telling students not to publish anything on social media,” and that this “stopped a deterioration on campus.”^[40] In some cases, suspension was an almost immediate punitive response. The university’s letters to the students were worded in firm language and attributed to them support for terror, incitement, or encouraging violence, before any hearing was held, any evidence was presented, or their arguments were heard.^[41] This phenomenon continued into 2024 and 2025. Adalah documented similar cases of disciplinary proceedings, raising the same fundamental questions about the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof.^[42] Temporary suspension without a preliminary inquiry violates the right to due process. The entire proceeding begins from a presumption of guilt, while the disciplinary hearings become an attempt by students to extricate themselves from these presumptions.

The severity of the harm is greater in light of the outcomes of some of the proceedings. In several cases in which the institutions imposed immediate temporary suspensions using the rhetoric of “support for terror” and “incitement to terror,” the proceedings ultimately ended with no conviction at all, or in mediation, or in educational measures. These outcomes illustrate the wide gap between the severity of the initial steps taken and the actual outcomes, and raise questions about the arbitrary application of temporary suspensions.

Chapter 3: Expanding the Boundaries of Surveillance and Enforcement

The authority of Israeli academic institutions to set and apply disciplinary regulations derives from their status as bodies recognized by the Council for Higher Education.^[43] The Students’ Rights Law, 2007 establishes the normative framework for the exercise of this authority. Article 17 of the Law empowers institutions of higher education to set and publish rules of conduct and a disciplinary code:

An institution shall set and publish, subject to the provisions of this Law, rules of conduct relating to the conduct of applicants and students in connection with their studies at the institution, including during the course of studies and within the institution’s grounds, and including in the student dormitories, among them a disciplinary code and the penalties anticipated for breach of the rules established in it [emphasis added].

In all of the disciplinary proceedings, Adalah argued that the institutions had no authority to address the social media posts, as they had been made from private social media accounts, with no connection whatsoever to the students’ studies, to other students, to faculty members, or to the institutions themselves.^[44] Adalah further argued that the provisions of the regulations refer expressly to the relationships between students, faculty members, and employees, and to the relationship between the student and the institution, and not to expressions in the public sphere. This interpretation is also necessary given the significant violation of the right to freedom of expression entailed in the institutions’ expansion of their own authority. The disciplinary committees rejected these arguments.

Thus, the academic institutions established a novel legal framework, within which they have disciplinary authority over the students even outside boundaries of the academic relationship. This step turned Israeli academia into an actor that redraws and limits the boundaries of freedom of expression for Palestinian students.

Creating a connection through “exposure” to the post: According to the institutions, it was enough for a post to have come to the knowledge of the academic community in order to establish a connection. A private post, made outside the academic framework and with no attribution to the institution, became a disciplinary matter from the moment it was viewed, forwarded, or reported within the academic community. The institutions thus replaced the test of academic connection with a test of “exposure” to the content. The disciplinary committee of the College of Management Academic Studies decided, for example, that “there is no need for the expression to be connected to the studies. It is enough that students were exposed to the expression.”^[45] Similarly, the disciplinary committee at the Technion noted that a student was identified as a Technion student on his Instagram page; that some of the account’s followers were Technion students; and that the person who contacted the disciplinary enforcement authorities was a student at the institution.^[46] Under this logic, a student can be held accountable for an expression based not only on the content of the post or on its academic context, but also from the conduct of others: whoever saw the post, whoever disseminated it, and whoever filed a complaint.

Establishing a connection through “harm to feelings”: The institutions also replaced the academic connection test with a test of “harm to the feelings” of the public associated with the institution. A disciplinary committee at Tel Aviv University decided as follows regarding a student who posted as an Instagram story a slide from a presentation titled “8 Things about What’s Happening in Palestine”:

The text has the potential to cause grave harm to students who, together with their families, were the target of the attack on 7 October. We saw that the text was brought to the attention of many students. There were those who argued that the text harmed them greatly. The university is entrusted not only with the instruction of its students but also with maintaining a protective academic environment and with the welfare of its students.^[47]

In other proceedings, the disciplinary committees emphasized a “sense of security” as the basis for the connection. The disciplinary committee of the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College, for example, held that, “It is impossible to require a student, or faculty members, to be on or off campus in the company of a person who has expressed support for an indiscriminate, murderous act of terror against a group that includes faculty members and students.”^[48] Shenkar College adopted a similar approach, finding in one case that there was “certainty that the public interest was harmed in a real and substantial manner as a result of the posts […] both in light of the complaints received regarding the posts, which included the expression of real apprehension about returning to the classroom together with you, and even the expression of objection and revulsion on the part of students at returning to shared studies.”⁶² At the College of Management Academic Studies, the “harm” referred to by the disciplinary committee was harm to a general national identity. A decision by the disciplinary committee emphasized that the student is an Israeli citizen studying at an Israeli academic institution, and that her fellow students and the faculty members are also Israelis. The committee further held that the events of 7 October were directed against “the State of Israel and its residents,” and that many members of the academic community were directly or indirectly affected by them. In this way, mere national affiliation, and not an academic connection to the campus or to academic activity, creates a disciplinary issue.⁶³ The connection to the institution was not examined via the relationship between the post and the students’ studies, nor via a direct connection to the college campus, but via the feelings of those who claim to have been harmed, in a manner that deviates from any established standard of safeguarding freedom of expression.

An expansive interpretation of Article 17 of the Students’ Rights Law: Prior to 7 October, academic institutions tended to apply disciplinary law only where there was a direct and clear academic connection between the conduct at issue and the studies or the academic community. Thus, for example, Tel Aviv University initiated  disciplinary action against a Jewish Israeli student who had sent a private message to a classmate that read, “Ashkenazi behavior, I heard it’s like that at TAU, no talent, only elbows and connections. People like you shouldn’t be alive at all.” He was charged with violating a fellow student’s dignity. The disciplinary committee conducted the proceeding under Article 29.8 of the university’s disciplinary regulations, and relied on a direct academic connection: the exchange took place between students in the same class, and in response to an academic interaction. The university imposed a relatively mild penalty: a reprimand, community service, and a suspension. The institution did not argue “harm to the feelings of the public” or damage “to the name of the university.”⁶⁴

62      Disciplinary proceedings at Shenkar College, legal submission on behalf of the prosecution, November 2023 ( on file with Adalah ).

63      See footnote 43, decision of the appeals committee at the College of Management Academic Studies ( on file with Adalah ).

64      D-2023-35, judgment of Dr. Yofi Tirosh, the disciplinary officer at Tel Aviv University, 26 November 2023.

Beyond that, even when serious public incidents occurred off the campus of Tel Aviv University, including a violent demonstration staged outside the university dormitories in May 2022, during which chants of “death to Arabs” were directed at Palestinian students, the university emphasized that this event had taken place outside the walls of the campus and took no disciplinary action. The university’s response in that case was that, “The demonstration in question took place in an urban area outside the university’s grounds and was handled on site by a reinforced police team,” and that “no unusual incident was recorded within the university’s grounds.”^[49]

After 7 October, with respect to Palestinian students, the manner of the application of the law changed and the academic connection requirement was broadened. Most institutions that gave reasoned decisions, often by adjudicators with legal expertise, did not see the law as a limitation on their authority, but as a far broader starting point, relying on an interpretation of the term “including.” Instead of seeing “including” as a supplementary clarification of a defined framework, the institutions interpreted it as an invitation to expand the boundaries of their authority. Thus, for example, the Technion held that Article 17 of the Students’ Rights Law does not limit its authority solely to conduct connected to students’ academic studies, but also permits the application of disciplinary regulations to conduct and posts beyond the academic setting.^[50] However, this approach was applied selectively. In 2025, Palestinian students filed a disciplinary complaint against the head of the Technion’s student union, following his public social media post showing that during his reserve service in Gaza, he drew the symbol of the Technion student union on the wall of a building destroyed by the Israeli military. The complaint argued that this post gravely offended the feelings of the Palestinian students, and that the very use of the student union’s symbols created a direct and clear connection to the academic institution. Nonetheless, the disciplinary prosecution at the Technion rejected the complaint, holding that, “It is not within our authority to enter the jurisdiction of the army,” and that their authority was limited to disciplinary offenses or offenses under the Military Justice Law and the Penal Law.^[51] This position shows that, even where there was a clear connection to the Technion, through the use of the student union’s symbols and the public identity of the head of the student union, the institution chose to emphasize the limits of its authority and to refrain from taking disciplinary measures.

At the Hebrew University, too, two separate tracks of enforcement emerged: after 7 October, the university adopted an expansive interpretation of Article 17 against private posts made by Palestinian students without any relation to their academic studies, but did not apply this interpretation in other cases.^[52] On 7 May 2026, the university sent a notice to all students following the conviction of a student for serious sex offenses committed against his former partner off campus and without relation to his studies.^[53] In the notice, the university clarified unequivocally that since the offenses “were not committed at the university or in the framework of university activity, the university’s regulations do not allow for barring the student from attending campus.” The university did not consider the feelings of the female students on campus, as it had in cases of social media posts made by Palestinian students.

The significance of context; time alters the law: Academic institutions also relied on the exceptional context in which the proceedings were opened – the 7 October attack and the state of war – as a basis for exercising authority. Authority was presented in these cases as a necessity stemming from the time, the situation, and the exceptional state of affairs. In the case of the student who posted the “8 Things” slide, the disciplinary committee at Tel Aviv University presented the expansion of the boundaries of surveillance as a direct outcome of the events. The committee expressly distinguished between past and present: “In the past, the institution adhered to the position that what happens on social media is not connected to [the university], adhering to the formal reasoning that this is not a platform the institution established and supervises.” Further, in the words of the committee, “the intense feelings of the students as a result of the terror attack require a response,” and “the new situation requires a new interpretation and a different application […] the attack of 7 October constituted an abrupt change.”^[54]

In response to the defense’s argument concerning the principle of legality, the committee held: “To argue that the law in general, and the disciplinary regulations of Tel Aviv University in particular, cannot respond to the new situation, and that if they do respond this will harm the principle of legality […] is a very thin, conservative, and mistaken conception of the role of law in society.”^[55] The role of the principle of legality is to set a limit on the exercise of power by the authorities; yet, in this decision, the committee turned this principle on its head: instead of this principle dictating restraint, it was used to justify the broadened interpretation. The “new situation” was not examined in light of this principle, but rather served as a ground for departing from it. Similarly, a disciplinary committee at the College of Management Academic Studies held that “the character, severity, and dimensions of the event are such as to affect the definition of the expression ‘their status as a student.’”^[56]

The disciplinary committee at Tel Aviv University also used its authority in a highly selective manner. For instance, the committee held that “an expression by students on social media as to how Israel ought to act with respect to Gaza and its residents during the war and afterward is not, on its face, connected to the student community at Tel Aviv University, and the question whether it amounts to incitement to terror or to racism is a matter for the general criminal law.”^[57] In this sense, according to the committee, posts that could rise to the level of incitement to genocide in Gaza, even though they constitute a criminal offense and a violation of international law, are not regarded as connected to the student community at the university. Through this proceeding, the institution redefined “the student community” and those who form part of it, with its values, its boundaries, and its prohibitions, as limited to the definition of an “Israeli,” even where a large number of the students studying at the institution are Palestinian citizens of Israel.

From Militant Democracy to the Militant Academy

Several academic institutions argued that the authority to conduct disciplinary proceedings derived from an inherent power vested in the institution to “protect its very existence” against those who seek “to undermine it.”^[58] The argument rested on the Israeli Supreme Court’s 1965 Yardor ruling, which barred the Arab al-Ard movement from running in the Knesset elections even though no law prevented it from running. According to this decision, a state institution may suspend the rule of law in order to safeguard the institution’s existence and the state’s existence against those who seek “to challenge its existence.” The Hebrew University of Jerusalem was the first institution to make this argument, after which it was adopted by other institutions. The Hebrew University’s decision opens with a determination intended to import the sovereign power established in Yardor into the academic institution: “The foundational principles of Israeli law recognize, in extreme and exceptional cases, the inherent authority of state institutions (and by implication every institution in the state) to protect their very existence and proper functioning against those who seek to undermine them.”^[59]

The decision continued by quoting the Yardor ruling: “no other authority of the state, either, should serve as an instrument in the hands of one who has set the elimination of the state as their goal,” and by drawing the conclusion that “in those extreme cases in which students’ expressions stand contrary to the foundational principles of the state and constitute an offense under the CounterTerrorism Law, the university is not required to stand aside; rather, it is within its authority, and even duty, to use disciplinary mechanisms in order to prevent such expressions and to ensure the proper continuation of the life of the university and of studies within it.”^[60]

This move cast Palestinian students as “enemies.” A discourse of “militant democracy,” intended to justify the suspension of the rule of law in order to confront “existential threats to the state,” thus became a basis for exercising academic disciplinary authority against Palestinian students, who were characterized as those who challenge the existence of the institution itself, and as enemies to be confronted by means of an inherent “sovereign” authority that exists even beyond the law.

The interpretive moves and the reasoning described above did not appear in a vacuum. Reliance on the position of the Education Minister, who requested that academic institutions adopt a “zero tolerance” policy, served as a substitute for an independent and legal examination of the limits of their authority. For example, the disciplinary committee of the WIZO Academy noted that at all academic institutions in the State of Israel, discussions of expressions of a similar character had been held from 7 October onward, subject to and in accordance with the guidelines of the Ministry of Education, the Council for Higher Education, and the Minister of Education.^[61] Similarly, the disciplinary committee of Yezreel Valley Academic College stated that “the college is subject to the Council for Higher Education, which issued clear guidelines in light of the very difficult hour in the country,” and that “the college bears the duty to address and handle these cases.”^[62] The disciplinary committee of Ramat Gan Academic College applied similar reasoning: “it was clarified that, according to the directive of the chair of the Council for Higher Education, Education Minister Kisch, institutions of higher education are required to place students on disciplinary trial.”^[63] In these cases, the very existence of external guidelines, or the fact that other institutions had acted in a similar manner, served as the source of authority itself.

Chapter 4: Narrowing the Scope of Freedom of Expression

Israeli institutions of higher education redrew the boundaries of political discourse and defined new prohibitions and restrictions on the freedom of expression rights of Palestinian students specifically.

As detailed below, the tightening of control and the narrowing of the scope of freedom of expression took place on two interconnected levels. Firstly, and directly, the institutions classified a wide range of these social media expressions as “incitement to terror” and as “identification with an act of terror,” and as such, they were prohibited and required sanctions. Secondly, the institutions relied on vague disciplinary provisions, including “conduct that may breach public peace,” “conduct unbecoming of the status of a student,” and “harm to the dignity of the institution,” for the purpose of imposing a disciplinary conviction, while establishing new elements of these offenses that do not align with the criminal law. To this end, the institutions applied various legal tests, drawn from diverse legal frameworks, including the “reasonable person” test, the “reasonable listener” test, the “reasonable reader” test, and the test of offending the feelings of the public.^[64]

The use of terminology borrowed from the Counter-Terrorism Law allowed the institutions to file disciplinary charges and secure disciplinary convictions that were detached from the provisions governing expression-related offenses. By combining the language of “counter-terrorism” in the factual description of the alleged conduct with disciplinary offenses in the legal classification of the charge, the institutions effectively created a new disciplinary regime grounded in securitization and the exclusion of Palestinian students from the academic space.

First, by framing the charges and convictions through the rhetoric of terror, and particularly by using the language of supporting the enemy in wartime, the institutions framed the Palestinian students and their social media posts as threatening the security of other students and the institutions, and as offending students’ feelings and the institutions’ dignity. In doing so, the committees positioned the Palestinian students as “others” to be removed as far as possible from the academic community.

Second, the use of the rhetoric of “terror” reshaped the meaning of the disciplinary provisions by interpreting them as prohibiting certain expressions, particularly speech deemed threatening the security and feelings of other students. In this way, the academic institutions effectively assumed the role of enforcing expression-related offenses even in cases where law enforcement authorities had not opened criminal proceedings against the students. They did so not according to the definitions and standards established in the criminal law, but based on the institutions’ own interpretations and classifications.

In this chapter, we present examples of disciplinary proceedings that resulted in the prohibition of social media posts and punishment of students for their posts. These cases illustrate broader structural processes through which academic institutions examined the lawfulness of the students’ social media posts by relying on novel factual and legal tests. These tests narrow the boundaries of freedom of expression and expand the interpretation of disciplinary provisions written in the institutions’ internal regulations. As a result, they create a framework that enables the institutions to subject students to disciplinary actions for a wide range of posts and other statements.

SOLIDARITY WITH THE POPULATION OF GAZA

With the onset of the war on Gaza, many students posted news reports, data, and testimony about the killing of civilians and whole families, among them children and women. They also posted documentation of the vast and wide-ranging destruction that struck every aspect of life in the Strip, accompanied by residents’ calls for help and their grief over the loss of their loved ones.

In many cases, these social media posts led to the institutions initiating disciplinary proceedings against the students for “supporting the enemy,” “anti-Israeli” content, “Gazan propaganda,” and making a comparison between Israel, which “fights terror,” and “dark regimes.” During the proceedings, the disciplinary prosecutors questioned the students about their personal views: why they had posted content supporting the residents of Gaza and not Israelis, and why they posted content intended to harm Israel. In some cases, the committees decided to acquit the students, while in others, they decided to convict them of disciplinary offenses, and even to expel them. Below we present examples in which the disciplinary committees decided to convict the students over such posts.

The College of Law and Business, Ramat Gan initiated disciplinary action against a student over four social media posts that she shared as Instagram “stories” from other people’s accounts.

Figure 1: First post. Screenshot of a video posted on 10 October 2023. In Arabic and English: “The occupation takes advantage of the night to burn entire residential blocks without mercy by bombing it with warplanes without allowing anyone to enter or leave the area.”

Figure 2: Second post. Screenshot of a video posted on 10 October 2023. In

Arabic and English: “At night, we die without anyone hearing or seeing us. We get injured and bleed to death without anyone helping us.”

Figure 3: Third post. Screenshot of a post from 8 October 2023, containing a prayer in Arabic for the residents of Gaza: “O God, protect Gaza and its residents from every harm and evil / We place Gaza and its residents in Your hands / its land, its sky, its men, its women, and its children, O Lord of the worlds / O God, watch over them with Your eyes that never sleep / and make the circle of evil fall upon Your enemy and theirs / O God, cover their vulnerabilities and calm their fears.”

Figure 4: Fourth post. Screenshot of a video from 15 October 2023, sharing a video by an activist named Haley Rothschild on the gap in media coverage between Palestinians and Israelis: “Why is it a problem only when Israelis die?

Why is it not a problem when Palestinians die too? Tell me why? In the media they only talk about the death of Israelis.”

The disciplinary charges alleged that the student posted “a call to violence and/ or support for a terror organization and/or incitement to terror and to violence and/or posts whose publication constitute a criminal offense and/or conduct unbecoming of a student at an institution of higher education,” according to disciplinary offense in Article 13.16 of the Center’s internal regulations, “conduct unbecoming an institution of higher education,” and Article 13.17, “conduct that constitutes a criminal offense when committed in connection with the academic center.”^[65]

During the hearings, the disciplinary prosecutor stated that the first post “attributes to the State of Israel harm caused to innocent people.” The second post constitutes, in his view, “false propaganda, attributing to Israel harm caused to innocent people, an absolute lie.” As for the third post, the disciplinary prosecutor noted that the student wishes “that the circle of evil fall upon the enemies of Gaza, at a time when a war is taking place in Gaza with Hamas, thereby expressing support for the enemy. In the post, there is not a single word about innocent people in Gaza.” The fourth post is “again enemy propaganda.” The prosecutor sought to convict the student and to suspend her for at least four years.

By contrast, the defense emphasized that there was nothing improper in the posts, and that they did not constitute a disciplinary offense or a criminal offense under Israeli law. Rather, the posts shared reports from the war in Gaza and calls by civilians under desperate conditions of war. The defense stressed that there was nothing illegal in criticizing the conduct of the media, and likewise a prayer is a customary way of conveying  support and solidarity with the population of Gaza.

The disciplinary committee delivered its decision on 28 January 2024, convicting the student of breaching the center’s disciplinary regulations, suspending her for two years and three months, and imposing a suspended punishment of permanent expulsion for the remainder of her studies in case of a further disciplinary offense. In addition, the committee recorded the conviction on the student’s academic record. In its decision, which adopted the disciplinary prosecutor’s interpretation, the committee detailed that the disciplinary rules “are intended to maintain a

framework of proper rules of conduct at the academic institution,” and that:

The norm of “unfitting conduct” refers to the values, principles, and interests that shape the academic institution from time to time in accordance with the foundational principles accepted in the society in which it operates, among other things with respect to public peace and the fabric of shared life at the academic institution […] the examination of whether this or that conduct by a student at an academic institution is unfitting will be carried out according to the foundational value-based principles of the enlightened public in Israel concerning the proper conduct of a student at an academic institution, from the perspective of a reasonable person entrusted with the foundational principles of the regime in Israel.^[66]

Relying on this interpretation, the committee placed the “reasonable person” test at the center of its analysis, replacing the legal elements of expressionrelated offenses. The “reasonable person” was defined as someone who is “entrusted with the foundational principles of the regime in Israel.” On this basis, the committee concluded that the third post, which became the focus of the conviction, constituted “a call to violence against the State of Israel […] especially in light of the fact that many students at institutions of higher education were murdered or wounded in the cruel massacre of “Black Saturday”; many others lost people close to them, and some have friends or relatives among the hostages.”⁸³

With respect to the other posts, the committee members held that they echo “Gazan propaganda against the State of Israel.” As for the first post, the committee noted that:

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The publication of these false statements against the state in which the student studies at an institution of higher education […] support the conclusion that the student committed a conduct offense unbecoming of a student at an institution of higher education. This is especially so in light of the fact that many students and faculty members were called up for reserve duty and are risking their lives in the war against the terror organizations in the Gaza Strip.⁸⁴

In this way, the disciplinary authorities redefined the law of freedom of expression in wartime in a manner that, in practice, applies exclusively to Palestinian students. For, in their view:

The principle of freedom of expression does not grant legitimacy to an Israeli citizen studying at an institution of higher education in the State of Israel to publish and echo false Gazan propaganda against the State of Israel at a time when a war is taking place between the State of Israel and the entity in Gaza, and only three days after the cruel massacre that those terror organizations that came from the Gazan entity carried out against the citizens of Israel on “Black Saturday.” These posts offend the feelings of other students and academic faculty at the academic institution, undermine proper discourse between students and academic faculty at the academic institution, undermine order and security at the academic institution, endanger public peace and the fabric of shared life at the academic institution, undermine the stability of the academic institution and its proper management, and undermine the students’ trust in the academic institution, its image, and its good name. And in particular, these posts

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of hers […] undermine proper discourse between students at an academic center, undermine the students’ trust in the academic center, in the image of the academic center, and in its good name, undermine respect for the feelings of other students at the academic center, and undermine the fabric of shared life at the academic center. Likewise, the student’s posts undermine the stability of the academic center and its proper management, undermine order and security at the academic center, undermine public peace at the academic center, and undermine the reasonable expectations of the general public from the academic center.⁸⁵

Thus, the committee classified the posts of the Palestinian student as supporting the enemy in wartime. The committee perceived someone who opposes the war as someone who opposes the state, and therefore as someone who commits a disciplinary offense. The very existence of students who were wounded or murdered on 7 October, a fact unconnected to the posts themselves, became in itself proof of the existence of the offense. The disciplinary proceeding became an examination of the student’s loyalty in wartime. The committee conducted the hearing and decided her case in complete disregard of the boundaries of the law on freedom of expression and of judicial caselaw in expression-related offenses.

Following an appeal by Adalah on behalf of the student, the parties signed an agreement that reduced the penalty to a suspension for one semester. However, the disciplinary conviction stood, as well as a compulsory letter of apology to be addressed to the College of Law and Business. The college required that the student express regret for the post, condemn the deadly attacks on Israeli citizens on 7 October 2023, and call for the calming of tensions, as well as refrain from posting any statements that may offend others’ feelings.

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In another case, the Ruppin Academic Center opened disciplinary proceedings against a student for two Instagram “story” posts, on two different dates in October.

Figure 5: First post. A quotation of a verse from the Qur’an: “And We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient” (Qur’an 2:155, Sahih International translation).

Figure 6: Post no. 2.

On October 30, 2023, the student received a letter of suspension from the center for “suspected identification with a terror organization.”^[67] Before the disciplinary committee convened, the center argued that his posts:

give rise to suspected identification with a terror organization, in especially grave circumstances in which the State of Israel is at war following a murderous terror attack on its citizens […] the posts may constitute both a criminal offense under the Counter-Terrorism Law, 2016, and a disciplinary offense under the college’s regulations […] among other things, but without limitation, these posts may be considered an offense under Chapter 7 of the college’s regulations, and may constitute improper conduct; non-student-like conduct; verbal violence in a manner that may threaten the safety of other students and college employees; and conduct that does not respect the lecturers, the college employees, and the other students.^[68]

The student explained the intention behind his posts, namely, his empathy for the suffering of children during the war. In response, he was asked why he saw the need to post the photograph of Gaza, and why it was important to him to post an illustration of a dead Palestinian infant, without expressing sympathy for the suffering of Israeli children. On 17 December 2023, the disciplinary committee issued a decision rejecting the student’s arguments while finding the temporary suspension to be a sufficient and appropriate penalty:

The members of the committee listened attentively to your arguments raised at the hearing, and after considering your explanations and arguments, decided to end your suspension and allow your return to studies […] the members of the committee support the existence of the freedom to express oneself on any subject, but view gravely any expression that may be interpreted as offensive. We expect all the college’s students to act with sensitivity and restraint in order to enable a pleasant and protective learning environment, particularly in these difficult days. As part of the desire to instill this policy, and in light of your posts, you are requested to arrange a meeting with the personal coordinator, Ms. [redacted], after your return.^[69]

The college rejected the student’s arguments and held that his “identification with” children in Gaza constituted, at the very least, “an expression that may be interpreted as offensive.” Thus, the expression of empathy with the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza by a Palestinian student constitutes a breach of disciplinary regulations and is prohibited, even though it does not constitute a criminal offense. These definitions expand the boundaries of permitted and prohibited speech under the criminal law, and the “educational” penalty imposed on the student amounts to a form of compulsory political loyalty in the Israeli academic space.

POSTS CRITICAL OF ISRAEL, THE ISRAELI MILITARY, AND WAR CRIMES IN GAZA

Content describing the war as involving war crimes, characterizing it as genocidal, or comparing it to past and present campaigns of ethnic cleansing also led to disciplinary convictions and sanctions at several academic institutions. These institutions regarded such expressions as harmful to students’ sense of trust and security and, in some cases, as offending Israeli society more broadly. An example is the WIZO Haifa Academy of Design and Education Academic Center, where a student posted the following Instagram “stories” several days after the outbreak of the war:

Figure 8: Post no. 2: “Trakh trakh trakh [the sound of gunfire], they were all murdered” (translated from Arabic). A screenshot from a video showing a clip from the documentary film about the Tantura massacre by Alon Schwarz (2020).

Figure 9: Post no. 3: “Exterminated” (translation of the word in yellow, from Arabic). “We are being bombed”.

On 16 October 2023, the student received a letter from WIZO informing her of her suspension “in light of your expression on social media and your implied support, as support for terror, against the State of Israel.”^[70] After a brief hearing in her case on 31 October 2023, in which she explained her political position and her intentions in publishing the posts, the committee decided on 6 November 2023 to convict her and to record a reprimand in her academic record. The committee reasoned in its decision:

The harsh posts that you disseminated / identified with on social media at the present time, and that compared the State of Israel, which is fighting a terror organization, to dark regimes in which the ethnic cleansing of innocent people was carried out, fundamentally undermine our sense of trust and security as a society, in which each person bears responsibility both in their private space and as a student at an academic institution in the State of Israel.

The committee views gravely any expression of this kind, especially at this time, and decided that this constitutes a breach of the disciplinary code and a disciplinary offense (‘conduct unbecoming of the status of a student, whether within the academic center or outside it’) for which a severe reprimand and a warning will be added to your academic record [emphasis in original].^[71]

CONTENT ON PALESTINIAN IDENTITY, THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION, AND THE BROADER CONTEXT OF THE EVENTS

Posts that framed the events of 7 October within the broader context of the Occupation also led to disciplinary convictions and sanctions. The WIZO Academy, for example, initiated disciplinary proceedings against a student for an Instagram post sharing a post by the Palestinian American comedian Amer Zahr: “75 years of ethnic cleansing / 15 years of siege / dispossession of Palestinian lands / pogroms against Palestinian towns / desecration of Palestinian holy sites / daily invasion of Palestinian homes / prolonged humiliation of an entire people / nothing from today is ‘unprovoked’.” During the hearing, the student explained the post’s meaning and the intention behind it: that, without justifying the 7 October deadly assaults, the attack did not occur in a vacuum. The committee convicted the student and suspended her for one academic year. It held, in a short and unreasoned decision, that the post “amounts to a justification […] and attests to your identification with, and support for, the events of the horrific massacre,” and that the committee views “the post very gravely, and in particular the timing of its publication.”^[72] On 22 November 2023, Adalah filed an appeal on behalf of the student that detailed the lawful and legitimate nature of her views, and the flaws in the conviction without a substantive discussion of the post’s content. In its decision of 25 December 2023, the appeals committee rejected the appeal against the conviction but shortened the penalty, allowing her to return to studies after half a year, at the start of the new academic year, subject to conditions. The appeals committee reasoned that, “The theoreticalphilosophical discussion of the difference between justification and explanation is not material to our case, since the essence of the harm lies in the way the readers interpreted the post and not in the intention behind it, and this especially in light of the timing of the post in view of the atrocities that took place on the same day.”^[73]

Thus, the appeals committee introduced new elements into the disciplinary offense framework governing the examination of expressions and their lawfulness at the WIZO Academy. These elements disconnect the post and its publisher, while placing the way in which readers interpreted the post at the center of the legal-disciplinary examination. The date of the post was also treated as a central factor in establishing the student’s guilt. All of these considerations became incriminating findings despite the absence of supporting evidence, even though neither a prohibition relating to the timing of the post nor a prohibition based on the way others might interpret it had been defined in any applicable rule or standard.

At the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College, a notable case involved a Palestinian student who posted a series of photographs from the West Bank, including images of the separation wall and graffiti artwork, accompanied by the hashtag “May we all rest in Palestine,” together with the Palestinian flag emoji, on Facebook on 13 October 2023. Unlike the proceedings at WIZO, the disciplinary committee’s deliberations in this case included theoretical discussions, which were used to justify the student’s disciplinary conviction. The committee relied on theories from the philosophy of language concerning the broader context of the statements, as well as concepts relating to how works of art express the views and identity of their creators, to support the decision.

The institution decided to suspend the student even before scheduling a hearing, after receiving a complaint from the college president. The president alleged that the posts supported terror in wartime, and that “harm to the feelings of those studying alongside him and of the faculty teaching him and providing him with services is unacceptable, and we will not show tolerance toward such conduct on the part of students at the college.”^[74]

The disciplinary committee convicted the student on 12 December 2023 under Articles 8.13 and 9.16 of the college’s internal disciplinary code, according to which “the publication of messages or posts of any kind and in any media that may offend the feelings of the public or harm the college’s reputation or the good name of its students, teachers, and employees,” and “conduct unbecoming of a student of the college.” In its decision, the disciplinary committee did not explain how the posts amounted to a breach of the disciplinary rules. Although the student did not seek to express support for any act or an organization designated as a terror organization, the disciplinary committee relied on what it described as “conflicts in his identity,” as well as his broader desire to emphasize his belonging to the Palestinian people, as considerations that found expression in the photographs he posted, and as factors establishing his support for terror. On this basis, the committee held that his conduct should be regarded as intending to harm the feelings of others, reasoning that the student should have taken into account the full range of possible interpretations that viewers might attribute to his posts. The committee stated:

The question of examining contexts is, in the case before us, a double-edged sword. Just as we accept the accused’s argument that a photograph included in a series of photographs cannot be taken out of context, so, too, must the post be viewed in its contexts, including the date of the post and the hashtag with the range of its meanings, which are known even to the accused […] since the question of the contexts of the concrete statement is relevant to the decision, we will make do with an insight relevant to our case from the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin […] “no utterance can be either the first or the last. It is only a link in a chain.” Everything that is said and written is only “up to this point,” and its end is always open. Following Bakhtin’s words, and following thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, it can be argued that a person making a post must take into account the system of contexts that gives their statement its overall context and the meaning perceived by the addressee. […] In making the post, he takes upon himself responsibility for the entire probable range of possibilities for the ways of understanding the discourse he arouses […] in the case before us, a very thin line is crossed between that “cute” and nonviolent way, in the accused’s words, of expressing his position, and the conveying of clear messages in support of terror.⁹⁴

As for the penalty, the committee held that “the system of contexts and circumstances described above dims the degree of clarity of the content of the post,” and therefore “he should be judged leniently, and a penalty at the lowest level of punishment available in the circumstances should be imposed on him.” The committee decided to issue a warning, to proceed with a temporary suspension, and to impose a suspended penalty until the end of his studies, according to which a further offense would lead to permanent expulsion from the college.

In effect, the student’s Palestinian identity, as well as the temporal proximity of the post to the events of 7 October, led to his conviction. In other words, the student’s artistic posts, which sought to express his identity, engage with the Palestinian question, and visualize the realities of the occupation and the separation wall in

94 Ibid., judgment, December 2023 (on file with Adalah).

the West Bank, were effectively reduced to the interpretations attributed to them by other students and the college administration. The college thereby adopted the view that the lawfulness of the posts was determined solely by the manner in which they were understood by a specific audience. By contrast, no weight was given to the interpretations of Palestinian students, in whose language the texts were written and who constituted another relevant audience for the posts in question.

In another case, Zefat Academic College opened disciplinary proceedings against a Palestinian student over posts and descriptions of an identity-based and cultural character, including writing “Palestine” in her TikTok bio and attaching a famous song by Fairuz titled “Jerusalem Is Ours.”

Figure 10: The student’s bio on her TikTok profile, in which the word “Palestine” appears together with the Palestine emoji and the word “Sakhnin”, an Arab town in Israel.

Figure 11: The first post. A screenshot of the student’s story, to which the song “al-Quds Lana” (Jerusalem Is Ours) by the Lebanese singer Fairuz was attached.

Figure 12: The second post. A story that the student shared: “A holiday marked by resilience/ Eid comes as Palestine continues to bleed. Our people are dispersed, and the occupation has left little space for celebration. Yet, despite it all, our hearts still carry hope—hope for return and for a victory that draws near. May we remain steadfast and resilient, standing our ground year after year.”

Figure 13: The third post. A Hebrew translation of the post as presented by the committee.

The disciplinary prosecutor charged the student with “incitement and the expression of support for the enemy in a war against terror organizations, until the imminent victory, directed against the state.” This accusation was conveyed to the student, together with notification of her immediate suspension, based on a decision by the college’s president.^[75]

With respect to the first post, the student emphasized that it represents how she defines herself. The second post contained a well-known song by the Lebanese singer Fairuz. “Jerusalem is ours” is a statement that numerous religious groups make, and that the student posted it because the al-Aqsa Mosque, a holy place for her, is located there. As for the third post, the student noted that it is a prayer expressing the hardships of the period, when there are people who are weakened, poor, and hungry, and that the victory referred to is a spiritual victory for the Palestinians. The defense also submitted an expert opinion, which emphasized that the terms used in the three posts are customary within Arab society in Israel, reflect their national, cultural, and social identity, and form part of the broader cultural and political discourse.

The committee convicted the student of an offense under the disciplinary rules and decided to suspend her for five years, revoke her eligibility to sit for examinations at the end of the second semester, and revoke her academic credits. The decision distorted the facts of the case, for example, as it claimed that she posted a photograph of Sakhnin next to the Palestinian flag, which she did not, and that she wished for peace to come to Palestine “from the river to the sea,” which she did not, in addition to an erroneous translation of one of the posts. Moreover, the committee applied the “reasonable reader” test, represented in practice by the “community in Zefat,” which it described as “a unique, fragile, and sensitive community.” Consequently, the committee held that the student’s posts constitute “text that disturbs the peace” and that she paints herself “in a political color that cries out from afar.”^[76] Following an appeal, the suspension order was reduced from five to three years.

NEWS, FALSE REPORTS, INFORMATION, AND NARRATIVES

The disciplinary proceedings were marked by the role academic institutions assumed for themselves as arbiters of “the truth,” whether in defining the nature of the war, the events that led to its outbreak, or the mass killings that took place during it. In doing so, they restricted the ability of Palestinian students to bear witness to the events of the war and to its broader context, and to recount or describe their own experiences or those of others within their community.

At Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, for example, a student was subjected to disciplinary proceedings for sharing part of a video on her Instagram account through the “story” feature.^[77]

indictment on 20 December 2023.

The video contained three reports on the events of 7 October: the alleged beheading of forty children, systematic sexual violence, and the mass killings at the Nova festival. The video presented these reports as narrative parts of a broad strategy of atrocity propaganda and an information war, intended to dehumanize the Palestinians, and thereby to justify Israel’s violence and atrocities against them.

In the disciplinary proceedings, the student testified that she had shared only the first part of the video, without being aware of its other parts, and that her intention had been to raise awareness of false reports. The university’s administration rejected her version. Even when the student brought various reports verifying her claims with respect to the beheadings, her fellow students, who testified against her during the hearing, argued that they “know what happened” without presenting any proof of their claims.

The disciplinary committee decided to convict the student of conduct unbecoming of a student, “whether it occurred within the walls of the university or outside them, that harmed or could have harmed, intentionally or negligently, the dignity of the university or the dignity of any of its teachers, employees, students, or guests,” under Articles 8.1 and 8.1.2 of the university’s academic code of student discipline. The committee imposed a penalty of a severe reprimand, a one-year suspended expulsion from the university in the event of a similar offense, and 40 hours of community service. Following an appeal filed by the university’s disciplinary prosecution, the appeals committee decided on 1 February 2024 to increase the penalty and to expel the student for one semester. The appeals committee held in its decision that:

Such harm, in the sensitive days in which we are all immersed, when the nerves are exposed, when sensitivity is at its peak, when, as the student’s fellow students testified: sitting with her in class are survivors of the [Nova] festival at Re’im, survivors of the massacre, and students whose family members were murdered, tortured, and abducted, is a harm that the mind cannot bear […] and [the students] are unable to tolerate her presence.^[78]

In this way, the disciplinary committee assumed for itself the authority to determine what constitutes “the truth”, even in the absence of any evidence to support its conclusions. This conception of “truth” is grounded on the reactions and feelings of the students and of the broader Jewish Israeli public, which, according to the university’s approach, become measures of the lawfulness of the posts, and more broadly, of the boundaries of permissible expression by students. In effect, the university privileges the Jewish-Israeli narrative of the war as “the truth”, while treating the Palestinian narrative as grounds for disciplinary sanction.

RELIGIOUS MATTERS, PRAYERS, AND VERSES FROM THE QUR’AN

The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa initiated a disciplinary proceeding against a Palestinian student for posting a verse from the Qur’an on 7 October 2023, إن موعدهم الصبح أليس الصبح بقريب, the translation of which is: “Indeed, their appointment is the morning. Is not the morning near?” The verse, which the student posted as an Instagram story, reflected his feelings of uncertainty, alarm, and fear on that day, according to his testimony. He viewed the wait for tomorrow and the morning as a source of clarity, symbolizing the hope that the prevailing darkness would end.

The university’s disciplinary prosecutor described the post as supporting and as connected to acts of terror and attacks against Israel and its citizens, including the events of 7 October 2023. The prosecutor also submitted an expert opinion, according to which this verse is “firmly embedded within Islamist discourse, and is currently on the lips of Hamas leaders, in their references to the imminent end of the criminals, the declared enemies of the community.”^[79]

The secular student testified that he is not an “Islamist” and does not consume “Islamist” content, and that he is unfamiliar with the use of the verse to which the prosecution referred. The expert opinion submitted by the defense emphasized the various interpretations of the verse, and that the student’s interpretation is reasonable. The defense also warned against Islamophobia and the inquisitorial nature of the disciplinary proceeding, which attempted to interpret verses of the Qur’an.

The committee adopted the prosecution’s interpretation and its expert opinion, and convicted the student of an offense under the university’s disciplinary rules. As a sentence, the committee imposed a penalty of suspension until the end of the academic year, a suspended sentence of expulsion, as well as an obligation to take a course in ethics in the department of humanistic studies and the arts. In its decision, the committee held that:

The post therefore speaks for itself, and the burden passes to the student to show that he did not intend the prevalent and implied meaning of the text. The argument that this is a positive expression is feigned innocence that does not accord with the language of the text. The combination of these things together, the date of the post, its content, the source of the verse, its prevalent interpretation, the context in which it frequently appears on social media, the student’s admission that he was familiar with the verse and that he encountered it that very morning on social media, his testimony, which contained contradictions and did not provide satisfactory explanations, and his claim that he did not remember the source of the post, all lead us to the clear conclusion that this post contains identification with the acts of the Hamas terror organization. Accordingly, the post constitutes a conduct offense unbecoming of a student, in an act carried out in connection with his being a student at the Technion.¹⁰⁰

The committee convicted the student on the basis of several interconnected determinations: first, that the content of the verse was violent; second, that its

100 Ibid., judgment and sentence, January and February 2024 (on file with Adalah).

publication in the context of 7 October necessarily conveyed a violent message; and third, that the student’s intentions in posting the verse were of no significance when weighed against against the intentions attributed to others who had used the same expression. In this way, the decision adopts a collective mode of analysis, under which the student’s identity and perceived affiliations within the digital sphere in the aftermath of 7 October become the decisive indicators of intent. As a result, greater weight is assigned to these factors than the content of the post or to the evidentiary strength of the prosecution’s version of the circumstances.

At the Ruppin Academic Center, a disciplinary committee issued a similar decision, convicting a Palestinian student who posted a verse from the Qur’an.

Figure 15: The student’s post from 8 October 2023. Translation of the verse: “Those who were certain that they would meet Allah said, ‘How many a small company has overcome a large company by permission of Allah. And Allah is with the patient.’ And when they went forth to [face] Goliath and his soldiers, they said, ‘Our Lord, pour upon us patience and plant firmly our feet and give us victory over the disbelieving people’” (Qur’an 2:249-250, Sahih International translation).

This image shows that the student posted the verse, highlighting parts and adding heart emojis. The student argued before the committee that she published the post on her birthday, and with it, she wished for peace to prevail and for all to be well, especially in those difficult days. For, in her view, the meaning of the verse is that those who believe in God and in justice are the ones who will prevail. The committee members argued that the student sought to incite against Israel. One of their arguments was that the use of the word “disbelievers,” in the circumstances of 7 October, means that the student is calling for victory over the Jews and over Israel, because organizations such as Hezbollah use this term to describe Israel and the Israelis as enemies to be fought. The committee members also sought to emphasize that the Qur’an, including this verse, can have an especially violent connotation in the context of 7 October, since “a sample check conducted by the committee shows that the verse was posted on social media shortly after 7 October in the context of supporting the acts of terror against Israel.”^[80] The disciplinary committee decided on 1 February 2024 to convict the student of breaching the college’s disciplinary rules and to determine that the period of temporary suspension imposed up to the date of the decision was the appropriate penalty for the disciplinary offense.

In this way, the committee concluded that the post had offended the feelings of students, lecturers and college employees, and had undermined their sense of security. On that basis, it found that the post violated the college’s disciplinary rules. The committee afforded no meaningful weight to the student’s version of events, nor to the alternative interpretations of the verse presented by the defense team. Instead, the committee held that the unlawfulness of the post derived solely from the context attributed to it by others, and from comparisons drawn between the student and unidentified publishers who had used similar expressions. Neither the identities of those publishers nor the content of their publications was disclosed to the student or to the defense team.

Zefat Academic College initiated a disciplinary case against a student for posting a video of a religious preacher, Mustafa Hosny, who prays for the safety of Palestinians and particularly for the population of Gaza. Part of the video appears in the screenshot shown to the committee, together with text added by the student, “Amen, O God,” with a sad/worried emoji.

Figure 16: A screenshot of the student’s post as presented to the committee.^[81]

At the end of a short hearing, without conducting a factual or legal analysis, the disciplinary committee found the student guilty of breaching the college’s disciplinary rules and decided to expel her permanently and revoke all her accumulated academic credits. While the student maintained that the post was a prayer for the peace of her people as part of her faith, and that she does not support terror, the disciplinary authorities regarded the post as one with “racist content […] it meets the definition of ‘hate speech’ and it clearly constitutes an expression that may harm the college, its employees, its students, Israeli society, and Israeli public peace.”^[82]

An examination of the committee’s reasoning shows that its members regarded the post as one that expresses support for the residents of Gaza, who are perceived collectively as the enemy, and as against Israel or the Israelis. Their interpretation was detached from the meaning of the post and the student’s intention in posting it. They reached this conclusion based on the words “grant them victory over their enemy and our enemy,” which the committee members inferred amounted to incitement to victory over Israel in connection with the events of 7 October. Further, the committee pointed to the student’s lack of understanding of the word “compassion” during the hearing, in their view, in a manner that raises doubts as to her capacity to comprehend the moral values required in her field of future work.

Further, the committee grounded its decision on defamation case law, relying on the “reasonable listener” test as the interpretative framework for examining the content of the post. This approach rests on vague understandings of the context. It excludes consideration of the bombardment of Gaza that began immediately after the events of 7 October, privileges Israeli perspectives over other relevant contexts, and treats the other parts of the post as irrelevant to understanding its broader meaning. As a result, the committee imported expansive interpretative tests from the field of civil law into the disciplinary sphere and determined what constitutes “truth” and “facts” through the prism of the distinctions between “us” and “them,” even when the student sought to present a broader, deeper, and more complex account of reality.

On appeal, the appeals committee members confirmed the disciplinary authorities’ decision and found the student guilty, justifying a severe penalty of suspension for ten years (but more lenient than the permanent expulsion imposed by the disciplinary committee). The members of the appeals committee considered the police’s decision not to press criminal charges against the student. This action led to her acquittal of the disciplinary offense detailed in Article 31(13) of the college’s disciplinary regulations, which requires the commission of a criminal offense. In reaching their decision, the committee members applied an expansive interpretation of expression-related offenses in the criminal law, and in practice treated disciplinary rules as extending beyond the limits of criminal law in assessing the lawfulness of expressions.^[83]

Despite these expansive interpretations of the disciplinary law and the narrowing of freedom of expression, disciplinary committees also occasionally acquitted students for posts containing religious expression. At the University of Haifa, for example, the disciplinary committee accepted the defense’s arguments and acquitted a student for posting a du’a (religious supplication) on 8 October 2023 expressing fears about the end of days:

The Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, said that the building of Jerusalem will occur when Yathrib [the former name of the city of Medina in Saudi Arabia] is destroyed, and the destruction of Yathrib will happen with the outbreak of the great war, and the great war will break out with the conquest of Constantinople [the former name of Istanbul], and the conquest of Constantinople will happen with the rise of the false messiah [who will appear at the end of days]. Among the signs heralding the coming of the Day of Judgment are the liberation of Jerusalem, the war of the Muslims against the Jews, the return of the al-Aqsa Mosque to the Muslims, and the prayer of our lord Jesus behind the Mahdi [a messianic figure]. O God, be good to us, forgive our sins, and seal us in the book of paradise through Your abundant mercy and not only on the basis of our deeds. Raise a prayer to God that He grant us a good end.^[84]

Adalah argued that the student’s intention in posting this du’a was to express a sense of fear and apprehension at the approaching Day of Judgment, in accordance with her religious faith, as in her view, the state of war contained signs of the end of days. The defense submitted an expert opinion, which stated that there is nothing in the post expressing joy over the events of 7 October, but that it is rather a prayer for “a good end.”

In its decision, the committee explained why it chose to depart from an agreement reached between the defense and the prosecution at the conclusion of mediation proceedings in a number of cases. It adopted the student’s account, which was supported by the translations and analysis of the defense expert, as a more reasonable interpretation than that advanced by the prosecution, which had failed to meet the burden of proof beyond any reasonable doubt. The committee further held that disciplinary proceedings are quasi-criminal in nature, and accordingly relied on the principle established in Article 34X(a) of the Penal Law, 1977, according to which, where competing interpretations are available, the interpretation more favorable to the student should apply.^[85]

Thus, this rare decision illustrates the application of procedural protections and interpretative principles drawn from criminal law by a disciplinary committee in adjudicating expression-related offenses. In doing so, the committee treated the interpretation of the post itself, and not its alleged offensiveness to the feelings of others, the dignity of the university, or other similar considerations, as the central basis for its assessment.

POSTS FROM THE 7 OCTOBER EVENTS

Academic institutions also initiated disciplinary actions against Palestinian students for posts that included photographs, videos, or other content discussing the 7 October events. The students posted most of this content on the morning of 7 October. A considerable amount of this content contained photographs that went viral, such as a crowd of young people on top of an Israeli military jeep taken into Gaza, a person standing on top of a military tank waving a Palestinian flag, and a bulldozer that broke through the border wall. Other such posts sought to present the broader context of the 7 October events as part of the Palestinian issue, in referring, for example, to Palestinian prisoners incarcerated by Israel or the ongoing Nakba since 1948.

All of these disciplinary indictments accused the students of incitement to terror and/or identification with acts of terror. In these cases, the disciplinary committees found the students guilty of breaching disciplinary regulations, while overwhelmingly disregarding the post’s purpose, the publisher’s purpose, and the context of the post. As for penalties, the academic institutions mostly suspended the students for varying periods of time or expelled them permanently.

In one case, Netanya Academic College opened a disciplinary proceeding against a student for posting an Instagram story on 7 October that contained a photograph of an Israeli military jeep and many young Palestinians gathered around it. Below the photograph, the student added the following text: “A photograph that will not be forgotten by history… 07.10.2023,” with the date colored in green, red, white, and black—the colors of the Palestinian flag. In the description of the photograph, the student added the date again, together with the Palestinian flag emoji. The college accused the student of “incitement-filled posts … which create support for terror,” in a letter dated 15 October 2023, which announced her suspension from the college.^[86] During the committee hearing, the student testified that she posted the story because it was a viral post, and that she deleted it about two hours later when she learned of the full scale of the events.

Notwithstanding her arguments, the committee convicted the student and expelled her from the college permanently, even though the police—which were pursuing a policy of discriminatory, selective enforcement of the criminal law against posts by Palestinians on social media—did not open a criminal case against her. In its decision, the committee stated:

As for the argument that the photograph does not express support for Hamas and for the terror attack it perpetrated, and does not express identification with the acts of terror, it cannot be accepted. There is in the photograph itself, combined with the text and the highlighting of the date through the colors of the Palestinian flag, which also appear above the photograph, an implicit identification with the terror operations of Hamas. Some would even say that the photograph cannot be interpreted other than as identification with the terrible acts of 7 October 2023 […] there is no doubt that the student undermined the dignity of the college, the values it promotes, the dignity of the students studying at it, and the faculty teaching at it. There is also no doubt that the student’s post undermined the public morality of Israeli society. We will add that the student expressed, during the hearing in her case, a laconic apology for posting the photograph. This conduct also reinforces the conclusion that the posting of the photograph constitutes harm to public morality.^[87]

In another case, Tel Aviv University initiated disciplinary proceedings against a student for posting a set of images under the title, “8 Things about What’s Happening in Palestine”, as discussed above. The images, which contain analysis of the Hamas attack and its context, were posted on 10 October 2023, with a note: “This post is an explanation of what happened and proves context. This page does not officially endorse any political party or faction.”

the disciplinary committee. The post included a series of images of an explanatory and political character with respect to the events of 7 October and their context.

The university’s disciplinary prosecutor argued that this set of images constituted a booklet “that praises Hamas,” and that “in these acts the accused committed an offense of conduct unbecoming the dignity of the university.”^[88] It added that the various slides present “a distorted picture of the events of 7 October,” in which Israel “is presented as a satanic regime to justify the ‘liberation operation [against it].’”^[89] The student and his defense team emphasized that the post’s purpose was to raise awareness of the other context of the war at a time when the voices in Israel called for revenge. The defense argued that the post does not support terror, nor does it encourage violence. The terminology, even if perceived as problematic by the university, is lawful and legitimate in its historical context, and is informative, and nothing more.

The committee convicted the student of an offense under the disciplinary code, and on 8 May 2024 imposed a penalty of a suspended sentence of expulsion. In the decision, the committee held that:

Even if the accused had succeeded in convincing us of a coherent and credible alternative interpretation, it is doubtful whether it would have had significance for the conviction of the offense, since the latter also rests on the possible manner of understanding the things by reasonable readers who are students, faculty members, and employees at Tel Aviv University living in the State of Israel […] there is a space of expressions that do not constitute incitement to terror or incitement to racism in their criminal sense, and that are protected by freedom of expression, but may constitute conduct unbecoming of the status of the student at Tel Aviv University, in particular when this expression comes to the knowledge of his fellow students.^[90]

The importance of the decision lies, in fact, in what was said as an obiter dictum ( a non-binding comment ):

I will add as an obiter dictum that had this been an expression in the framework of a discussion in class or an exchange of academic, and even political, ideas and positions, and had the accused made proposals, for example to improve the situation of the Palestinian people, or expressed identification with the suffering of civilian residents of Gaza, the considerations that would have operated would have been different. The space of expression that does not constitute conduct unbecoming a student would have been larger than in an expression that does not truly advance an academic discussion and may harm other students directly.

A racist expression, too, in the networks and groups of Jewish students against specific Arab students or the group of Arab students at the university, which came to the knowledge of the Arab students, whether directly or indirectly, can be a basis for filing a disciplinary indictment and even for a conviction. By contrast, an expression by students on social media as to how Israel ought to act with respect to Gaza and its residents during the war and afterward is not, on its face, connected to the student community at Tel Aviv University, and the question whether it amounts to incitement to terror or to racism is a matter for the general criminal law. In other words, the fact that the expression was on social media and not in class does not teach that no disciplinary offense was committed, but may, in certain circumstances, lead to the opposite result [emphasis added].

For the avoidance of doubt, the post that formed the basis of the conviction was not directed at specific Jewish students or at the group of Jewish students at the university. Rather, it constituted a general political characterization of the Hamas attack of 7 October. Yet, the standards applied by the disciplinary committees appear to differ depending on the identity of the speaker. Whereas expression by an Israeli Jewish student must bear a direct connection to Palestinian students as a group in order to constitute a disciplinary offense, a general post by a Palestinian student, even when not specifically directed at Israeli Jewish students at the university, may be deemed sufficient to constitute a disciplinary offense. This distinction is not technical; rather, it points to asymmetries in the drawing of the boundaries of permissible expression under a framework grounded in the protection of feelings from potential offense.

Summary and Conclusions

institutions adopted an even more extreme and punitive approach, imposing severe disciplinary sanctions on Palestinian students, including permanent expulsion.

Academic institutions systematically violated the foundational principles of fair due process with respect to Palestinian students. For example, the institutions summoned Palestinian students to disciplinary committees without showing them the post at issue. Institutions translated social media posts from Arabic to Hebrew using automatic translation software, even when it was clear that the original linguistic and cultural meaning was entirely different. The committees rejected expert opinions provided by the defense, at times with derision, while accepting expert opinions proffered by the prosecution, at times without providing an opportunity for the defense to cross-examine the experts. Institutions also imposed interim suspensions on students before giving them a chance to be heard, and amended disciplinary indictments in the course of the proceedings in line with the desired outcomes. The institutions also shifted the burden of proof to the students, who were required to prove their innocence before committees that had already formed an adverse impression of them in many instances.

Since 7 October 2023, a new framework of surveillance, disciplinary rules enforcement, and punishment has developed at Israel’s academic institutions, one that is directed exclusively against Palestinian students. The institutions adopted this new framework rapidly, within a few hours and days from the start of the war. The academic institutions assembled, almost overnight, a wideranging enforcement mechanism that classified Qur’anic verses, prayers, and expressions of solidarity with the residents of Gaza as offenses warranting the suspension or expulsion of Palestinian students from universities and colleges throughout the country.

Israeli academic institutions acted contrary to the rule of law. Article 17 of the Students’ Rights Law limits the disciplinary authority of academic institutions to activities with some connection to students’ studies, and until 7 October, this boundary was respected. After 7 October, however, these institutions systematically overstepped this boundary, but did so exclusively in cases against Palestinian students. Disciplinary committees held that the connection required for the exercise of authority exists even for a private post by a student, published before the start of the academic year, for example; a post with no connection to studies, the campus, or other students; and even a post to which most of the academic community was not exposed. By contrast, with respect to Israeli Jewish students, the academic institutions were careful to emphasize the limits of their authority and they refrained from applying disciplinary regulations.^[91] In this way, Jewish Israeli students were afforded the protections of the rule of law, while Palestinian students were not.

In several cases, academic institutions continued to pursue disciplinary proceedings against students even after the police – which has pursued discriminatory, selective enforcement of the criminal law in expression-related offenses against Palestinians in Israel, particularly after 7 October – had decided not to initiate criminal prosecutions, and ultimately found that the students had committed disciplinary offenses. In these cases, the academic By contrast, the institutions did not open disciplinary actions against Israeli Jewish students for posts that included racial incitement, such as calls for revenge or for the bombing of the civilian population in Gaza, or for the expulsion or forced transfer of Palestinians. In this context, the constitutional principle that fundamental rights may not be infringed in the absence of explicit legislation applied only to Israeli Jewish students.

Thus the universities and colleges in Israel created two separate disciplinary tracks: a prerogative (administrative) track for Palestinian students and a normative (constitutional) track for Israeli Jewish students. The administrative track, applied to the Palestinian students, operates in a state of exception, suspending the rule of law and dispensing with procedural protections. It gives little weight to the principles of natural justice, in particular the presumption of innocence, and proceeds without clear definitions of the offenses in question. By contrast, the constitutional  track, applied to Jewish Israeli students, is grounded in the rule of law, including adherence to the limits of authority and constitutional standards of freedom of expression. Within this framework, Israeli Jewish students were effectively shielded from disciplinary proceedings for speech that had no direct connection to their academic studies, even when that speech was racist, advocates for genocide, or calls for the total destruction of Gaza.¹¹³

In the administrative track, expressions by Palestinian students, even when written in Arabic for the Arab public and sometimes consisting of a prayer, are judged through the lens of the “reasonable reader” or the “reasonable listener.”

113 On the distinction between the two tracks, the prerogative (administrative) and the normative (constitutional), see the pioneering work of Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State (OUP 2017). On the contribution of Fraenkel’s book, recently published in Hebrew, see: Barak Medina, “The Myth of the Rule of Law: In the Wake of the Legal System in Nazi Germany,” Makor Rishon, 26 February 2020 [Hebrew]. David Dyzenhaus makes use of Fraenkel’s work for the purpose of the distinction between the Israeli regime and the apartheid of South Africa: David Dyzenhaus, “Dugardian Legal Theory in The Pursuit of a Brave New World,” in International Law 3 (Tiyanjana Maluwa, Max du Plessis, Dire Tladi, eds, Brill Nijhoff 2017). See also Shinar’s work on the application of the administrative law track in place of the constitutional track to the occupied territories. He argues that the Palestinian population in the OPTs is classified in Israeli eyes as an enemy, and administrative law is intended for the treatment and management of a population under a colonial regime, whereas the constitutional law track applies to Israelis as the sovereign granted constitutional protections: Adam Shinar, “Israel’s External Constitution:

Friends, Enemies, and the Constitutional/Administrative Law Distinction,” 57 VA. J. INT’L L. 735 (2017).

This standard is shaped, in practice, by the perspective of the student or lecturer who is a soldier facing the enemy in Gaza. The language used by the institutions in their decisions, including references to the “feelings of the community,” in which “students and faculty members are fighting in Gaza,” reveals the content of the category of “the student”. The Palestinian student is not treated as a civic subject with constitutional rights, but as a figure cast as an “enemy,” required to repeatedly prove his/her loyalty and conformity to the Zionist national ethos.

These features point to an apartheid-like policy in disciplinary proceedings within Israeli academia after 7 October. This policy rests on ethno-racial separation between disciplinary tracks and on different standards in determining who is deemed fit to be a student. This separation, which relies heavily on the broad and flexible use of terms such as “support for terror” and similar terminology, helps construct the underlying distinctions that structure the policy. In practice, these categories are applied to  Palestinian students and form the basis of the administrative track, activated as needed. The result is the positioning of the Palestinian student within a framework of “separate and unequal.”

This racial separation resulted in persecution on national grounds. Expressions by Palestinian students, including identification with the suffering experienced by members of their people; wishes of hope for a better future for them; condemnations of the Israeli military’s aggressive actions against civilians in Gaza; photographs of victims; and Qur’anic verses used as prayers for the safety of Gaza’s residents were frequently interpreted as identification with the enemy or as support for terror. In this way, the Palestinian students were required to suppress expressions of their national identity under the rhetoric of security, Israeli Jewish community sentiment, and the preservation of public order. Consequently, disciplinary proceedings addressed not only questions of prohibited expression, but also the broader redrawing of the boundaries of the legitimacy of Palestinian presence and subjectivity in the Israeli academic space.

This policy of racial discrimination, even aside from its material consequences, violates the right to dignity. Accordingly, although most Palestinian students who have faced disciplinary proceedings will continue with their lives, the damage created in the course of these processes – personal, academic, professional, and emotional – will accompany many of them, as well as the broader community of Palestinian students at Israeli institutions of higher education, for a long time. This policy produces collective harm, in which religious, political, or identitybased expression by Palestinian students may result in sanctions and academic penalties. It creates a “chilling effect” within the Palestinian student body in Israeli academia, fostering fear, incentivizing self-censorship, and discouraging legitimate expression. By contrast, such fears do not exist for the Jewish-Israeli student.

This two-track policy sets a dangerous precedent. It exposes the fragility of constitutional protections in Israeli society when subjected to a state of emergency, public anger, collective trauma, intense emotions, or political pressure, conditions that tend to facilitate the oppression of the Palestinian population, citizens of Israel. This fragility has long characterized the conduct of the security authorities, including the police, and it has also not spared the academic space, particularly in relation to restrictions on campus protests during wartime. However, its manifestation within academia after 7 October, and at the scale described in this report, further illustrates the erosion of standards at institutions that otherwise pride themselves on their openness and on their opposition to political attempts to further narrow the space of individual liberties and the mechanisms that protect them.

These racially segregated tracks are reminiscent of those imposed during the period of military rule on Palestinians in Israel (1948-1966). Then, the administrative track was applied exclusively to the Arab population that was placed under military rule. They were prevented from expressing their national identity, while the legal system operated to suppress their freedom of political expression. A prominent example is the Yardor case, in which Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the disqualification of the Arab al-Ard movement from running in the Knesset elections, invoking the doctrine of “militant democracy,” “state security,” and the state’s identity as a “Jewish state” against an enemy from within, while suspending the rule of law. It is therefore not surprising that the Yardor case was cited as a source of authority in the decision of a disciplinary committee at the Hebrew University in order to justify deviations from the rule of law in the disciplinary track applied to Palestinian students.^[92]

This racist policy of the Israeli academic institutions violates international law, most notably the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD); the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW); and Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which affirms the protection of the collective rights of ethnic minorities. In light of these violations, UN human rights bodies have criticized the treatment of Palestinian students by Israel’s academic institutions, as highlighted above.

The proceedings described in the report have, in most cases, ended, but their consequences persist. These consequences are likely to continue shaping Palestinian students’ relationship with the academic space, affecting their sense of security and belonging, narrowing the boundaries of perceived legitimate expression, and entrenching a reality in which full participation in the academic life becomes conditional.

Academic institutions should therefore reconsider the use of disciplinary mechanisms as tools for selectively policing political expressions, and redefine the limits of their authority in a way that guarantees freedom of expression as a foundational principle of academic life for all students, even for expressions that diverge from the state’s official narrative or the prevailing views of the majority.

w w w . a d a l a h . o r g

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^[1] Prof. Gur Alroey, Rector of Haifa University, “Suspension from Studies,” letter dated 9 October 2023. On the initial suspensions issued beyond the rector’s authority, see: Academia for Equality, “Academia for Equality’s Report on the State of War and Political Persecution in Academia,” 13 November 2023.

^[2] Of the 132 inquiries, Adalah received one from a foreign student studying at the Technion, against whom disciplinary measures were taken following political posts that included criticism of settler violence and of the destruction in Gaza.

^[3] This figure is based on Adalah files, to date. It does not exhaust the scope of the phenomenon. The organization “Academia for Equality” separately documented more than 120 disciplinary proceedings opened against students since the beginning of the war. See report by Academia for Equality, footnote 1.

^[4] To protect the students’ privacy and anonymity and out of concern for causing them further harm, Adalah did not include identifying details such as names, file numbers, or additional personal data in the report. Accordingly, Adalah used general references, including the type of document, the name of the institution, and its date. All the primary documents are on file with Adalah. In cases where even the combination of partial details could lead to identification, Adalah omitted details not material to the analysis.

^[5] On this subject, see: Barak Medina, Ilan Saban, Michal Saliternik, and Alexander (Sandy) Kedar, “The Powers of Institutions of Higher Education in Israel to Restrict Students’ Freedom of Expression,” ICONS-IL Blog (7 November 2023) [Hebrew]. The authors take an explicitly critical position on the measures taken, according to which the connection to studies required under Article 17 of the Students’ Rights Law, 2007, must be significant and clear, while a loose or vague connection does not suffice.

^[6] The other inquiries included cases in which Adalah gave only initial legal advice, cases in which the students were represented by other attorneys, and cases in which students discontinued their studies during the handling of the complaint or did not continue with the proceeding.

^[7] According to the data of the Council for Higher Education. The list of institutions is available on the website of the Council for Higher Education.

^[8] Due to a confidentiality decision, it is not possible to detail beyond this in these cases. See reports in the press, e.g., Yishai Almakayis-Elram, “Minister of Education: Students who expressed support for Hamas will be expelled immediately,” Makor Rishon, 12 October 2023 [Hebrew]. Shahar Ilan, “Bezalel takes disciplinary measures against 11 students who expressed support for the massacre in the Gaza envelope,” Calcalist, 12 October 2023 [Hebrew].

^[9] For example, in the case of the University of Haifa, investigative materials in criminal proceedings reveal that the university itself was the complainant, and that the then-rector of the university (today the university’s president), Prof. Gur Alroey, himself testified at the police station. See an interview with Prof. Gur Alroey, president of the University of Haifa and former rector: Doron Solomon, “The tension on campus is volatile and a provocation could lead to an explosion” (mynet Haifa, 8 November 2024) [Hebrew]. In other cases, this involvement even appeared in formal institutional decisions. At Ruppin Academic Center, the disciplinary committee ordered the school’s director to file a police complaint following the post that was the subject of the proceeding (decision of a disciplinary committee ordering the filing of a police complaint, in the framework of a disciplinary proceeding at Ruppin Academic Center, December 2023; on file with Adalah).

^[10] See footnote 6.

^[11] Letter of the Governmental Institute of Technological Training at the Ministry of Labor dated 26 October 2023.

^[12] The analysis is based on 100 cases in which Adalah provided legal support or representation. In many cases, several different posts were documented with respect to the same student, so that the distribution below indicates the features of the posts themselves and not the number of students in each category.

^[13] The terminology used by academic institutions was not uniform. In some cases, terms such as “determination of disciplinary responsibility” or “absence of disciplinary responsibility” were used, and in other cases sanctions were imposed or proceedings were closed without explicit use of the terms “conviction” or “acquittal.” For the purposes of this report, cases in which responsibility was determined or a sanction was imposed were classified as a conviction, and cases in which responsibility was not determined were classified as an acquittal.

^[14] Of these 15 cases, two included students who were at the final stages of receiving their degrees, including one doctoral degree, and the suspension resulted in a delay in finalizing the technical requirements for the awarding of the degree certificate by at least a year.

^[15] In one of the cases, in addition to permanent expulsion, the student was denied recognition of the academic credit she had accumulated during her studies.

^[16] In a number of cases several sanctions were imposed cumulatively on the same student, such as reprimands accompanied by an additional penalty.

^[17] Letter on behalf of the disciplinary prosecution in response to the request of the student’s counsel to receive the post at issue, in the framework of a disciplinary proceeding at the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College, October 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[18] Adalah’s letter demanding the closure of the case against the student owing to misidentification, in the framework of a disciplinary proceeding at ORT College Jerusalem, November 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[19] In another case, Yezreel Valley Academic College opened a disciplinary proceeding against a student because she was one of the administrators of an open Telegram group in which other users posted content interpreted by the institution as supporting terror. The group was opened before 7 October for the purpose of sharing literary content in Arabic, and any user could post in it without the approval of the group administrator. The institution withdrew the charge (on file with Adalah).

^[20] Decision to accept the defense’s argument concerning the timing of the post, in the framework of a disciplinary proceeding at the Peres Academic Center, November 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[21] Disciplinary proceeding against a student at the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College, December 2023, over a post from January 2023 that included words of religious prayer, among them a request to God to bring sadness upon “people,” without the post specifying to whom the words were directed. Although the student presented evidence that the post was published months before 7 October and was unconnected to it, the disciplinary committee did not dismiss the disciplinary indictment. The institution amended the disciplinary indictment and argued, after the fact, that the post constituted support for another attack that took place in Jerusalem on that same day, without presenting any evidence of the connection. Only after the defense presented metadata and additional evidence that there was no connection between the post and the security event did the institution withdraw the charge (on file with Adalah).

^[22] Qur’an 3:200, Sahih International translation.

^[23] Disciplinary proceeding at Achva Academic College, November 2023, following a religious post on the importance of prayer in Islam, without any connection to the war. After other students traced the source of the post, it emerged that it had been shared from an Instagram page that also included another post with the hashtag “death to Israel.” Although the student was not the owner of the page and did not even follow it, he was required to apologize to his classmates and to undertake not to share posts from that page in the future, regardless of the content of the post itself. The student changed representation, and Adalah is not aware of the final outcome of the proceeding (on file with Adalah).

^[24] Disciplinary proceeding at Kaye College, response of Adalah, October 2023 (on file with Adalah). In the framework of the proceeding, the student was attributed to “liking” a post concerning Jerusalem. The College convicted the student over the “like” mark, and for this, the College imposed a penalty of preventing her from enrolling in a course.

^[25] Disciplinary proceeding against a student at ORT College Tel Aviv, January 2024 (on file with Adalah), following the sharing of a clip from a historical drama series in the Turkish language with subtitles in Arabic. According to a student’s testimony, the scene was translated by an Israeli army officer in the West Bank, and according to this translation, ORT argued that one of the characters calls “to conquer Israel.” The institution relied on a complaint by students and on an unprofessional translation in opening the disciplinary proceeding.

^[26] Adalah documented this pattern at the WIZO Academic Center and the College of Management Academic Studies, as well as at ORT College Jerusalem, ORT College Tel Aviv, Ono, Tel Hai, Sami Shamoon, Seminar HaKibbutzim, Achva, and the Kinneret Technological College. In some cases, the reference to the Counter-Terrorism Law was made only at an advanced stage of the proceeding.

^[27] Disciplinary proceeding at the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College, decision of conviction and sentence, January 2024, appeal by Adalah against the decision, February 2024 (on file with Adalah).

^[28] Disciplinary proceeding at Zefat College, October 2023 (on file with Adalah). 41 Ibid., the judgment (on file with Adalah).

^[29] Ibid.

^[30] Disciplinary proceeding at the College of Management Academic Studies, January 2024, following the publication of the text: قريب فرج صبــاحكم وثبــات، وتمكين ونصر فتــح يوم اليوم هذا اجــعل اللــهم. In the prosecution’s translation it was written: “May God make this day a day of victory, empowerment, and stability, may you have a morning of imminent relief,” whereas the defense expert translated: “O God, make this day a day of salvation and victory [also possible: a day of conquest and victory], a day of empowerment and resolve, may your morning [be one of] imminent salvation” (on file with Adalah).

^[31] Disciplinary proceeding at the College of Law and Business, Ramat Gan, December 2023; the first post: “The occupation exploits the night to burn whole residential compounds, without mercy it bombs from the air, without giving anyone the possibility of entering or leaving the area (the compound)”; the second post: “At night we die without anyone hearing or seeing us, we are wounded and bleed to death without anyone saving us” (on file with Adalah).

^[32] Ibid., hearing record (on file with Adalah).

^[33] Disciplinary proceeding at the College of Management Academic Studies, summons to a disciplinary committee and complaint, November 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[34] See footnote 36, the committee’s decision (on file with Adalah).

^[35] Disciplinary proceeding at Zefat College, disciplinary indictment, May 2025 (on file with Adalah).

^[36] Ibid., the judgment (on file with Adalah).

^[37] Disciplinary proceeding against a student at the Technion, following her release from detention as part of a prisoner-and-detainee exchange deal, based on the argument that the very release as part of the deal offended the feelings of other students and constituted “unfitting conduct.” The student left the institution before the disciplinary committee in her case convened (on file with Adalah).

^[38] Inquiry proceeding at Meir Medical Center, summary of a conversation in the framework of complaints filed, October 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[39] Disciplinary proceedings at the College of Management Academic Studies and the Western Galilee College, decisions (on file with Adalah).

^[40] Disciplinary proceeding at the University of Haifa, hearing record, November 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[41] For example, ORT College Jerusalem and the Ono Academic College sent letters asserting that the students “supported the terror attack” and “encouraged the killing of innocents” based on their social media posts, and that they were suspended pending the clarification of the matter. In one case at Ono, the proceeding was ultimately closed without disciplinary measures, even though the posts attributed to the student included a prayer for the residents of Gaza and a call to refrain from posting celebratory content during the war.

^[42] See footnote 48, decision on Adalah’s request to cancel an interim suspension; the student was suspended immediately on the basis of a “free translation” and an interpretation of her posts, without her position being heard and without a concrete factual basis being presented. When she argued that her presumption of innocence had been denied, the committee replied that “the fact that she made the post was not denied” (on file with Adalah).

^[43] The Council for Higher Education Law, 1958.

^[44] In this context, Adalah pointed to a similar position expressed by several senior law lecturers shortly after the beginning of the war. In their view, the connection to studies must be significant and clear, while a loose or vague connection does not suffice. See footnote 12.

^[45] Disciplinary proceedings at the College of Management Academic Studies, decision of the disciplinary committee, January 2024 (on file with Adalah).

^[46] Disciplinary proceeding at the Technion, judgment, January 2024 (on file with Adalah).

^[47] Disciplinary proceeding at Tel Aviv University, judgment, March 2024 (on file with Adalah).

^[48] Disciplinary proceeding at the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College, decision, December 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[49] Einav Halabi and Tamar Trabelsi Hadad, “Singing ‘death to Arabs’ outside the dormitories: racist calls near TAU | documentation,” Ynet, 18 May 2022 [Hebrew].

^[50] Disciplinary proceeding at the Technion, judgment, January 2024 (on file with Adalah).

^[51] Disciplinary complaint against the chair of the Technion student union following a public post from Gaza in which the symbol of the student union appeared; response of the Technion disciplinary prosecution according to which “it is not within our authority to enter the boundaries of the army,” 2025 (on file with Adalah).

^[52] Disciplinary proceeding at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, decision of the special disciplinary committee for the period of the “Swords of Iron War,” November 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[53] Email notice on behalf of the president of the Hebrew University and the rector to all students, concerning the conviction of a student of serious sex offenses, 7 May 2026 (on file with Adalah).

^[54] See footnote 60, the Tel Aviv University judgment (on file with Adalah).

^[55] Ibid. (on file with Adalah).

^[56] See footnote 43 (on file with Adalah).

^[57] See footnote 60, the Tel Aviv University judgment (on file with Adalah).

^[58] See footnote 68, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (on file with Adalah).

^[59] Ibid. (on file with Adalah); for the source of the doctrine, see EA 1/65 Yardor v. Chairman of the Central Elections Committee for the Sixth Knesset, PD 19(3) 365 (1965).

^[60] Ibid. (on file with Adalah).

^[61] Disciplinary proceeding at WIZO College, decision of the disciplinary committee, November 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[62] Disciplinary proceeding at the Yezreel Valley Academic College, judgment, January 2024 (on file with Adalah).

^[63] Disciplinary proceeding at Ramat Gan Academic College, decision of the disciplinary committee, October 2023 ( on file with Adalah ).

^[64] The disciplinary charges and their wording differed from institution to institution, in accordance with the internal regulations of each institution.

^[65] See footnote 79 (on file with Adalah).

^[66] Ibid., judgment (on file with Adalah).

^[67] Disciplinary proceeding at Ruppin Academic Center, letter of suspension from studies, October 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[68] Ibid., summons to a hearing before the disciplinary committee, December 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[69] Ibid., decision, December 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[70] Disciplinary proceeding at WIZO College, letter of suspension from studies, October 2023 (on file with Adalah). The letter is similar in content to all letters sent to students at the college who were subject to disciplinary measures over social media posts.

^[71] Ibid., decision, November 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[72] Ibid. (on file with Adalah).

^[73] Ibid., decision of the superior appeals committee, December 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[74] Disciplinary proceeding at the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College, decision on suspension from studies in the framework of a disciplinary proceeding, October 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[75] Disciplinary proceeding at Zefat College, notice of the opening of a disciplinary proceeding and immediate suspension from studies, April 2025 (on file with Adalah). For the disciplinary indictment, see footnote 47.

^[76] Ibid., judgment, July 2025 (on file with Adalah).

^[77] The original video, which was shared from the Instagram account of Eye on Palestine, was not located by the authors of this report.

^[78] Disciplinary proceeding at Ben-Gurion University, decision on appeal in the framework of a disciplinary proceeding, February 2024 (on file with Adalah).

^[79] Disciplinary proceeding at the Technion, expert opinion on behalf of the prosecution (on file with Adalah).

^[80] Disciplinary proceeding at Ruppin Academic Center, hearing record of the disciplinary committee, January 2024 (on file with Adalah).

^[81] The full content of the prayer as it appears in the video is as follows (in Arabic): انصــر اهــل فلســطين/ م هداء/ الله ازل الش ى من ي اعل دك ف هداءهم عن ل ش م تقب ر/ الله ون فانتص م مغلوب م انه اء/ الله م ضعف م انه الله ا ا الله ي ا ي ل دعاءن تر/ واقب ة والس ام العافي ي تم ن ف ا رب العالمي م ي ظ حيه ن/ واحف ا رب العالمي م ي في جرحه اش لم ه وس م علي اللهلّ ن/ ص ا رب العالمي ا ي م وبلادن ظ بلاده م احف ا/ الله ا مولان ا ي م وعدون ى عدوه م عل الله/ انصره يدنا محمد وبرك على س. In translation: “Grant victory to the people of Palestine / O God, they are weak / O God, they are defeated, so grant victory / O God, accept their fallen with You in the highest stations of the martyrs / O God, heal their wounds, O Lord of the worlds / and protect their living, O Lord of the worlds, in complete well-being and shelter / and accept our prayer, O God, O God / grant them victory over their enemy and our enemy, O our Lord / O God, protect their land and our land, O Lord of the worlds / may

God bless our master Muhammad and grant him peace and blessing.”

^[82] Disciplinary proceeding at Zefat Academic College, judgment in the framework of a disciplinary proceeding from October 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[83] Ibid., decision on appeal, March 2024 (on file with Adalah).

^[84] Disciplinary proceeding at the University of Haifa, translated by an expert on behalf of the defense, April 2024 ( on file with Adalah ).

^[85] Ibid., judgment April 2024 (on file with Adalah).

^[86] Disciplinary proceeding at Netanya Academic College, email, October 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[87] Disciplinary proceeding at Netanya Academic College, judgment, November 2023 (on file with Adalah).

^[88] Disciplinary proceeding at Tel Aviv University, disciplinary indictment, November 2023 (on file with Adalah). For the judgment, see footnote 60.

^[89] Ibid., summations on behalf of the prosecution, February 2024 (on file with Adalah).

^[90] Ibid., judgment and sentence, March and May 2024 (on file with Adalah).

^[91] For cases in which academic institutions refrained from applying the disciplinary law and emphasized the limits of their authority, see chapter 3 on “Expanding the Boundaries of Surveillance and Enforcement.”

^[92] On apartheid based on the distinction between the administrative track and the constitutional track during the period of the military government on the matter of freedom of expression, see: Hassan Jabareen, “Kol Ha’am of Agranat! The Voice of Which People?,” Iyunei Mishpat 44 (2021) 627-660 [ Hebrew ]. 

16.09.26

Editorial Note

George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, Washington, DC, will host an event on 25 Years of the War on Terror, on September 17–18, 2026. It will “examine lessons from the War on Terror, explore what resistance to this framework of state violence has looked like,” and shall ask “how we can imagine a future where infrastructure of the War on Terror is finally abolished.” The conference will also “hold space to mourn and remember survivors and the millions of victims of the War on Terror, as we continue to demand accountability, justice and reparations.”

This event, titled “When Will This War End: Lessons and Legacies of the War on Terror,” is organized by the Muslim Counterpublics Lab (MCL), a grassroots organization based in Washington, D.C., dedicated to dismantling Islamophobia and challenging state-sponsored oppression. Founded in 2022 by Dr. Maha Hilal, MCL focuses on “empowering Muslim communities to reclaim their narratives and confront systemic injustice.” Hilal is a Muslim Arab American and an expert on institutionalized Islamophobia.

Thirty additional organizations have joined the MCL in sponsoring the event, which plans to examine both “25 years of the Global War on Terror and 250 years of the American empire.” It will analyze “how racialized narratives, Islamophobia, and xenophobia have shaped surveillance, militarization, and national security policies.” The conference is also showing a special exhibition titled “Shattering Justice & Re-Making the Muslim Threat.”

The conference explicitly connects the historical framework of the U.S. Global War on Terror to current geopolitics involving Israel and the Palestinian territories. Organizers and speakers argue that the domestic and international counterterrorism infrastructures developed over the last 25 years are being deployed to justify state violence and suppress advocacy.

Panels and discussions focusing on Israel include: 

• “Palestine and the War on Terror: State Repression and (Dis)arming Genocidaires,” a session focusing on the legal, academic, and organizing perspectives regarding the domestic crackdowns faced by individuals speaking out for Palestine, as well as resisting U.S. military and financial aid to Israel.
• “Tracing the Global War on Terror from Past to Present,” an opening plenary connecting historical U.S. post-9/11 military campaigns (such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan) to what organizers describe as the U.S.-Israeli military actions in Gaza and broader escalation toward Iran.
• “Manufacturing Consent for State Violence,” an analysis of corporate media narratives, critiquing how “counterterrorism” frameworks and terminology have been weaponized by states—including the U.S. and Israel—to build public support for military occupations and violence.

The conference organizers note that after 9/11, President George W. Bush spoke to Congress and announced the launch of the War on Terror. He stated: “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” The conference leaders found much wrong with the War on Terror, describing the President’s definition as a “dangerously expansive one.” For them, it “quickly evolved into a framework of warfare, draconian immigration policies, mass surveillance, terrorism prosecutions, and detention and torture that has not only endured, but expanded with US wars devastating Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Nigeria among other countries. Some estimates calculate 1 million killed directly from war, with millions more killed from sanctions, starvation, disease, the destruction of sovereign state institutions, and displacement.”  

According to the organizers, for twenty-five years, “the architecture of the War on Terror has profoundly reshaped the lives of Muslims, Arabs and other targeted communities in the United States and across the globe.”

Because of these alleged consequences, the conference will “analyze the impacts of the global War on Terror and how the United States and its allies continue to deploy War on Terror frameworks, particularly Islamophobia and xenophobia, to manufacture consent for draconian surveillance and immigration policies, and exorbitant military spending for campaigns of ethnic cleansing, genocide, occupation, and extractivism.”

The goal of the conference is to “confront the quarter-century of structural violence that has operated under problematic, violent policies that claim to battle ‘terrorism’.”  

The conference would explore “what resistance to this framework of state violence has looked like, and ask how we can imagine a future where infrastructure of the War on Terror is finally abolished.”

This conference “will hold space to mourn and remember survivors and the millions of victims of the War on Terror, as we continue to demand accountability, justice and reparations.”

The sessions of the conference include: “From Iraq and Afghanistan to Palestine and Iran”, “The Global War on Terror’s Blueprint (domestically and globally)”, “Immigration and the Carceral State”, “Exposing and Targeting War Profiteers”, “Journalistic Responsibility: Countering State Propaganda”, and “Shattering Justice and Remaking the Muslim Threat,” among others. 

The Conference is going to “Interrogate the War on Terror as an enduring system of power that has evolved into a permanent global infrastructure of state violence, shaping law, policy, and public discourse”; “Expose the role of Islamophobia + xenophobia and analyze how racialized narratives have justified surveillance, detention, militarization, and national security policies”; “Center the experiences of impacted communities and highlight the human costs of the War on Terror on Muslim and marginalized communities”; “Critically examine legal and political frameworks that has facilitated ongoing state violence under the guise of ‘counterterrorism’”; “Highlight and learn from resistance movements from grassroots organizing to narrative interventions to policy change”; and “Envision abolitionist futures by fostering collective imagination around dismantling this infrastructure and build systems rooted in justice, care, and collective liberation.”

The overall goal is to “confront the quarter-century of structural violence that has operated under problematic, violent policies that claim to battle ‘terrorism’,”  and “what resistance to this framework of state violence has looked like, and ask how we can imagine a future where infrastructure of the War on Terror is finally abolished.”  The conference would explore “what resistance to this framework of state violence has looked like, and ask how we can imagine a future where infrastructure of the War on Terror is finally abolished.”

Finally, the conference “will hold space to mourn and remember survivors and the millions of victims of the War on Terror, as we continue to demand accountability, justice and reparations.”

Those who follow our work in Israel Academia Monitor would notice that the pattern is clear, instead of accusing the radical Islamist terrorists of perpetuating a global terrorist network, these American Muslim scholars and intellectuals use their academic platform to put the blame on the US, Israel, and the West – the terror-stricken countries.  

But even by the standards of Israel Academia Monitor case studies, the claims of the MCL activists are egregious.  First, they represent a total moral inversion, meaning, they reverse the moral roles of victim and perpetrator. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were clear aggressors on 9/11, killing some 3000 people in the Twin Towers. Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which murdered some 1,200, mostly civilians, on October 7, 2023, were also clear aggressors.

The empirical inversion of facts is equally glaring, most notably with regard to the claims that the “millions of people” died in “Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Nigeria among other countries,” because of the United States or the “West.”  Civilians died in many countries, especially in the Middle East, when al-Qaeda, which morphed into ISIS, launched attacks in Iraq and Syria before moving to Africa. All this without mentioning that Iran – through its Axis of Resistance: Hezbollah, Popular Mobilization Forces, and the Houthis – killed thousands of people, on top of the Hamas massacre. 

Already in April 2024, George Washington University was accused of failing to address antisemitism, when numerous events were recorded, including calls to destroy Israel outside an event with Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. The anti-Israel activists protested outside and shouted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and called Thomas-Greenfield a “Zionist Imperial Puppet.” They handed out pamphlets with the writing “Amerikkka” to describe the U.S. 

Universities must not allow anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-West, terror apologists among their midst. The war on terror is not over.

REFERENCES:

ABOUT

“The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

— Milan Kundera

On September 20th, 2001 – nine days after the 9/11 attacks – President George W. Bush gave a speech to Congress announcing the launch of the War on Terror.  His definition was a dangerously expansive one:  “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” The War on Terror quickly evolved into a framework of warfare, draconian immigration policies, mass surveillance, terrorism prosecutions, and detention and torture that has not only endured, but expanded with US wars devastating Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Nigeria among other countries. Some estimates calculate 1 million killed directly from war, with millions more killed from sanctions, starvation, disease, the destruction of sovereign state institutions, and displacement.  For twenty five years, the architecture of the War on Terror has profoundly reshaped the lives of Muslims, Arabs and other targeted communities in the United States and across the globe.

This conference will analyze the impacts of the global War on Terror and how the United States and its allies continue to deploy War on Terror frameworks, particularly Islamophobia and xenophobia, to manufacture consent for draconian surveillance and immigration policies, and exorbitant military spending for campaigns of ethnic cleansing, genocide, occupation, and extractivism. 

The goal of this conference is to confront the quarter-century of structural violence that has operated under problematic, violent policies that claim to battle “terrorism” by bringing together scholars, organizers, advocates, survivors, journalists, and community members to examine lessons from the War on Terror, explore what resistance to this framework of state violence has looked like, and ask how we can imagine a future where infrastructure of the War on Terror is finally abolished. Finally, this conference will hold space to mourn and remember survivors and the millions of victims of the War on Terror, as we continue to demand accountability, justice and reparations.

What You Can Expect

• Connecting with Conference Speakers and Participants from Diverse Fields: Scholars, Organizers, Advocates, Survivors, Journalists
• 8+ Planeries (ex: Past to Present, From Iraq and Afghanistan to Palestine and Iran, The Global War on Terror’s Blueprint (domestically and globally), Immigration and the Carceral State)
• 4+ Workshops: (ex: Exposing and Targeting War Profiteers, Journalistic Responsibility: Countering State Propaganda)
• Gallery Exhibit for War on Terror Timeline: Shattering Justice and Remaking the Muslim Threat

Conference Goals

• Interrogate the War on Terror as an enduring system of power that has evolved into a permanent global infrastructure of state violence, shaping law, policy, and public discourse.
• Expose the role of Islamophobia + xenophobia and analyze how racialized narratives have justified surveillance, detention, militarization, and national security policies
• Center the experiences of impacted communities and highlight the human costs of the War on Terror on Muslim and marginalized communities.
• Critically examine legal and political frameworks that has facilitated ongoing state violence under the guise of “counterterrorism.”
• Highlight and learn from resistance movements from grassroots organizing to narrative interventions to policy change.
• Envision abolitionist futures by fostering collective imagination around dismantling this infrastructure and build systems rooted in justice, care, and collective liberation.

=======================================================

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Muslim Counterpublics Lab

25 Years of the War on TerrorAbout the event Scholars, organizers, advocates, survivors, journalists, and community members will examine lessons from the War on Terror, explore what resistance to this framework of state violence has looked like, and ask how we can imagine a future where infrastructure of the War on Terror is finally abolished. This conference will hold space to mourn and remember survivors and the millions of victims of the War on Terror, as we continue to demand accountability, justice and reparations.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Thursday Sep 17th

Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E St NW, Washington, DC 20052

Light Breakfast and Registration

8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

Reception Area between City View and State Room (7th Floor)

Introductory Remarks

9:30 AM – 9:45 AM

City View Room

Speakers:

Dr. Melani McAlister, Professor of American Studies & International Affairs; Director of the Institute for Middle East Studies

Dr. Maha Hilal, Muslim Counterpublics Lab

Grounding Plenary

TRACING THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR FROM PAST TO PRESENT

9:45 AM – 10:45 AM

City View Room

Speakers: Nazia Kazi·Baher Azmy·Alka Pradhan

Moderator: Dr. Mariam Durrani

Block I for Simultaneous Sessions

Presentation and Discussion:

THE “WORST OF THE WORST”: THE POST 9/11 CARCERAL STATE FROM ENEMY COMBATANTS TO MIGRANT DETAINEES

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM

City View Room

Speakers: Aliya Hussain·Hassan Ahmad·Yumna Rizvi·Fahad Mahamud

Moderator: Mikki Charles

Case Study Workshop:

MUSLIM MAJORITY COUNTRIES AND THE INTERNAL ADOPTION OF COUNTERTERRORISM FRAMEWORKS

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM

State Room

Speakers: Suad Abdel Aziz·Niala Mohammad·Habib Battah·Yasmine Taeb

Moderator: Sanaa Ansari Khan

Luncheon Fireside Chat

STATE VIOLENCE BY DESIGN: ANTI-INDIGENOUS RACISM, ANTI-BLACKNESS AND THE HISTORICAL LEGACY OF AMERIKKKA

12:30 PM – 1:30 PM

City View Room

Speakers: Margari Hill·Jen Deerinwater

Moderator: Dr. Irene Calis

Block II for Simultaneous Sessions

Workshop and Discussion:

MANUFACTURING CONSENT FOR STATE VIOLENCE: MEDIA COMPLICITY IN THE WAR ON TERROR

1:30 PM – 3:00 PM

State Room

Speakers: Nausheen Husain·Dr. Assal Rad·Sana Saeed

Moderator: Nima Shirazi

Presentation and Discussion:

WHO’S THE TERRORIST? THE DOMESTIC LEGAL BLUEPRINT OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE

1:30 PM – 3:00 PM

City View Room

Speakers: Fatema Ahmad·Arjun Sethi·Steve Downs

Moderator: Fahd Ahmed

Closing Day 1 Panel + Workshop

PALESTINE AND THE WAR ON TERROR: (DIS)ARMING GENOCIDAIRES AND STATE REPRESSION

3:15 PM – 4:45 PM

City View Room

Speakers: Sara Arman·Dr. Irene Calis·Dylan Saba· Shelly Cohen Fudge

Moderator: Tina Al-Khersan

Conference Mixer Onsite

5:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Friday
Sep 18th

Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E St NW, Washington, DC 20052

Light Breakfast and Registration

8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

Reception Area between City View and State Room (7th Floor)

Introduction + Plenary

INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN MUSLIM: ISLAMOPHOBIA IN THE WAR ON TERROR

9:30 AM – 10:00 AM

City View Room

Speaker: Dr. Maha Hilal

WE REFUSE TO BE SILENT: TESTIMONIES OF SURVIVORS AND POLITICAL PRISONERS POST 9/11

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM

City View Room

Speakers: Mansoor Adayfi·Nida Abu Baker· Mariam Abu-Ali · Fadya Risheq

Moderator: Dr. Maha Hilal

Lunch

11:30 AM – 1:00 PM

Block III for Simultaneous Sessions

Workshop and Discussion:

CONFRONTING STATE AND CORPORATE VIOLENCE: FROM ACCOUNTABILITY TO REPARATIONS

1:00 PM – 2:30 PM

City View Room

Speakers: Arash Azizzada ·Ramah Kudaimi·Gabi Schubiner

Moderator: Roshni Ahmed

Case Study Workshop:

WHO CAN SAY WHAT? THE TERRORISM PARADIGM AND CRIMINALIZATION OF DISSENT

1:00 PM – 2:30 PM

Lindner Family Commons Room 602 (6th Floor)

Speakers: Sufia Khalid·Nicole Nguyen

Moderator: Sanaa Ansari Khan

Conference Closing Plenary

CONNECTED STRUGGLES, COLLECTIVE FUTURES: BUILDING A WORLD BEYOND STATE VIOLENCE

3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

City View Room

Speakers: Rashida James-Saadiya·Kairi Al-Amin·Kali Rubaii·Roshni Ahmed·Maryam Kashani

Moderator: Loan Tran

Conference Mixer Offsite (Location TBD)

5:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Institute for Middle East Studies The Institute for Middle East Studies (IMES) was founded in 2007 as part of a broad, university-wide initiative to support academic work on the Middle East. IMES faculty represent a breadth of disciplines from political science to media and public affairs to religion to international business. IMES also sponsors outstanding visiting scholars focused on the Middle East, enriching the institute’s scholarship and academic programs. The Institute hosts both academic and policy-oriented event series that are open to the public, in addition to flagship events such as the IMES Annual Conference and the Annual Kuwait Chair Lecture. IMES also hosts a variety of workshops and professional development events for K-14 teachers on both teaching the Arabic language and on teaching about the Middle East.

IMES is also dedicated to supporting educational programs that focus on the modern Middle East, such as the Elliott School’s B.A. and M.A. programs in Middle East Studies. The Institute serves as the administrative home of these programs, and offers funding to support student research. IMES encourages intellectual collaboration among members of the George Washington University (GWU) community interested in the Middle East, between GWU research institutes, and with other organizations in the Washington area. In promoting and publicizing new work on the Middle East, the IMES aims to deepen understanding of this critical region among scholars, students, and the broader public.

Muslim Counterpublics Lab 

Muslim Counterpublics Lab (MCL) is a grassroots, community-building organization that uses the tools of research, writing, and organizing as well as direct, victim-centered support and advocacy campaign programming to challenge systems of oppression rooted in Islamophobia. These structures include state and state-sanctioned violence ranging from widespread surveillance and persecution of Muslim communities by law enforcement and immigration authorities to indefinite detention and torture. We believe that in order to be effective in this work, we must confront the pervasive dehumanization of Muslims head-on and offer support to historically marginalized and oppressed communities.

Visit the IMES website >>>

Visit the MCL website >>>

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25 Years Later, WoT has the “War on Terror” achieved?

4 Sep 2026

25 Years Later, WoT has the “War on Terror” achieved?

Imtiaz Muqbil

Bangkok — In a few days, the world will mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The “War on Terror” which followed had a profound impact on Travel & Tourism — increased security measures, visa restrictions, racial profiling, travel disruptions, warfare, draconian immigration policies, mass surveillance, terrorism prosecutions, and detention and torture.

Arguably the worst affected business sector, Travel & Tourism has paid both the price and the costs.

Worse, it is continuing to do so, with no end in sight.

Yet, the topic has never been discussed at any travel industry forum. That gap is now set to be plugged.

Between Sep 17 – 18, 2026 the Institute of Middle East Studies, George Washington University in Washington DC, is co-sponsoring a conference to “analyse the impacts of the global War on Terror and how the United States and its allies continue to deploy War on Terror frameworks, particularly Islamophobia and xenophobia, to manufacture consent for draconian surveillance and immigration policies, and exorbitant military spending for campaigns of ethnic cleansing, genocide, occupation, and extractivism.”

Says the introductory preamble, “Scholars, organizers, advocates, survivors, journalists, and community members will examine lessons from the War on Terror, explore what resistance to this framework of state violence has looked like, and ask how we can imagine a future where infrastructure of the War on Terror is finally abolished. This conference will hold space to mourn and remember survivors and the millions of victims of the War on Terror, as we continue to demand accountability, justice and reparations.”

The conference is being organised by Muslim Counterpublics Lab (MCL), a grassroots, community-building organization whose mission is to “disrupt and subvert dehumanizing narratives that are designed and deployed to justify state violence against Muslims. Its vision is to create a world where Muslims and all marginalized communities have political, social, and economic power to build societies rooted in liberation instead of oppression.”

Travel & Tourism forums will be encouraged to note that the event has attracted a high level of sponsorship support from multiple organisations with shared values. This opens up a clear window of opportunity to build on the conference subject matter and more comprehensively analyse its impact on Travel & Tourism.

The rationale for the conferences notes that the right after 9/11, the “War on Terror quickly evolved into a framework of warfare, draconian immigration policies, mass surveillance, terrorism prosecutions, and detention and torture that has not only endured, but expanded with US wars devastating Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Nigeria among other countries. Some estimates calculate 1 million killed directly from war, with millions more killed from sanctions, starvation, disease, the destruction of sovereign state institutions, and displacement. For twenty five years, the architecture of the War on Terror has profoundly reshaped the lives of Muslims, Arabs and other targeted communities in the United States and across the globe.”

The organisers say they “know that this anniversary – like many anniversaries past will be used to narrate events that justifies the multiple wars and systemic violence of the War on Terror, while also legitimizing the ongoing criminalization and demonization of our communities domestically and across the globe.

“At the twenty-five-year juncture of the catastrophic War on Terror and the infrastructure of state violence it has institutionalized, it is imperative that we hold space for our communities to reflect on this history, our resistance, and how we can pave the path toward our collective liberation.””

The conference will include a striking physical and digital exhibition headlined, “Shattering Justice & Re-Making the Muslim Threat”. Through a meticulous excavation of key events, policies, and laws enacted in the wake of the attacks and the launch of the War on Terror, the exhibit exposes the deep-rooted system of Islamophobia that has shaped U.S. national security policy and normalized the criminalization, surveillance, and dehumanization of Muslim communities.

“A series of bold, visceral poster panels are designed to unsettle, disrupt, and compel critical reflection of what justice and reckoning could and should look like and encourage viewers to look beyond the damage done and commit to the urgent work of solidarity, transformation, and abolition.”

Register for the GWOT Conference https://waronterror25.org/

The full schedule can be found here: https://waronterror25.org/schedule/

The exhibits can be found here: www.shatteringjustice.org

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zinneducationproject36w

How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism? — Howard Zinn, HowardZinn.org

#HandsOffVenezuela

Check out the lesson, Whose “Terrorism”? https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/whose-terrorism/

About the Zinn Education Project

The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people’s history in classrooms across the country. The Zinn Education Project is coordinated by two non-profit organizations, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, that have spent decades developing and providing social justice resources for teachers.

We offer free people’s history lessons and books for middle and high school classrooms; curriculum workshops; online classes with people’s historians; teacher-led study groups; a teacher leader fellowship, and campaigns on Reconstruction, climate justice, and defending the right to teach truthfully.

Since 2008, the Zinn Education Project has introduced students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula. With more than 177,000 people registered, and growing by more than 10,000 new registrants every year, the Zinn Education Project has become a leading resource for teachers and teacher educators.

The empowering potential of studying history is often lost in a textbook-driven trivial pursuit of names and dates. We believe that through taking a more engaging and more honest look at the past, we can help equip students — and all of us — with the analytical tools to make sense of and improve the world today. For a more complete description of our approach, read why teach people’s history.

Our website offers free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and grade level. Based on the approach to history highlighted in Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States, our teaching materials emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history.

Our daily This Day in History posts highlight stories ignored in most textbooks and are shared on social media where we have more than 500,000 followers.

We also produce a regular If We Knew Our History column that features articles by teachers, journalists, and scholars that expose the myths told in corporate curricula and offer ideas for teaching outside the textbook.

We offer professional development workshops in collaboration with school districts, teacher unions, and at teacher conferences. To support teacher leaders, we host the Prentiss Charney Fellowship.

We have several campaigns including Teach Reconstruction, Teach Climate Justice, Teaching for Black Lives, and Abolish Columbus Day. In the spring of 2021, we launched a Teach Truth pledge and we have been active in campaigns to defend teaching honestly in the face of anti-CRT laws and book bans.

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Failure to address antisemitism at George Washington University is a betrayal to students

Failure to address antisemitism at George Washington University is a betrayal to students

 by Sabrina Soffer, opinion contributor – 04/14/24 4:00 PM

Calls to destroy Israel throbbed outside the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs last Thursday. Members of GW Student Coalition for Palestine (GWSCP) protested an event with U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, shouting militant chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and calling Thomas-Greenfield a “Zionist Imperial Puppet.” They even hung a dozen-foot-long Palestinian flag over the building and handed out pamphlets that used the spelling “Amerikkka” to describe the U.S. amid claiming that “imperialism in blackface is not progress,” referencing zionism.

With campus culture increasingly toxic in the wake of Hamas’s massacre of 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, the school administration promised to take steps to “strengthen our community in challenging times.” Receiving a generous “C” grade according to the new Anti-Defamation League (ADF) campus antisemitism report card, GW is failing to live up to its commitments.

Strains on GW’s community became evident on Oct. 25, when members of GW’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJPGWU) projected slogans lauding violence, such as “glory to our martyrs,” on the exterior of Gelman Library. GW’s administration enacted a 90-day suspension of SJPGWU for violating university policy to which the group responded by reconstituting itself as GWSCP, detached from formal university affiliation.

Following continued anti-Israel disruptions that violated policy and pressure from donors, parents, alumni, students and beyond, the school administration created a three-pronged plan to “foster productive dialogue,” “strengthen partnerships and support,” and “renew policies and procedures” to protect Jewish students and pave the path toward a more harmonious community. The Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities also began disciplinary proceedings for specific students engaging in severe, frequent and pervasive breaches of the student code of conduct, including but not limited to tearing down posters from the inside of GW’s Hillel building. Around three months later, GW has failed to enforce its new plan and policies while emboldening a loud, fringe minority.

While imperfect, the plan did institute new clear policies and reinforce existing ones. Such policies would ensure that students engaging in “community disturbance,” making “excessive noise either inside or outside a building, including but not limited to shouting, pounding objects or surfaces, or playing music or other electronics at a loud volume in a manner that disturbs others,” are prohibited from occurring in the first place. 

GW has a long history of antisemitism and has been under fire before for allowing it to fester. Last April, the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into GW after the university failed to address Jewish-Israeli students’ concerns over alleged antisemitic harassment by psychology professor Lara Sheehi — who recently left GW and now teaches in Doha, Qatar. 

Thursday’s protest violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance — which, as of 2019, includes antisemitism by executive order. 

Amid the demonstrations, students complained that they were “unable to focus” on their studies and even quizzes due to the raucous and sheer shock. This clearly violates GW’s discriminatory harassment policies, whereby behaviors “in any context” even without the “intent to harm” that “unreasonably interfere with, limit, or deprive an individual of participating or benefiting from the university’s educational…experience” breach the code.  

GW’s administration certainly seeks to avoid another Title VI investigation and the prospect of a lawsuit as many other universities, like The Ohio State University, have recently incurred. An easy first step to averting this would be addressing issues of student organizations masterfully skirting around accountability. If the same behaviors are occurring on the same premises, with the same students, and leading to the same breaches of the student code of conduct, there should be no reason that school policy does not apply. 

Abiding by policy is a duty. Eradicating the hypocrisy and moral rot occurring inside our institution is imperative. If GW seeks to regain the trust of its Jewish and Israeli students and remain true to its values of diversity, equity and inclusion, it must enforce its new plan and add deterrence measures.

In a disappointing move, GW’s Fall 2023-Spring 2024 Student Association administration decided to discontinue the antisemitism task force instituted by former Student Association President Christian Zidouemba last March. The university administration has failed to institute a task force linked to the school administration even after various requests from parents and students in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks. While task forces’ efficacy is contested due to concerns of mere performativity, one could have helped address antisemitic behaviors from the onset, before they escalated. Failing to form an antisemitism task force demonstrates GW’s lack of seriousness when it comes to protecting all students.

Jewish students not only deal with hostility in the campus public square, but they frequently contend with professors propagating distortions about Israel and anti-Zionism. Teaching with bias is even more problematic due to the inherent power imbalance in the student-professor relationship, where the student often regards the professor as an expert intellectual authority. Students with limited knowledge of the Middle East are thus inclined to join in the inflammatory activism of their GWSCP peers. 

Inside the esteemed Elliott School of International Affairs sits the Institute of Middle East Studies (IMES), whose many scholars are professors at GW. IMES also hosts the DC Arabic Teacher’s Council, which is sponsored by Qatari Foundation International (QFI). QFI’s mark on IMES has been clear in the programming biased against Israel that it has presented before, and most notably, after Oct. 7.  

On Oct. 16, IMES facilitated a panel of Middle East experts who did not have not a single firmly pro-Israel perspective; on Oct. 18, IMES hosted the screening of “Israelism,” a film containing distorted facts and anti-Israel propaganda; and on Dec. 4, three IMES professors spoke at a GW Medical School panel that ignored Hamas atrocities and defended its attack on Israel as a “right of resistance.”

Fast forward to this week: On April 19, IMES will hold its annual conference titled “Middle East Knowledge Production In the Aftermath of October 7.” The array of scholars chairing the panels—many of whom spoke at the panel on Oct. 1—and language of “decoloniz[ing] academic knowledge production in Middle East Studies,” “Palestine/Israel Studies in the shadow of a genocide,” and “knowledge-production amidst dehumanization” with zero reference to the hostages or condemnation of Hamas on their website, paired with IMES’s past programming, make clear the conference will not be balanced. 

According to GW’s Faculty Code of Conduct, academics must defend “intellectual honesty, freedom of inquiry and instruction, and the free expression of ideas.” 

If GW is truly committed to values of diversity and the principle that “academic institutions exist for the transmission of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, the development of students, and the general well-being of society” where “free inquiry and free expression are indispensable to the attainment of these goals,” it must also review the integrity of the curriculum and institute hiring practices that include pro-Israel Jewish faculty members and ideally, those who can present all narratives of conflict with historical fact. Enrollment in an institution as prestigious as GW must guarantee that all students are afforded true academic freedom—that of academic diversity, the inclusion of all perspectives in their learning, and the equal opportunity to learn in peace alongside their peers. 

Shallow excuses for failing to enforce school policy do not suffice. Above all, GW and all academic institutions have the fiduciary duty to protect all its students—including Jewish-Israeli and Zionist students. With lawsuits looming, and reputational damage imminent, the failure to do so may result in serious penalties for GW and its community.

Sabrina Soffer is the former commissioner of GW’s Antisemitism Task Force and a 2023-2024 fellow at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA)

09.09.26

Editorial Note

On September 3, 2026, the US House of Representatives approved a bill penalizing universities that align with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. 

The bill, the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act of 2026, calls for the Department of Education to publicly list all the universities that do not abide by the Act’s provisions. To become law, it must pass the Senate and receive a presidential signature. 

The bill was first introduced on July 29, 2025, and would withhold federal funding from a university that participates in a boycott of Israel. According to the bill initiators, a boycott does not serve “the security, stability, and economic vitality of the United States.”

The HR 4795 bill, co-sponsored by North Carolina Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx and New Jersey Democrat Rep. Josh Gottheimer, passed in a 237-to-169 vote, with 203 Republicans, 33 Democrats and one Independent in favor. Whether Democrats will grant sufficient support to pass the legislation in the Senate remains unclear. 

If the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act goes on to become law, it would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to require universities to refrain from “participating in a nonexpressive commercial boycott of Israel” in order to remain qualified for certain funds. Expressive conduct is “symbolic speech” designed to relay a message, like picketing, marching, flag desecration, and draft-card burnings. 

In addition to forbidding boycotts, the bill also stipulates that institutions receiving such funds would need to “certify that students are not unreasonably obstructed from participating in academic programs in Israel.”

Gottheimer, who is Jewish, said in a statement, “This bill is an important step forward in ensuring academic freedom for all students… I will push the Senate to take up the bill shortly so it can become law.” Foxx stressed that the Act “takes a strong stand against the BDS movement on college campuses across the nation… This legislation has true teeth and completely severs any possible taxpayer support of these concrete campaigns of antisemitism in the form of BDS and academic boycotts of Israel,” Foxx said.   

The wording of the Act includes the following:

“An Act to amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to prohibit an institution that participates in a nonexpressive commercial boycott of Israel from being eligible for certain funds under that Act, to require an institution that participates in certain programs under that Act to certify that students are not unreasonably obstructed from participating in academic programs in Israel, and for other purposes.” And that, “The institution will not engage in a nonexpressive commercial boycott of a major strategic partner of the United States.“

Another issue is eligibility for Title VI funds. Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965 is amended by adding at the end the following new sections: “Annual requirement for institutional eligibility.—Not later than July 31 of each calendar year beginning on or after the date of enactment of the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act of 2026, an institution of higher education participating or applying to participate in any program under this title shall submit to the Secretary the certification required under subsection (b). An institution that does not submit such certification by July 31 of a calendar year shall be ineligible to receive any funds under this title in the first fiscal year that begins after such July 31, including any funds under this title that would otherwise have been available to the institution in such fiscal year for a grant awarded during a previous fiscal year.“ 

The Act includes a certification stating that “An institution shall certify to the Secretary that, for the period beginning on the date of such certification and ending on July 31 of the following year.” The institution will “permit students and faculty of the certifying institution to participate in academic programs, including conferences, teaching exchanges, cultural exchanges, study abroad programs, joint research, and other collaborative educational activities, in a major strategic partner… of the United States in the same manner, and under the same terms and conditions, as students and faculty of the institution are permitted to participate in academic programs in other foreign countries”; and “permit students and faculty of postsecondary educational institutions in such a major strategic partner to participate in academic programs offered by the certifying institution, including conferences, teaching exchanges, cultural exchanges, study abroad programs, joint research, and other collaborative educational activities, in the same manner, and under the same terms and conditions, as students and faculty of other foreign postsecondary educational institutions that are not in such a major strategic partner.“

Specifically stating, “It is the sense of Congress that limitations on cooperative efforts by institutions of higher education, consortia of such institutions, or partnerships between nonprofit educational organizations and institutions of higher education with a major strategic partner… of the United States do not serve the security, stability, and economic vitality of the United States.”  

The bill has been sent to the Senate for consideration, but the leadership has not yet set a date for the floor to debate or vote. The exact timeline and ultimate prospects in the Senate remain uncertain.  

Since 2002, Israel has been facing academic boycott attempts from pro-Palestinian / anti-Israel activists, a trend that has intensified after October 7, 2023.

But the proposed legislation extends beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At present, Jews—and their collective embodiment in the State of Israel—are among the most harshly targeted groups in this ideological campaign. But Jews may be the proverbial canary in the coal mine. The model developed to delegitimize Israel and subject it to BDS, and other forms of institutional exclusion, need not remain confined to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Once such methods become accepted as legitimate instruments for advancing political causes, they can be applied to other countries, institutions, professions, corporations, and groups deemed ideologically unacceptable. What begins as a campaign against Israel can therefore establish a broader precedent for using academic, economic, and institutional power to punish those who fall outside an increasingly politicized consensus.

However, there is little evidence that the universities themselves are either able or willing to reverse this growing politicization. The question, therefore, is whether the government can simply stand aside while publicly supported institutions become increasingly politicized and while ideological campaigns acquire the authority of academic legitimacy. Government intervention should not aim at dictating what scholars may think or teach. Instead, it should ensure that universities remain committed to viewpoint diversity, intellectual freedom, and equal treatment. 

In this respect, legislation restricting institutional participation in the BDS campaign represents a step in the right direction—not because the government should determine the political conclusions universities or their faculty must reach, but because it can limit the use of public institutions and public resources to advance discriminatory political campaigns.

Approving the law will deal the BDS movement a serious blow.

Israel Academia Monitor will continue to provide updates on the issue. 

REFERENCES

US House passes bill stripping federal funds from universities that boycott Israel

US House passes bill stripping federal funds from universities that boycott Israel

The measure had the support of 203 Republicans, 33 Democrats and one Independent. But not all Jewish representatives voted in favor.

By Sharon Udasin September 3, 2026 6:46 pm

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday approved a bill that would prevent federal funds from going to academic institutions that participate in commercial boycotts of Israel.

The HR 4795 bill, co-sponsored by North Carolina Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx and New Jersey Democrat Rep. Josh Gottheimer, passed in a 237 to 169 vote, with 203 Republicans, 33 Democrats and one Independent in favor. Whether Democrats will grant sufficient support to pass the legislation in the Senate remains unclear. 

If the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act goes on to become law, it would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to require universities to refrain from “participating in a nonexpressive commercial boycott of Israel” in order to remain qualified for certain funds. 

Expressive conduct is “symbolic speech” designed to relay a message, like picketing, marching, flag desecration and draft-card burnings. A 2022 U.S. Court of Appeals ruling deemed economic boycotts nonexpressive commercial conduct as opposed to independent expression. 

In addition to forbidding boycotts, the legislation also stipulates that institutions receiving such funds would need to “certify that students are not unreasonably obstructed from participating in academic programs in Israel.”

“This bill is an important step forward in ensuring academic freedom for all students,” Gottheimer, who is Jewish, said in a statement. “I will push the Senate to take up the bill shortly so it can become law.”

Foxx, meanwhile, stressed that the act “takes a strong stand against the BDS movement on college campuses across the nation,” referring to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign that aims to put economic pressure on Israel by barring the purchase of Israeli products and suspending trade agreements. 

“This legislation has true teeth and completely severs any possible taxpayer support of these concrete campaigns of antisemitism in the form of BDS and academic boycotts of Israel,” Foxx added.  

The Anti-Defamation League welcomed the bill’s passage on Thursday, deriding BDS activities as a tool used “to delegitimize Israel and demonize Jews and other students for their connection to the Jewish state.”

The Combat Antisemitism Movement, an interfaith advocacy group that aims to fight “Jew hatred,” echoed these sentiments. A Thursday statement from the coalition noted that ahead of the vote, the group had sent a letter to all U.S. House members conveying its support for the bill. 

“Academic boycotts of Israel harm American students and scholars, weaken vital U.S.-Israel research collaboration, and lend the credibility of American universities to a discriminatory campaign that singles out the only Jewish state,” the letter stated. 

Among the 32 Democrats to join Gottheimer in supporting the bill were many prominent Jewish lawmakers, such as Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Lois Frankel and Jared Moskowitz of Florida; Greg Landsman of Ohio; Brad Schneider of Illinois; Eugene Vindman of Virginia and Kim Schrier of Washington. 

Yet not all Jewish legislators, even those who are against BDS, voted in favor of the bill. Ahead of the vote, Rep. Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York, vowed in a statement that he would vote against the bill and urged his colleagues to do the same. 

While Nadler voiced his antipathy to BDS and acknowledged that proponents of the movement “can veer into antisemitism,” he stressed that “those who engage in BDS have a First Amendment right to do so.”

The liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street offered similar opposition, arguing that this bill would mean “infringing on constitutionally protected free speech and academic freedom.” Noting a distinction between Israel proper and the West Bank, J Street stated that “penalizing universities for expressing their opposition to activities that further annexation sets a dangerous precedent.”

Nadler, meanwhile, described the measure as both “a direct and gross violation of the First Amendment” and “the latest assault by the Trump Administration” on the nation’s academic institutions. 

“No matter how much I may disagree with BDS, and find it strategically stupid and morally repugnant, I will always fight to protect Americans’ right to speech with which I disagree,” he added. “It is the only way to ensure speech I do agree with is equally protected.

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https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4795/text

Engrossed in House (09/03/2026)

119th CONGRESS 2d Session

H. R. 4795

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AN ACT

To amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to prohibit an institution that participates in a nonexpressive commercial boycott of Israel from being eligible for certain funds under that Act, to require an institution that participates in certain programs under that Act to certify that students are not unreasonably obstructed from participating in academic programs in Israel, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. Short title.

This Act may be cited as the “Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act of 2026”.

SEC. 2. Ineligibility of institutions of higher education participating in certain nonexpressive commercial boycotts.

Section 487(a) of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 1094(a)) is amended by adding at the end the following:

“(30) (A) The institution will not engage in a nonexpressive commercial boycott of a major strategic partner of the United States.

“(B) For purposes of this paragraph:

“(i) The term ‘major strategic partner’ means, with respect to the United States—

“(I) a country described in section 4 of Public Law 113–296; or

“(II) an entity licensed or regulated by, or organized under the laws of, such a country.

“(ii) The term ‘nonexpressive commercial boycott of a major strategic partner’—

“(I) means a commercial action (including engaging in refusals to deal and terminating business activities) that—

“(aa) is intended to limit commercial relations with a major strategic partner; and

“(bb) is not based on a valid business reason; and

“(II) does not include actions described in regulations issued to provide for the exceptions described in section 1773(a)(2) of the Anti-Boycott Act of 2018 (50 U.S.C. 4842(a)(2)).”.

SEC. 3. Eligibility for title VI funds.

Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 1121 et seq.) is amended by adding at the end the following new sections:

“SEC. 639. Institutional certifications.

“(a) Annual requirement for institutional eligibility.—Not later than July 31 of each calendar year beginning on or after the date of enactment of the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act of 2026, an institution of higher education participating or applying to participate in any program under this title shall submit to the Secretary the certification required under subsection (b). An institution that does not submit such certification by July 31 of a calendar year shall be ineligible to receive any funds under this title in the first fiscal year that begins after such July 31, including any funds under this title that would otherwise have been available to the institution in such fiscal year for a grant awarded during a previous fiscal year.

“(b) Certification.—An institution shall certify to the Secretary that, for the period beginning on the date of such certification and ending on July 31 of the following year, the institution will—

“(1) permit students and faculty of the certifying institution to participate in academic programs, including conferences, teaching exchanges, cultural exchanges, study abroad programs, joint research, and other collaborative educational activities, in a major strategic partner (as defined in section 487(a)(30)) of the United States in the same manner, and under the same terms and conditions, as students and faculty of the institution are permitted to participate in academic programs in other foreign countries; and

“(2) permit students and faculty of postsecondary educational institutions in such a major strategic partner to participate in academic programs offered by the certifying institution, including conferences, teaching exchanges, cultural exchanges, study abroad programs, joint research, and other collaborative educational activities, in the same manner, and under the same terms and conditions, as students and faculty of other foreign postsecondary educational institutions that are not in such a major strategic partner.

“SEC. 639A. Sense of Congress.

“It is the sense of Congress that limitations on cooperative efforts by institutions of higher education, consortia of such institutions, or partnerships between nonprofit educational organizations and institutions of higher education with a major strategic partner (as defined in section 487(a)(30)) of the United States do not serve the security, stability, and economic vitality of the United States.”.

Passed the House of Representatives September 3, 2026.Attest:

Clerk.  

119th CONGRESS      2d SessionH. R. 4795

AN ACT

To amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to prohibit an institution that participates in a nonexpressive commercial boycott of Israel from being eligible for certain funds under that Act, to require an institution that participates in certain programs under that Act to certify that students are not unreasonably obstructed from participating in academic programs in Israel, and for other purposes.

02.09.26

Editorial Note

The Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology (ESC) brings together criminologists and professionals in related fields. It provides a platform for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers globally to discuss and share their work on various aspects of criminology, criminal justice, and related social sciences.

In 2026, the annual Eurocrim Conference, under the theme “Frontiers of Criminology,” will take place in Warsaw, Poland, on 9–12 September 2026.

A highly polarized activist campaign is targeting the ESC. The boycott calls are organized by the group Criminologists for Palestine, alongside broader Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) networks.

Boycott activists are calling for an academic boycott of the Conference due to the ESC’s refusal to sever ties with Israeli academic institutions, specifically targeting scholars affiliated with Ariel University (located in a West Bank settlement). The pressure began intensifying during the Eurocrim 2025 Conference in Athens, where local Greek institutions and student unions successfully pressured Panteion University to withdraw its local sponsorship of the event. When activists tried to force an official institutional boycott vote during the 2025 General Assembly, the ESC Executive Board blocked the motion.

The Boycott organizers argue that the ESC is “whitewashing” and “normalizing war crimes by failing to implement ethical due diligence or exclude complicit state-affiliated institutions.” Boycott organizers urged keynote speakers, panelists, and attendees to boycott the Eurocrim events. The ESC Executive Board maintains that institutional boycotts violate the Society’s constitution and its core mission of academic freedom. The board stated that the ESC does not exclude individual participants based on nationality, religion, or institutional affiliation, though they have condemned international human rights violations. 

However, despite all the friction, online petitions, and pushback from activist members, Eurocrim 2026 is moving forward. The ESC Board has engaged in membership consultations regarding its ethical policies, but has firmly rejected calls to cancel or institutionally restrict the upcoming event.

Still, Criminologists for Palestine recently published a statement on August 28, 2026, attacking the board and stating that in 2025, the board “subverted the democratic workings of the Society by preventing a vote on our Motion – which won overwhelming support at the general assembly – and instead chose to provide impunity to complicity in Israeli atrocity crimes. This controversial decision continues to reverberate today.”  

Criminologists for Palestine claims that the number of participants in this year’s Eurocrim has declined by hundreds. According to them, “This decrease in the number of participants illustrates the harm done by the ESC Board to the Society itself, and to the capacity of our discipline to critically and publicly engage in our scientific field of expertise more broadly. The events since the denial of a formal vote last September suggest that the ESC board has not changed its ways.” 

Criminologists for Palestine protest the fact that during the ESC Presidential Address, the President revealed traveling to Israel to attend a conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “To travel to a country currently committing a genocide, which the UN has observed takes place through ‘deliberately targeting Palestinian children’ is not a matter of balance. To visit an institute deeply embedded in the training soldiers, developing weapons, and silencing dissent towards such a genocide is sign of unwavering support. It is unfortunate that this bears repeating: opposition to a genocide and support to a genocide are not equal opinions that require balancing.”

Criminologists for Palestine declare they will continue to “advocate for a Society, and a Criminological discipline more broadly, that does not willfully ignore crime and harm when the perpetrators are in a position of power. We will continue to work to make use of the specific expertise found in our discipline to challenge the perpetrators of atrocity crimes and the structures that enable them.”

To recall, IAM reported on “‘Criminologists for Palestine’ Mounts Pressure on the European Society of Criminology to Boycott Israel” in January 2025, and earlier, in September 2024, IAM reported that “The European Society of Criminology Conference in Athens Targeted by BDS.” Our posts noted that the Conference topics were diverse, including panels on crimes committed during times of war, the psychological impact of the October 7 Hamas attack, and others. Many panels were critical of Israel. For example, a roundtable titled “Types of Offending/Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes” discussed how “Israel’s war on Gaza has continued unabated for many months, killing over 60,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom are women and children,” among others. 

However, a total of 16 Israeli academics took part in the Conference, of whom at least 7 were affiliated with Ariel University.

At the time, during the General Assembly, the ESC Board declared that an academic boycott of Israel was unconstitutional and could not be put to a vote. Yet, BDS activists were given a vast space to operate inside and outside the Conference halls. Israeli scholars were targeted by attempts to interrupt their presentations.

IAM noted that during the Conference, Criminologists for Palestine tried to push for a resolution to boycott Israel, without success. 

After the Conference, the Criminologists for Palestine held a conference titled “Criminological Perspectives on Palestine: Legal Responses and Academic Complicity in Times of Genocide,” in Ljubljana, stating that this conference “seeks to explore the ways in which criminologists can, and should, address state criminality; to consider how criminological scholarship may contribute critical analyses of violations committed by Israel in Palestine, including genocide; and to examine how the discipline might engage with ongoing debates concerning academic complicity and calls to boycott institutions implicated in such violations.”

In response to boycott calls, the ESC Executive Board (EB) published a report in January 2025, saying that the ESC “views this debate as a manifestation of a more general discussion about the role of social sciences. A considerable portion of our membership believes imposing a particular normative or moral perspective on scholarly activity is inherently unscientific, censorial and political; while another substantial contingent is uncomfortable with a criminology that does not proclaim and condemn injustices—not only within scientific discourse but also in the public domain. Social science is by nature pluralistic and thrives on controversy rather than consensus. The role of the EB, therefore, is not to serve as final arbiter in these debates, but rather to guide the Society through current events in a manner that allows both camps to continue feeling at home within the ESC.” 

The pressure mounted by Criminologists for Palestine included a petition titled “Petition Against Complicity,” urging, “The only possibility of legal compliance for the ESC is therefore to exclude participants willingly partaking in a war crime, including those from Ariel University.” 

IAM noted that an Israeli academic is a key activist with the group Criminologists for Palestine, pushing for BDS. His name is Dr. Lior Volinz, a researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. Volinz is a longtime anti-Israel activist.  As reported in 2006, at the age of 18, Volinz was a member of a group of persons refusing to enlist in the Israeli army. Dr. Ishai Menuchin, spokesperson for Yesh Gvul, a movement of army refusers, supported Volinz’s refusal to enlist in 2006. He said in an interview that he is convinced that 18-year-old Lior Volinz and his friend, who announced that they are refusing to enlist in the IDF, are heroes.

In 2019, Volinz was among the signatories of an “[Open Letter] Criticizing Israeli policy is not anti-Semitism!” Claiming “This is part of a broader trend of silencing voices critical of Israeli policy. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, in particular, is often labeled antisemitic. This is a worrying development.”

In August 2025, Volinz participated in a conference where he spoke about “how Israel uses privatization and digitization of surveillance to deepen its occupation and control over the lives of Palestinians.”

At the upcoming Eurocrim 2026, the organizers expect over 2,200 participants. Only some eight presenters are from Israel, and none are from Ariel University – in striking contrast to last year. The Ariel boycott has taken effect.

Eurocrim 2026 is a typical example of the so-called “activist capture” of a large organization – where a dedicated group of anti-Israel advocates manages to marginalize Israeli scholars and, more to the point, misrepresent the terms of genocide, war crimes, and other concepts related to International Humanitarian Law (IHL). The same dynamics were at play when Israel was accused of all sorts of crimes, genocide, starving the population of Gaza, and bombing hospitals and residential facilities. In reality, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad had brought the disaster on the Palestinian population by embedding in public sites – hospitals, mosques, schools, and turning them into human shields. Such practices are IHL, but bound by its anti-Israel animus, the Association would never discuss Hamas’s crimes. The Conference exemplified the selective application of human-rights standards: egregious violations elsewhere are largely ignored, while Israel has been singled out for sustained condemnation.

Israel Academia Monitor will continue to report on this issue.

REFERENCES:

Criminologists for Palestine

Towards Eurocrim 2026

Statement by Criminologists for Palestine, 28.8.2026

Last year, the board of the European Society of Criminology (ESC) subverted the democratic workings of the Society by preventing a vote on our Motion – which won overwhelming support at the general assembly – and instead chose to provide impunity to complicity in Israeli atrocity crimes. This controversial decision continues to reverberate today.  The number of participants in this year’s Eurocrim – the major annual event of the Society – has declined by hundreds, far above seasonal variation. This is not coincidental. A large number of participants chose to boycott the Eurocrim conference in a sign of protest – and demand for change – after the board gave precedence to complicity in atrocity crimes over the democratic wishes of its membership. Many other criminologists do not plan to attend due to consternation, disappointment, and lack of trust in a board which denies its members their legal rights. This decrease in the number of participants illustrates the harm done by the ESC Board to the Society itself, and to the capacity of our discipline to critically and publicly engage in our scientific field of expertise more broadly. 

The events since the denial of a formal vote last September suggest that the ESC board has not changed its ways. In this spring, the Board has released a set of questions of its own writing to informally consult the membership. Among other questions, the board asked whether the Society should issue a statement on atrocity crimes committed in Gaza. The membership responded clearly in the positive. The Board then released a unilateral statement on Gaza, one that mentions Israelis only as victims and Palestinians only as perpetrators. Any mention of the atrocity crimes reported in Gaza, including genocide, is made without a culprit and without a victim. This is not what the membership voted for, and this is not what democracy looks like. 

At the same time, the ESC Presidential Address revealed that the ESC President has recently travelled to Israel to attend a conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To travel to a country currently committing a genocide, which the UN has observed takes place through ‘deliberately targeting Palestinian children’ is not a matter of balance. To visit an institute deeply embedded in the training soldiers, developing weapons, and silencing dissent towards such a genocide is sign of unwavering support. It is unfortunate that this bears repeating: opposition to a genocide and support to a genocide are not equal opinions that require balancing. 

The Board of the ESC continues to block a democratic vote on the motion proposed by Criminologists for Palestine. The ESC secretary has recently asserted that the motion is unconstitutional since it calls for ‘exclusionary measures such as denying membership or conference participation on the basis of a person’s nationality or their link to a particular state, territory, or institution’. This is false. The motion does not target individuals, or calls for an exclusion of members. Instead, it calls upon members to follow the recommendations triggered by ICJ decision not to enter into institutional arrangements with institutions involved in atrocity crimes. This position has won overwhelming support among the 700 members of the ESC who attended the last general assembly.  

Criminologists for Palestine will continue to advocate for a Society, and a Criminological discipline more broadly, that does not willfully ignore crime and harm when the perpetrators are in a position of power. We will continue to work to make use of the specific expertise found in our discipline to challenge the perpetrators of atrocity crimes and the structures that enable them.

Response to the ESC’s Call for Vote – 30.1.2026

The Board of the European Society of Criminology has published, with a delay of many months, a set of questions to the ESC membership on the Society’s response to Israel’s atrocity crimes. This set of questions seeks to replace the democratic will of the ESC membership, including their right to vote on a motion against complicity in atrocity crimes – a motion that won overwhelming support at the ESC 2025 General Assembly. We acknowledge that the set of questions does put to a vote one of the motion’s demands – that the ESC makes a statement on Israel’s atrocity crimes. However, we are alarmed that this set of questions continues to prevent a vote on our main demand – that the ESC should call on members not to provide material support to academic institutions complicit in Israel’s crimes. We extend further on the violations of members’ rights by the ESC Board at the end of this statement.

We call on ESC members to vote on the questions posed by the ESC Board while continuing to act for the ESC to fullfil its democratic mission by enabling a vote on complicity in atrocity crimes. We support colleagues who choose to boycott the ESC, who publish on the topic, who organize activities on complicity at ESC events and who convey their concerns to the ESC Board.

We call on ESC members to vote, using their personal invitation link, as following:

Section A:
1a. Yes (for the ESC to issue statements on atrocity crimes in Europe)
1b. Yes (for the ESC to issue statements on atrocity crimes outside Europe)
1c. Yes (for the ESC to issue statements on atrocity crimes committed by Israel in Gaza)
2. Yes (for the ESC to correctly register conference participants from illegal Israeli institutions based in the Occupied Palestinian territories).

Why we believe the ESC Board continues to provide impunity to complicity in Israeli atrocity crimes

1. The European Society of Criminology is a Society of its members; the Executive Board is appointed to execute the will of the membership, represented under Swiss law by the General Assembly. To deny a vote on an agenda item placed in front of the membership, to which overwhelming support was shown, is a subversion of the democratic workings of the Society. This violation has been post-factum explained by the Board’s recent request for a ‘legal opinion’: however, the Board continues to block information on the content of the legal advice it sought on the Society’s expense, whom it was sought from, or what were the parameters of its request. Specifically, the continuous choice to prevent the membership from exercising their right to a vote on the Motion’s central demand – accountability for the complicity of Israeli academic institutions in atrocity crimes – is a violation of the rights of the membership. No legal reasoning was given to explain this violation; instead, the Board falsely claims that our motion targets individual scholars. To make it clear – for the ESC to call on its members not to provide material support for legal entities found by UNHRC to be complicit in grave atrocity crimes is matter of compliance with international law, not an unconstitutional act nor a violation of academic freedom.
   
   The ESC Board subversion of the democratic workings of the Society is not unique to the ESC. It is a part of a wider assault on academic freedom, centred in Trump’s America where a number of scholarly associations similarly blocked a democratic vote on Israel’s atrocity crimes.
2. We are appalled by the message of the ESC President, a message that opposes action on complicity in atrocity crimes and decrying our work for accountability and transparency as a violation of academic freedom. We do not agree with this assertion: we believe that as a discipline studying crime we are professionally and morally obliged to address atrocity crimes, and speak publicly even when those crimes are supported, facilitated, funded or tolerated through silence by European governments and institutions. The message by the ESC President further asserts that the true victims are Israeli scholars, who are confronted with legitimate discussions on the role of their institutions in advancing atrocity crimes. In this discussion there is no space foreseen to our Palestinian colleagues, whose universities have been bombed to rubble by Israeli forces; whose families have been killed, maimed, tortured or held in illegal detention; or who’ve lost their livelihood for speaking out on Israel’s crimes. The choice of words by prof. Anna-Maria Getoš Kalac is significant in explaining not only her own, but also the ESC Board lack of moral order and its continuous support for normalization of and complicity in Israel’s atrocity crimes.
   
   Criminologists for Palestine, 30.1.2026
   —————————

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What happened at the Eurocrim 2025 conference in Athens? The issue of the response by the European Society of Criminology (ESC) to the genocide and atrocity crimes in Palestine overshadowed the annual conference. Our motion won overwhelming support, but the ESC Board denied the membership a democratic vote. Read our full report here.

Vote of support for Criminologists for Palestine’s motion, ESC General Assembly 2025

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Motion of the European Society of Criminology concerning collaborations with Israeli academic institutions in light of the ongoing genocide committed by Israel in Gaza and other systematic human rights violations in Palestine

Considering that the European Society of Criminology has on numerous occasions manifested its commitment to academic freedom and human rights;

Considering that international intergovernmental organizations and non-governmental organizations, have documented and verified Israel’s systematic annexation and colonization of Palestinian territories, massive violations of the human rights of Palestinians, including the right to self-determination,  a 18-year blockade of the Gaza strip, segregationist and discriminating policies and laws, the ongoing massacres and deliberate starvation of civilians in Gaza which all major international, Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations consider a genocide, and the International Court of Justice consider plausible a genocide; and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor acknowledges Israel’s responsibility in war crimes and crimes against humanity; and the International Court of Justice ruling that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, is illegal, amounts to annexation and violates the prohibition against apartheid;

considering the systematic violations reported, which include the relentless killing of teachers, students, researchers, journalists, and cultural workers, and its systematic destruction of schools, universities, libraries, archives, heritage sites, and cultural institutions, which effectively have obliterated the entire sector of education and research in Gaza, also characterized as ‘scholasticide’; 

Considering that these systematic violations also include restricting freedom of movement for Palestinians; isolating, undermining, or otherwise attacking Palestinian educational institutions; harassing Palestinian professors, teachers, and students; harassing Israeli professors and students criticizing Israeli policies; destroying, confiscating, or otherwise rendering Palestinian archival material inaccessible; and maintaining inequality in educational resources between Palestinians and Israelis; 

Considering that Israeli academic institutions are reported to be imbricated in these systematic violations through their provision of direct assistance to the Israeli military and intelligence establishments, that they (among others – Technion, Hebrew University, Ben Gurion University, Tel Aviv University) are reported to hold joint programs with arms industries,  and conduct specialized training program for soldiers; and that some Israeli academic institutions are located in the Occupied Palestinian territories,  in violation of international law;

Considering that European governments and public institutions have systematically shielded successive Israeli governments from being held accountable for the aforementioned violations and facilitated them through unprecedented diplomatic, military, and economic support; and considering that complicit Israeli academic institutions continue to enjoy access to European Union research funds and resources;

Considering that in order for UN member states to meet their obligations as triggered by the International Court of Justice ruling, they must “[c]ancel or suspend economic relationships, trade agreements and academic relations with Israel that may contribute to its unlawful presence and apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territory”;

Considering that the European Society of Criminology is committed to academic freedom, including by continuing to welcome to its conferences and any activities all scholars, irrespective of their nationality or background, who accept the values the Society ascribes to, as laid down in the European Convention on Human Rights and other key Council of Europe Conventions and Recommendations; and that the need for immediate action using peaceful means has never been greater; be it

Resolved, that the ESC:

1. Does not and will not collaborate with complicit Israeli institutions, as identified by the UN HRC, UN OHCHR, or other relevant UN bodies, until Israel complies with International Law and International Humanitarian Law; does not publicise, promote, or encourage such collaborations or any related activities.
   
2. Calls on ESC members not to enter into institutional arrangements, e.g. through common research projects and grants, with such complicit Israeli academic institutions, until Israel complies with International Law and International Humanitarian Law.
   
3. Recognizes and condemns the genocidal acts committed by Israel in Gaza, and the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel in all parts of Palestine, as found by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s office.
   
4. Supports the work of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court in tackling, without fear of retaliation, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, and the work of all human rights organisations and of researchers to uncover, examine and report these crimes, and resists any attempts to stigmatise or silence staff and students at European universities engaged in research, speech, and actions on Palestine.
   
5. Builds academic links with Palestinian universities and academics; speaks out against the destruction of the educational sector and restrictions on academic freedom in Palestine; demand an end to limitations on travel, research, and expression for Palestinian scholars and students; advocates for the removal of barriers, such as checkpoints and travel restrictions, that impede academics’ and students’ ability to attend classes, participate in research, and engage in academic activities.
   
6. Directs the ESC Executive Board to work to give effect to the spirit and intent of this motion, including through the publication of implementation guidelines, in a manner consistent with ESC’s bylaws as well as the relevant national laws.

==============================================================

Disproportionate Killings of Civilians in the Gaza Genocide: The Rules of Engagement, Artificial Intelligence, and the Disregard for the Principle of Proportionality

Thu, September 10, 3:45 to 5:00pm, Faculty of Applied Languages – 55 Dobra Street., Floor: 3, Room 3.150

Abstract

This paper examines the normalization of disproportionate killings of civilians as an integral part of genocidal violence in Gaza. Based on Israeli government statements, news media reports, and UN reports, it provides an interpretive analysis of the various elements of the target selection process – for example, the use of over-broad rules of engagement, the employment of artificial intelligence (AI) for determining alleged military targets, and the reinterpretation of key aspects of proportionality assessments – to demonstrate how the Israeli military deliberately disregarded the principle of proportionality, thus enabling disproportionate violence against Palestinian civilians.
The paper is divided into two parts. First, it discusses how the use of an AI-based tool that was unable to see all civilians trapped on the battlefield resulted in an inability to determine “expected civilian losses,” a key element of proportionality assessments. Second, the paper examines how the Israeli military reinterpreted key aspects of proportionality assessments to ignore the constraints of the proportionality rule. For example, the military adopted various civilian fatality cut-off values in proportionality assessments, thereby quantifying civilian losses. Additionally, the military used an overly broad definition of “military advantage,” which led to a misinterpretation of the proportionality rule.
The paper demonstrates how the Israeli military deliberately created conditions for disproportionate killings of civilians, thus enabling genocidal violence in Gaza. The human-machine assemblage in the target selection process significantly expanded the scope of the unlawful use of armed force and decreased the protection of civilians.

Author: Vasja Badalič, Institute of Criminology

Anti-Semitism and Criticism of Israel’s Policy – Empirical Insights into Differences and Overlaps

Sat, September 12, 9:00 to 10:15am, Faculty of Applied Languages – 55 Dobra Street., Floor: 2, Room 2.136

Abstract

In light of developments in the Middle-East, particularly escalting military conflicts in Gaza, Libanon and Iran a nationally representative survey was conducted in spring 2025, involving approximately 4 000 adult residents of Germany. The survey explored their attitudes towards the policies of the State of Israel, as well as the prevalence of various forms of anti-Semitic sentiment. Specifically, it examined the extent to which: (a) traditional, prejudice-driven anti-Semitism directed against Jews can be distinguished from (b) anti-Semitism that is associated with Israel’s policies but also directed at Jews more broadly, and (c) critique of Israeli policies, which is non-anti-Semitic in nature. Employing latent class analysis, the study aims to identify whether distinct patterns of these attitudes can be discerned. The characterised groups are described based on their core attributes and analysed with regard to potential factors of differentiation.

Authors

Peter Wetzels, Universität Hamburg

Katrin Brettfeld, Universität Hamburg

Janosch Kleinschnittger, Universität Hamburg

26.08.26

Editorial Note

The Olam, launched in May 2026 by Ronn Torossian, a veteran digital entrepreneur, is a new publication focused on Israel, Jewish affairs, and the global Jewish economic community. It published two new studies recently.

The first is on US university faculty in Jewish Studies, Israel Studies, Hebrew language, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The results, summarized in an article in the Jerusalem Post (JP), stated that “over half of the faculty records linked to anti-Israel positions.”  

The Olam analyzed 2,499 faculty members and institutional entries across 313 American universities, cross-referencing names and program listings against nine documented public petitions spanning from May 2021 through spring 2026. The audit alleges that 1,298 of the analyzed entries, or 51.9%, featured documented anti-Israel public positions as defined by the study’s criteria.  Among the scholars who identified as teaching subjects in Jewish, Israel, Hebrew, or Holocaust studies, the audit found that 401 out of 1,014, or 39.5%, held such positions. It noted high numbers at Ivy League universities, where 72.3 percent of audited faculty records have documented anti-Israel positions. The study classified an anti-Israel stance based on public actions of groups such as Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) or Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), alongside petitions that endorsed academic boycotts, characterized Zionism as “settler colonialism,” labeled Israel an apartheid state, or defined its military actions as genocide. 

The Olam researchers excluded mainstream political criticisms – such as opposing specific government policies, advocating for a two-state solution, or demanding accountability for civilian casualties – that reflect ongoing debates within Israeli society itself. 

The study’s methodology involved compiling rosters from publicly available university websites between July and August 2026, including every institutional member program of the Association for Jewish Studies and every US center or chair listed by the Association for Israel Studies. The Olam researchers said that they matched faculty names to petition signatories using university affiliation, department, academic title, and full name.

The Olam acknowledged limitations, noting that their audit captured only publicly available positions and did not account for faculty who may have held private views.

The report emphasized that these professors were “hired to teach the next generation about Judaism, the Hebrew language, the State of Israel, and the history of the Holocaust.” It argued that the documented positions fell outside the consensus of mainstream Zionism. The audit also identified 14 holders of endowed chairs, positions funded by donors intended to strengthen Jewish scholarship. 

The evaluated petitions also encompassed broader advocacy activities including protests against administrative discipline targeting pro-Palestinian organizers and pushback against the alleged weaponization of antisemitism. The Olam also noted a significant escalation in petition activity. For example, the March 2025 “Not in Our Name” petition, initiated by Boston area Jewish faculty and staff to protest campus crackdowns and the alleged weaponization of antisemitism, garnered over 3,450 academic signatures.

The second audit conducted by The Olam, and reported by JP, was titled “Half of faculty at Israeli universities signed petitions accusing IDF of Gaza war crimes – study,” and was published on August 23, 2026. This report examined political petition endorsements among 2,844 faculty across eight Israeli universities. The analysis found that 1,434 faculty, representing 50.4% of those included in the study, publicly signed at least one petition calling the Israeli army’s Gaza campaign following the October 7 massacre – a war crime. The study covered universities such as the Technion, Hebrew University (HUJ), the Weizmann Institute, the Open University, Tel Aviv University (TAU), Ben-Gurion University (BGU), the University of Haifa, and Bar-Ilan University. 

According to their findings, the signatures were taken from a document issued by the Black Flag Action Group (BFAG) on May 31, 2025. Titled “An Urgent Call to the Heads of Academia in Israel,” it was signed by more than 1400 signatures. The document described the military campaign in Gaza as “a horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity.” It urged the Association of University Heads in Israel (VERA) to mobilize Israeli academia to stop the war.  BFAG held various meetings on the issue.

This study noted that the vast majority of faculty signed only once, with just 18 individuals across the dataset signing multiple petitions.

The study finds that Israeli humanities professors are at least three times more likely to sign Gaza war crimes petitions. Humanities faculty members were roughly three and a half to five times more likely to sign than their colleagues in STEM fields. Middle Eastern studies faculty signed at an 82% rate, sociology at 70%, philosophy at 66%, and political science at 59%, compared with lower engagement in fields such as physics at 27%, chemistry at 23%, biology at 19%, and engineering at 15%.

Israel Academia Monitor (IAM) has been following anti-Israel Israeli and Jewish activist faculty for over two decades. The vast majority of individuals and groups identified by IAM teach in Middle East Studies, political science, sociology/anthropology, etc.  The Olam study is much more sobering. As Torossian pointed out, many departments and faculty were endowed by Jewish donors who sought to strengthen Jewish scholarship, Jewish education, and the connection between American Jewry and Israel. But the findings indicate a profound disconnect between the philanthropic purposes for which Jewish Studies programs were created and the political positions adopted by some of their faculty.

For Torossian, documenting this disconnect is only the first step; the larger challenge is to consider what Jewish donors and institutions can do to address this problem.

REFERENCES:

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-906348

Half of faculty at Israeli universities signed petitions accusing IDF of Gaza war crimes – study

According to the report, 96.9% of the identified signatures traced back to a single document issued by the Black Flag initiative in May 2025.

ByALEX CARSONAUGUST 23, 2026 19:20Updated: AUGUST 23, 2026 19:37

A new report published by research and business-intelligence outlet The Olam on August 17 examined political petition participation among 2,844 faculty members across eight leading Israeli universities. The audit found that 1,434 faculty members, representing 50.4% of those included in the study, publicly signed at least one political petition calling the Gaza campaign launched following the October 7 massacre a war crime.

The study covered universities such as the Haifa Technion, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU), the Weizmann Institute, the Open University, Tel Aviv University (TAU), Ben-Gurion University (BGU), the University of Haifa, and Bar-Ilan University. Researchers cross-referenced public rosters of political petitions circulated between 2024 and 2026 with official university faculty directories.

According to the report, 96.9% of the identified signatures traced back to a single document issued by the Black Flag initiative in May 2025.

Titled “An Urgent Call to the Heads of Academia in Israel,” the letter explicitly described the military campaign in Gaza as “a horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity,” and urged the Association of University Heads in Israel and other academic leaders to mobilize the full weight of Israeli academia to stop the war.

The researchers noted that the numbers were driven by widespread single-issue participation rather than a small cadre of habitual activists, pointing out that the vast majority of participating faculty signed only once, with just 18 individuals across the dataset signing multiple petitions.

Participation rates varied notably across institutions, highlighting how institutional character shapes faculty activism. At the Technion, 77% of audited faculty signed, and HU recorded 67%, while Bar-Ilan sat at the opposite end of the spectrum with a 30% signing rate.

Study finds that Israeli humanities professors at least three times more likely to sign Gaza war crimes petitions

The findings also underscored a structural divide between academic disciplines. Humanities faculty members were roughly three and a half to five times more likely to sign than their colleagues in STEM fields. Middle Eastern studies faculty signed at an 82% rate, sociology at 70%, philosophy at 66%, and political science at 59%, compared with lower engagement in fields such as physics at 27%, chemistry at 23%, biology at 19%, and engineering at 15%.

The Olam noted several methodological limitations, stating that petition-signing does not directly establish an individual’s broader political ideology, and that the sample of eight universities likely does not capture the entirety of Israeli academia.

The researchers placed these findings in a broader comparative context by looking at a previous study they conducted on American academia.

That earlier audit examined 2,499 American Jewish Studies faculty members across 313 US universities and found that 51.9% of them had publicly signed political petitions targeting Israel, such as calls to sever institutional ties with Israeli academic centers, endorse academic boycotts, or condemn Israeli military policies. By comparing the two datasets, the authors noted that elite American academia and flagship Israeli universities exhibited nearly identical overall rates of public political petitioning.

Ronn Torossian, publisher of The Olam, said in a statement, “These are not fringe figures – these are core faculties at Israel’s flagship research universities, during a war that began with the single deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Parents sending their children to study at these institutions, donors writing checks, and the boards of governors who set policy for them are entitled to know exactly what they’re funding. Now they can.”

Torossian told The Jerusalem Post that “after completing studies on both American and Israeli academia, students seeking Zionist and pro-Jewish values should thoroughly explore enrolling at institutions which don’t permit views opposed to their worldview,” noting that “in both Israel and the US, there are entire schools and departments which have been completely infected with radical extreme viewpoints.”

Torossian commented on the report, saying, “What is extraordinary about this study is the sheer scale of professors in Israel who operate well outside the country’s political mainstream and Zionist consensus. There is not a single major Israeli political party that would endorse the positions represented in these petitions.”

Torossian added that “when political activism reaches this level inside institutions entrusted with scholarship and intellectual independence, Israelis, parents, students and donors have every right to ask difficult questions.”

‘How deeply anti-Israel have these institutions become?’ researcher asks

“Do Israel’s universities reflect the society whose taxpayers and philanthropists sustain them? How deeply anti-Israel have these institutions become?” He asked, warning: “The concentration of this political activism is bewildering. Israeli universities should not be places where radical viewpoints become the mainstream. It is alarming to see how deeply entrenched these extreme viewpoints appear to be in academia.”

He urged “donors to the Technion, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and other Israeli universities to demand answers from university leadership and ask what these institutions are doing to protect Zionist interests and values.”

“Donors have every right to ask whether the institutions they support remain places of genuine intellectual pluralism. The numbers make that question impossible to ignore,” Torossian said.

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https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-906022

Over half of US Jewish studies faculty records linked to anti-Israel positions

The study was conducted by the Olam, an institutional intelligence platform for Israel and the global Jewish economy, and published in early August.

ByALEX CARSONAUGUST 19, 2026 18:32Updated: AUGUST 19, 2026 19:54

A new national faculty audit claimed that over 50 percent of audited university faculty members and related program files in Jewish Studies, Israel Studies, Hebrew language, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies were associated with documented anti-Israel public positions.

The study was conducted by The Olam, an institutional intelligence platform for Israel and the global Jewish economy, and published in early August. According to the report, the research analyzed 2,499 faculty members and institutional entries across 313 American universities, cross-referencing names and program listings against nine documented public petition campaigns and organizational records spanning from May 2021 through the spring of 2026.

Introducing the scope of the project, Ronn Torossian, publisher of The Olam, told The Jerusalem Post that the audit represents “the largest audit ever undertaken of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies faculties in the United States,” and said the report reveals that “more than half the professors in America teaching about Judaism, the Hebrew language, the State of Israel, and the history of the Holocaust have publicly positioned themselves against the Jewish state.”

Audit finds anti-Israel positions among faculty records

The research alleged that 1,298 of the analyzed entries, or 51.9%, featured documented anti-Israel public positions as defined by the study’s criteria. Among individual educators specifically identified as teaching in the relevant fields of Jewish, Israel, Hebrew, or Holocaust studies, the audit claimed that 401 out of 1,014, or 39.5%, held such positions

It reported particularly high concentrations at Ivy League universities, where Torossian noted that “72.3 percent of audited faculty records have documented anti-Israel positions.”

To establish these metrics, the study classified an anti-Israel stance based on specific public actions, such as leadership roles in groups like Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) or Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), alongside signing petitions that endorsed academic boycotts, characterized Zionism as “settler colonialism,” labeled Israel an apartheid state, or defined its military actions as genocide.

The researchers noted that they deliberately excluded mainstream political criticisms – such as opposing specific government policies, advocating for a two-state solution, or demanding accountability for civilian casualties – that reflect ongoing debates within Israeli society itself.

“These professors are the people hired to teach the next generation about Judaism, the Hebrew language, the State of Israel, and the history of the Holocaust,” the report stated, arguing that the documented positions fell outside the consensus of mainstream Zionism.

Endowed chairs appear among petition signatories

The audit identified 14 holders of endowed chairs, positions funded by donors often intended to strengthen Jewish scholarship, who appeared among the signatories of these examined campaigns. Highlighting this aspect, Torossian pointed out that “14 endowed chairs – positions funded by Jewish philanthropists specifically to strengthen Jewish scholarship – are held by faculty openly opposed to Israel,” adding that donors established these funds to strengthen Jewish education. “Instead, many now fund scholars who describe Zionism as ‘settler colonialism,’ endorse academic boycotts of Israeli universities, and use language like ‘Jewish supremacy’ to describe the Jewish state.”

Beyond academic boycotts and political definitions, the evaluated petitions also encompassed broader advocacy, including protests against administrative discipline targeting pro-Palestinian organizers and pushback against the alleged weaponization of antisemitism claims

Furthermore, the report noted a significant escalation in petition activity. The March 2025 “Not in Our Name” letter, initiated by New England faculty and staff to protest campus crackdowns and the alleged weaponization of antisemitism claims, gathered over 3,400 academic signatures, becoming the largest single petition in the documented record.

How the faculty audit was conducted

The study’s methodology involved compiling rosters from publicly available university websites between July and August 2026, including every institutional member program of the Association for Jewish Studies and every US center or chair listed by the Association for Israel Studies. The researchers said that they matched faculty names to petition signatories using university affiliation, department, academic title, and full name.

They acknowledged limitations, noting that their audit captured only publicly available positions and did not account for faculty who may have held private views, nor did it capture Hebrew language instructors, who, they said, rarely signed political letters.

Addressing the implications of the data, Torossian said, “The question before Jewish families, donors, and institutional leaders is straightforward: Will we demand transparency about who teaches these subjects and what they publicly believe? Will endowments established to strengthen Jewish education actually accomplish that mission? The Olam created this study to answer these questions with data. The findings are now public. What institutions, families, and donors choose to do with this information is their decision.”

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https://ronntorossian.medium.com/why-i-built-the-olam-for-the-ai-answer-era-a95105a6879a

Why I Built The Olam for the AI Answer Era 

Ronn Torossian 

Jun 22, 2026

Two decades in communications. Two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release. Guest lectures on crisis at Harvard. A lot of time studying how institutions get remembered — and how they disappear. The pattern I kept seeing: the institutions that survive disruption are the ones that control the authoritative source. The ones that don’t lose the narrative — slowly at first, then all at once.

In 2026, the authoritative source isn’t a newspaper. It’s what ChatGPT returns when someone asks the question that should belong to you.

The gap in the data

The global Jewish business economy is one of the least-mapped commercial networks on earth — despite its scale, capital density, and influence. An estimated $9 trillion in annual activity: Israeli defense exports, sovereign capital flows, family offices relocating, venture infrastructure, AI companies going public on NASDAQ. (That estimate covers Jewish-owned, Israeli-linked, and diaspora-connected business activity across public companies, private capital, real estate, defense, venture, and family offices.)

And it was effectively invisible inside the AI engines that now answer the world’s questions.

We documented this across three separate Everything-PR research projects. The Israel AI Visibility Index 2026 found Israel ranking first globally in AI usage intensity — meaning the people most active in this economy are doing first-pass research inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews more than almost anywhere else. The Israeli-Jewish Media AI Visibility Study found that English-language retrieval for this category concentrates inside just three general newsrooms.

The goal is not advocacy. The goal is retrievability: making a fragmented economy legible to the systems now shaping institutional research.

What the classroom taught me

When I lectured on crisis communications at Harvard, the question I kept returning to: who defines you when you’re not in the room?

In a crisis, it’s the reporter who got there first. In a market, it’s the publication that established the record before you did. In 2026, it’s the AI engine — and whatever source it retrieves when someone asks the question that should have been yours.

The global Jewish business economy had no one in the room. No institutional English-language publisher building the knowledge base, naming the entities, producing the data products that turn a category into a retrievable fact base.

So we built it

That’s The Olam. A Financial Times-style institutional layer for a category that has never had one — built from the first commit for AI engine retrieval. Pillars, not posts. An entity index that routes every company and regulator to a canonical page. Data products built to be cited: the Israeli Brand AI-Visibility Index, the Israeli Defense Export Index, the Global Jewish Venture Capital Map.

Six months from now, when someone asks an AI engine about Israeli sovereign capital — I want The Olam to be the answer.

Ronn Torossian writes about communications, AI visibility, reputation, and retrieval-first publishing. He is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm, and publisher of Everything-PR and The Olam. Author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.

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About Ronn Torossian: PR advisor. Founder & Chairman, 5WPR. Entrepreneur. CNBC contributor, Forbes contributor. Author, “For Immediate Release.” Investor.

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https://olam.business/who-teaches-judaism-in-america-full-audit

Half of US Jewish Studies Faculty Have Stood Against Israel

Ronn Torossian

Publisher · The Olam

Aug 3, 2026

1,298 of 2,499 professors teaching Judaism, Israel Studies, and Hebrew in America have signed petitions against Israel since 2021.

OLAM RESEARCH · THE FACULTY AUDIT

This audit was covered by The Jerusalem Post (“Audit finds anti-Israel positions across US Jewish, Israel studies programs,” August 19, 2026) and JNS (“More than half of professors teaching on Judaism, Israel at US colleges attack Jewish state publicly,” August 4, 2026).

How Many Faculty Have Documented Anti-Israel Positions?

This study examined 2,499 faculty and institutional records across Jewish Studies, Israel Studies, Hebrew language, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies programs at American universities. Jewish Studies is also commonly called Judaic Studies; this audit treats the two terms as interchangeable throughout. Each record was cross-referenced against nine publicly documented petition campaigns, organizational membership records, and documented public statements spanning from May 2021 through Spring 2026.

The study found:

1. 1,298 records, 51.9 percent of the total audited, have documented anti-Israel public positions as defined by this study’s methodology.

2. Among 1,014 faculty specifically identified as teaching in Jewish Studies, Israel Studies, Hebrew, or Holocaust Studies, 401, or 39.5 percent, have documented positions.

3. At Ivy League universities, 240 of 332 records, 72.3 percent, are on the record against Israel.

4. Every Ivy League university has multiple faculty members meeting the study criteria. Columbia leads with 41, followed by Princeton (35), Yale (30), Brown (27), Penn (19), Harvard (18), Cornell (13), and Dartmouth (multiple).

5. Fourteen holders of endowed chairs, positions funded by donors who intended to strengthen Jewish scholarship, appear among the signatories.

6. The petition activity is accelerating. The March 2025 “Not in Our Name” letter has gathered 3,400+ signatures, making it the largest single petition in the documented record. Each successive campaign has been larger than the last.

Companion study: Olam ran the same audit on Israeli faculty. 50% of Israeli Professors Signed a Letter Calling Gaza a War Crime found a nearly identical 50.4% participation rate across eight Israeli universities, despite covering a different country and a narrower petition set.

Why Does This Audit Matter for Jewish Families?

The professors audited in this study are the people hired to teach the next generation about Judaism, the Hebrew language, the State of Israel, and the history of the Holocaust. Their public positions on Israel shape the scholarly environment in which Jewish students study their own civilization.

On the core questions at issue, the legitimacy of Zionism, the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, the use of economic boycotts against Israeli academic institutions, the positions documented in this study are not held by any mainstream political party in Israel. Those who call Zionism “settler colonialism,” endorse academic boycotts of Israeli universities, or use the phrase “Jewish supremacy” to describe the Jewish state are well outside the consensus of mainstream Zionism.

Which Programs and Universities Were Audited?

Jewish Studies, Israel Studies, Hebrew language instruction, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies are taught across hundreds of American universities. The field is anchored by professional associations, endowed chairs, and dedicated centers at the country’s most prestigious research universities.

The 2,499 records audited in this study exceed the estimated faculty universe because the database includes multiple categories: named faculty in dedicated Jewish Studies programs, faculty in adjacent departments who signed the petitions documented in this study, institutional-level entries representing programs where individual names could not be confirmed, FSJP chapter-level entries, and petition-level aggregate records. These broader entries are included as scope indicators and are identified as such in the database.

This audit covers American faculty. For the parallel data on Israeli faculty, see Olam’s discipline breakdown of Israeli faculty petition participation, which found Middle Eastern Studies professors signing at 82% versus 15% in Engineering.

How Were Faculty Records Identified and Verified?

How Were Faculty Rosters Compiled?

Faculty rosters were compiled from publicly available university websites during July and August 2026. Sources included every institutional member program of the Association for Jewish Studies (70+), every US center and chair listed by the Association for Israel Studies (~30), and additional degree-granting programs identified through College Factual, IPEDS, and university academic catalogs.

Individual faculty names, academic titles, departmental affiliations, and institutional roles were recorded. The study includes tenured and tenure-track faculty, clinical and visiting professors, professors emeriti, senior lecturers, and postdoctoral fellows. Graduate students are excluded unless they hold a formal teaching appointment. Joint appointments are counted once at their primary institution. Faculty who have moved between institutions are listed at their most recent confirmed institution.

What Counts as a Documented Anti-Israel Position?

A faculty member is classified as having a documented anti-Israel public position if they have performed one or more of the actions listed below. Every position is publicly verifiable, based on open-source records, and documented with the specific petition, letter, or statement signed.

Included in the classification:

Endorsing the academic boycott of Israeli institutions. Describing Israel as an apartheid state in a signed petition or public statement. Describing Zionism as settler colonialism in a signed petition or public statement. Signing petitions that characterize Israel’s military conduct as genocide. Calling for the end of all US military aid to Israel. Leadership or membership in FSJP. Leadership or membership in JVP. Signing the May 2021 “Statement on Israel/Palestine by Scholars of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies.” Signing any AcademicsForPeace petition (August 2023 through March 2024). Signing the Jewish Studies Ceasefire Letter (October 2023). Signing the “Not in Our Name” letter (March 2025). Other publicly documented statements meeting the above criteria.

Not included in the classification:

Supporting Palestinian human rights within the framework of Israel’s continued existence. Supporting a two-state solution. Criticizing specific Israeli government policies. Criticizing the current Israeli prime minister. Opposing settlement expansion. Criticizing IDF conduct in specific operations. Calling for accountability regarding civilian casualties. These positions have robust representation in Israeli politics and civil society and are not classified as anti-Israel in this study.

How Were Petition Signatures Verified?

Each faculty member was matched to petition signatories using university affiliation, department, academic title, and full name as listed on the petition. Where multiple individuals shared a name, institutional affiliation was used to confirm identity. Signatory lists were accessed directly from their publicly available sources: the AcademicsForPeace website, the “Not in Our Name” Google Document, the May 2021 declaration website, and published reporting on other campaigns.

What Are the Study’s Limitations?

This study documents publicly available positions only. Faculty who hold private views but have not signed public letters or joined public organizations are not captured. Absence from any signatory list does not indicate a pro-Israel position. FSJP membership lists are not fully public. Hebrew language instructors rarely sign political letters and are underrepresented. The “Not in Our Name” letter includes students and staff alongside faculty; this study extracted faculty signatories only.

Which Nine Petitions Drove the Faculty Signatures?

Campaign	Date	Total Signatories	DB Records
May 2021 JS/IS Declaration	May 2021	~100 JS/IS faculty	298
Palestine and Praxis	May 2021	7,500+ academics	Sampled
AcademicsForPeace (4 petitions)	Aug 2023-Mar 2024	700-1,300+ each	586
JS Ceasefire Letter	Oct 2023	100+	27
240 Scholars BDS Letter	Various	240+	Sampled
60 Holocaust Scholars Letter	Dec 2023	60	Sampled
1,200 Jewish Professors vs IHRA	May 2024	1,200+	Sampled
“Not in Our Name”	March 2025	3,400+	242
U Michigan Jewish Faculty Letter	March 2025	297	Sampled

What Did the May 2021 Declaration Say?

Published on a dedicated website and explicitly authored by self-identified scholars of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies. The statement characterized the Zionist movement as “shaped by settler colonial paradigms.” It stated that Zionism and the State of Israel have contributed to “unjust, enduring, and unsustainable systems of Jewish supremacy, ethnonational segregation, discrimination, and violence against Palestinians.” It endorsed “boycott or other organized economic pressure on Israel” as a legitimate form of faculty protest.

Who Signed the AcademicsForPeace Petitions?

Four petitions, each gathering 700 to 1,300+ signatures. The March 2024 petition, titled “Genocide Is Plausible; Stop Arms to Israel,” was authored by Lior Sternfeld, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State University. Signatories included two Nobel laureates, multiple National Jewish Book Award winners, Guggenheim Fellows, and MacArthur Fellows.

What Is the “Not in Our Name” Letter?

Drafted by Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff, Boston Area. The letter has gathered 3,400+ signatures from Jewish professors, staff, and students at universities across the United States. It denounced “anyone who invokes our name, and cynical claims of antisemitism, to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities.”

How Widespread Is FSJP on Campus?

FSJP operates 130+ campus chapters. Research has documented that schools with five or more faculty BDS supporters are 7.2 times more likely to experience antisemitic incidents, and that FSJP presence on campus increases the likelihood of physical assaults on Jewish students by more than seven times. New chapters continued to form through 2024 and 2025.

Which Campuses Have the Most Faculty on the Record?

Rank	Institution	On Record	Key Findings
1	Columbia University	41	77 faculty boycotters per national barometer; Yerushalmi Chair holder signed 4 petitions; 5 departments on record
2	Princeton University	35	Judaic Studies fellow signed; 8 AcademicsForPeace signatories; multiple endowed chairs
3	Penn State University	32	AcademicsForPeace national spokesperson; 11 NION signatories
4	New York University	31	148 faculty boycotters (#1 nationally); Prof Emerita of Jewish History signed all petitions
5	Yale University	30	Professor of Jewish History signed NION; Judaic Studies Assoc Prof signed 2 petitions
6	University of Chicago	28	Professor of Jewish History signed NION; Hebrew lit professor signed May 2021
7	Brown University	27	3 Judaic Studies faculty signed; first endowed Palestinian Studies chair
8	University of Michigan	26	Frankel Center director signed NION; 297 Jewish faculty signed campus letter
9	UC Berkeley	25	Hebrew lit professor emerita signed NION; FSJP chapter active
10	UCLA	24	Israel Studies chair holder wrote “genocide”; center director signed NION
10	Stanford University	24	Former MESA president authored petitions; Talmud specialist signed May 2021
10	University of Washington	24	$5M endowment pulled after Israel Studies chair signed

What Did Olam Find at Columbia University?

Yinon Cohen holds the Yosef H. Yerushalmi Chair of Israel and Jewish Studies. He signed the May 2021 declaration, AcademicsForPeace, the 240 Scholars BDS letter, and the “Not in Our Name” letter. A national barometer documented 77 faculty boycotters at Columbia, 27 FSJP events and statements, and five academic departments with anti-Israel institutional positions.

Beth Berkowitz (Rennert Chair in Jewish Studies, Barnard) signed the May 2021 declaration. Marianne Hirsch (William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita) signed “Not in Our Name.” At the same institution, a Business School professor was suspended for criticizing the university’s response to antisemitism. No comparable professional defense was mounted on his behalf.

What Did Olam Find at Penn State University?

Lior Sternfeld (Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies) authored all four AcademicsForPeace petitions and serves as the campaign’s national spokesperson. Benjamin Schreier (Mitrani Family Professor of English and Jewish Studies) signed the May 2021 declaration and “Not in Our Name.” Tamir Sorek signed AcademicsForPeace and “Not in Our Name.” Eleven faculty associated with Penn State signed the “Not in Our Name” letter.

What Did Olam Find at Brown University?

Omer Bartov (Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, National Jewish Book Award winner) signed every major AcademicsForPeace petition and “Not in Our Name.” Katharina Galor (Hirschfeld Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies) supports BDS and signed multiple petitions and “Not in Our Name.” Ariella Azoulay described Palestinian violence as “a legitimate revolt against colonial occupation” and signed “Not in Our Name.” Brown also hosts the first endowed chair in Palestinian Studies at any American university.

What Did Olam Find at Harvard University?

Shaul Magid was hired in 2025 as Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence. He openly identifies as a “counter-Zionist.” Saul Zaritt (Associate Professor, CJS Executive Committee) signed the May 2021 declaration and “Not in Our Name.” Sara Feldman (Yiddish Preceptor at CJS) signed “Not in Our Name.” Steven Levitsky (Professor of Government, author of “How Democracies Die”) signed “Not in Our Name.”

What Did Olam Find at Oberlin College?

Matthew Berkman (Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies) is a JVP steering committee member and BDS supporter who teaches “Jews and Power.” Six leaders of the Association for Jewish Studies wrote defending him. Shari Rabin and Sheera Talpaz (both Jewish Studies faculty) signed the May 2021 declaration. With approximately three core Jewish Studies faculty and three documented as signatories, the rate at Oberlin approaches 100 percent.

What Did Olam Find at the University of Washington?

Liora Halperin held the Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Chair in Israel Studies. She signed the May 2021 declaration and “Not in Our Name.” The donor pulled the entire $5 million endowment. The university stripped her chair title. Then 700+ Jewish and Israel Studies scholars signed a letter defending Halperin. She was subsequently promoted to full professor. The entire Jewish Studies research faculty at UW appears in the signatory lists.

Which Other Top Campuses Made the List?

NYU: Ranked #1 worst nationally on a faculty barometer, with 148 documented faculty boycotters. Hasia Diner (Professor Emerita of History and Hebrew & Judaic Studies, National Jewish Book Award winner, Guggenheim Fellow) signed all major petitions. Marion Kaplan (Professor of Modern Jewish History Emerita) signed “Not in Our Name.”

UCLA: David N. Myers (Distinguished Professor, Leve Center Director) signed AcademicsForPeace and “Not in Our Name.” Dov Waxman (Gilbert Foundation Chair of Israel Studies, Nazarian Center Director) signed “Not in Our Name.” Sarah Stein (Distinguished Professor of History) signed “Not in Our Name.”

Yale: David Sorkin (Lucy G Moses Professor of Jewish History) signed “Not in Our Name.” Saul Zaritt signed both the May 2021 declaration and “Not in Our Name.” Ra’anan Boustan (Presidential Fellow, Judaic Studies) signed AcademicsForPeace and “Not in Our Name.”

University of Michigan: Deborah Dash Moore (Distinguished University Professor of History and Judaic Studies) signed “Not in Our Name.” Rachel Rafael Neis (Professor of Judaic Studies) signed the May 2021 declaration and “Not in Our Name.” In March 2025, 297 Jewish faculty and staff signed a campus letter.

Brandeis: Nine faculty from or affiliated with NEJS signed one or more petitions, including ChaeRan Y. Freeze (Professor), Bernadette J. Brooten (Kraft-Hiatt Professor Emerita, MacArthur Fellow), and Eva Bellin (Professor).

Penn: David Ruderman (Joseph Meyerhoff Professor Emeritus of Jewish History) signed “Not in Our Name.” Talya Fishman (Associate Professor of Jewish History) signed “Not in Our Name.” Kathryn Hellerstein (Professor of Yiddish), previously documented as having signed against an academic boycott, signed “Not in Our Name.”

Do Endowed Jewish Studies Chairs Appear on the Lists?

Endowed chairs represent the most prestigious positions in academic life. They are funded by permanent endowments, typically established by Jewish philanthropists who intended to strengthen Jewish scholarship and education. Read the full endowed chair investigation.

Chair	Holder	Institution	Petitions Signed
Yerushalmi Chair of Israel & Jewish Studies	Yinon Cohen	Columbia	May 2021 + AcademicsForPeace + BDS letter + NION
Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History	Barry Trachtenberg	Wake Forest	Multiple petitions + NION
Meyerhoff Professor Emeritus of Jewish History	David Ruderman	Penn	NION
Gilbert Foundation Chair of Israel Studies	Dov Waxman	UCLA	NION
PenTishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies	Alon Confino	UMass Amherst	May 2021
Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies	Nitzan Lebovic	Lehigh	May 2021 + AcademicsForPeace + NION
Ticktin Professor of Israel Studies	Arie Dubnov	GW	May 2021 + AcademicsForPeace
Kraft-Hiatt Professor Emerita (NEJS)	Bernadette Brooten	Brandeis	AcademicsForPeace
Rose Professor of Holocaust Studies	Frances Tanzer	Clark	May 2021 + AcademicsForPeace + NION
Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies	Ranen Omer-Sherman	U Louisville	May 2021
Benaroya Chair of Israel Studies (stripped)	Liora Halperin	U Washington	$5M endowment pulled + NION
Swig Professor of Jewish Studies	Aaron Hahn Tapper	U San Francisco	May 2021 + AcademicsForPeace
Endowed Prof of Holocaust/Genocide Studies	Raz Segal	Stockton	“Textbook genocide” + NION
Mitrani Family Professor of English & Jewish Studies	Benjamin Schreier	Penn State	May 2021 + NION

How Are Holocaust Scholars Divided Over Israel?

Raz Segal (Stockton University) published an article on October 13, 2023 titled “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” He organized a letter signed by 60 Holocaust and genocide scholars. An 800-scholar statement followed. The University of Minnesota offered him a directorship, then rescinded it. In August 2026, Minnesota paid Segal $250,000 to settle. He signed “Not in Our Name” as signatory number 8.

Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) published an essay calling Israel’s war “genocide,” writing that “most acts of genocide are perceived by their perpetrators as acts of self-defense.”

In August 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution stating that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. A 2026 article in the Journal of Genocide Research documented “the growing rift between Holocaust scholars over Israel/Palestine.”

Is Petition Activity Against Israel Accelerating?

Year	Campaign	Scale
May 2021	JS/IS Declaration + Palestine and Praxis	~100 JS/IS faculty + 7,500 academics
Aug-Oct 2023	AcademicsForPeace + JS Ceasefire Letter	700-1,300 per petition
Dec 2023-Mar 2024	AcademicsForPeace (continued) + 60 Holocaust scholars	1,300+ per petition
May 2024	1,200 Jewish Professors vs IHRA	1,200+
March 2025	“Not in Our Name”	3,400+
March 2025	U Michigan Jewish Faculty Letter	297 (campus-specific)
Spring 2026	U Michigan Commencement	1,488 (campus-specific)

Frequently Asked Questions

Who teaches Jewish studies in America?

Jewish Studies (also called Judaic Studies) is taught at 313+ American universities, anchored by the Association for Jewish Studies (70+ member programs) and the Association for Israel Studies (~30 centers and chairs). Olam’s audit identified 2,499 faculty and program records nationally, with the largest concentrations at Columbia, Princeton, Penn State, NYU, and Yale.

How was the audit conducted?

Researchers built faculty rosters from public university websites (July-August 2026), then cross-referenced every name against nine documented petition campaigns spanning May 2021 to Spring 2026, plus organizational membership records and public statements. Each match was confirmed against the original public signatory lists by name, institution, department, and title. The full dataset accompanies this report as a separate searchable database.

Is this the largest study of its kind?

Yes. At 2,499 records across 313 institutions and nine petition campaigns, it is the broadest publicly documented audit of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies faculty ever conducted in the United States.

What are the headline findings?

1,298 of 2,499 records (51.9%) are on the record against Israel. Among 1,014 faculty specifically teaching Jewish Studies, Israel Studies, Hebrew, or Holocaust Studies, 401 (39.5%) are on the record. At Ivy League institutions, 240 of 332 records (72.3%) are on the record. Fourteen endowed chair holders appear on signatory lists. Petition activity is accelerating: the “Not in Our Name” letter (March 2025) has 3,400+ signatures.

What exactly counts as an anti-Israel position in this study?

Signing the academic boycott of Israeli institutions; describing Israel as apartheid, settler colonialism, or committing genocide in a signed petition; joining FSJP or JVP leadership; signing AcademicsForPeace, the “Not in Our Name” letter, or other major campaigns since May 2021. Positions explicitly excluded: supporting Palestinian rights within a two-state framework, criticizing specific Israeli policies, opposing settlement expansion, or criticizing the current Israeli government, since these are mainstream in Israeli politics and civil society.

Which institutions have the highest concentration?

Columbia (41), Princeton (35), Penn State (32), NYU (31), Yale (30), University of Chicago (28), Brown (27), University of Michigan (26), UC Berkeley (25), UCLA (24), Stanford (24), and University of Washington (24). National barometers documented 77 faculty boycotters at Columbia, 148 at NYU, and multiple FSJP chapters at each.

What are the study’s main limitations?

It captures public acts only; private views without a public statement are not counted. Absence from any list is not evidence of a pro-Israel position. FSJP membership lists are incomplete, Hebrew-language instructors rarely sign and are underrepresented, and the “Not in Our Name” letter mixed students and staff (only faculty were extracted). Classroom conduct is not assessed.

Does the study call for any professor to be fired or disciplined?

No. It makes no recommendation on employment, tenure, or academic standing. It documents publicly available information so that families, donors, endowments, and communal organizations can see what faculty teaching Judaism and Israel are saying publicly about Israel.

How do the documented positions compare to Israeli politics?

They sit outside mainstream Israeli political discourse. No mainstream Israeli political party endorses academic boycotts of Israeli universities, calls Zionism settler colonialism, or uses Jewish supremacy as a frame. The study deliberately excluded positions that ARE mainstream in Israel: two-state support, criticism of specific government policies, opposition to settlement expansion, to make clear that the documented positions fall outside Israeli consensus.

What does this mean for Jewish families considering university enrollment?

Families now have institution-by-institution data on faculty teaching Jewish Studies and Israel Studies who have signed anti-Israel campaigns. This is information that donors and endowments intended to strengthen Jewish education can use when making funding and enrollment decisions.

How will the database be maintained going forward?

The database will be updated annually. Corrections, additions, and verification requests are invited. The methodology is public and transparent. Future updates will track whether new faculty join campaigns and whether any faculty retract or distance themselves from previous signatures.

What Are the Study’s Full Numbers at a Glance?

Metric	Value
Total records audited	2,499
Records on the record against Israel	1,298 (51.9%)
Jewish Studies-related faculty identified	1,014
JS-related faculty on the record	401 (39.5%)
Ivy League records	332
Ivy League records on the record	240 (72.3%)
Institutions covered	313
Petition campaigns cross-referenced	9
FSJP chapters documented	130+
Endowed chair holders on the record	14
Faculty who signed multiple petitions	50+
Largest single petition (“Not in Our Name”)	3,400+ signatories
Largest institutional concentration (Columbia)	41
Highest faculty boycotter count (NYU)	148

The Full Series: Olam’s Faculty and Philanthropy Coverage

• The Full Faculty Database: 2,499 records across 313 universities, searchable by institution, petition, and category
• 50% of Israeli Professors Signed a Letter Calling Gaza a War Crime: the companion audit of 2,844 Israeli faculty at eight universities
• Who Signed: How Israeli and American Academic Petition Participation Compare: a side-by-side breakdown of both audits, 5,343 faculty combined
• Fourteen Endowed Chairs Funded by Jewish Donors Are Held by Faculty on the Record Against Israel: every chair, every donor, every petition
• Bend the Arc’s Money Map: The Funders Behind the Mamdani Machine: $50M funder network behind progressive Jewish advocacy
• The Other Spielberg Foundation: How $26.7M Amplifies Anti-Israel Infrastructure
• Streisand Foundation’s $597K Network: Anti-Israel Advocacy and the Iran Deal
• 82% of Middle Eastern Studies Professors Signed the Gaza War Crimes Letter: Israeli faculty petition participation broken down by academic discipline
• More Olam coverage: Universities & Research
• More Olam coverage: Global Jewish Philanthropy

The full database, names, titles, institutions, and the specific documents each faculty member signed, accompanies this report as a separate searchable database.

A study by olam.business and the Ronn Torossian Foundation. The methodology is public. The data is sourced. Corrections, additions, and verification requests: contact olam.business.

Glossary of Terms

BDS: Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, an international campaign promoting economic and academic pressure on Israel.

FSJP: Faculty for Justice in Palestine, a network of 130+ faculty chapters on US campuses that promotes the academic boycott of Israeli institutions.

JVP: Jewish Voice for Peace, a US-based organization that supports BDS and identifies as anti-Zionist.

AJS: Association for Jewish Studies, the primary professional body for Jewish Studies scholars in the United States.

AIS: Association for Israel Studies, the professional body for Israel Studies scholars.

IAGS: International Association of Genocide Scholars, the world’s largest academic association for genocide studies.

IHRA Definition: The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

Endowed Chair: A prestigious faculty position funded by a permanent endowment, typically named after the donor.

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https://olam.business/the-repeat-signers-faculty-who-signed-multiple-anti-israel-petition-campaigns

Fifteen Professors Sign Anti-Israel Petitions Repeatedly

The Olam Editorial Team

Editorial Team

Aug 21, 2026

Most faculty on the record signed one petition. These fifteen signed two, three, or four, across years and escalating campaigns. Eight hold endowed chairs.

OLAM RESEARCH · THE FACULTY AUDIT

Most faculty on the record signed one petition. These fifteen signed two, three, or four, across years and escalating campaigns. The repeat signers are the spine of the petition machine.

The Olam faculty audit documents nine petition campaigns spanning May 2021 through Spring 2026. Most of the 1,298 faculty on the record signed a single letter. But a subset, documented below, signed multiple campaigns: separate petitions, organized by different groups, circulated months or years apart. These are not one-time expressions. They are sustained, repeated, documented public commitments against Israel from some of the most senior scholars in the field.

Signing once could be a moment. Signing repeatedly is a position.

Yinon Cohen Signed 4 Campaigns: More Than Any Other Faculty Member in the Audit

Yerushalmi Professor of Israel & Jewish Studies, Columbia University

Cohen signed the May 2021 declaration, an AcademicsForPeace petition, a BDS letter calling on Germany to reject a resolution equating BDS with antisemitism, and the March 2025 “Not in Our Name” letter. Four separate campaigns across four years. He holds the Yerushalmi Chair, the most prestigious Israel Studies position at Columbia. The search committee that appointed him included Palestinian activist professors Rashid Khalidi and Lila Abu-Lughod. His research field is sociology and labor markets, not Jewish history or Israel Studies.

Lior Sternfeld Authored All 4 AcademicsForPeace Petitions: 4,000+ Combined Signatures

Associate Professor of History & Jewish Studies, Penn State University

Sternfeld is the national spokesperson for AcademicsForPeace and the author of all four petitions: August 2023, October 2023, December 2023, and March 2024. The March 2024 petition was titled “Genocide Is Plausible; Stop Arms to Israel.” Combined, the four petitions gathered 4,000+ signatures. He also signed the Jewish Studies Ceasefire Letter. He is not an endowed chair holder; he is an associate professor at a taxpayer-funded land-grant university. But he is arguably the single most consequential individual in the dataset, the person who built the petition infrastructure the rest of the field signed.

Omer Bartov Signed Every Round of AcademicsForPeace at Brown

Professor of Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Brown University

Bartov signed all three rounds of AcademicsForPeace (October 2023, December 2023, March 2024). National Jewish Book Award winner. Brown has 27 faculty on the record and hosts the first endowed Palestinian Studies chair at any American university.

Barry Trachtenberg Signed 3 Campaigns From Wake Forest’s Rubin Chair

Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University

Trachtenberg signed the Ceasefire Letter (October 2023), AcademicsForPeace (March 2024), and “Not in Our Name” (March 2025). Three campaigns, three organizing groups, 18 months. Rubin Presidential Chair.

Nitzan Lebovic Signed 3 Campaigns From Lehigh’s Apter Holocaust Chair

Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies & Ethical Values, Lehigh University

Lebovic signed the May 2021 declaration, AcademicsForPeace, and “Not in Our Name.” Three campaigns across four years, beginning before October 7. Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies.

Frances Tanzer Signed 3 Campaigns From Clark’s Rose Holocaust Chair

Rose Professor of Holocaust History, Clark University

Tanzer signed the May 2021 declaration, AcademicsForPeace, and “Not in Our Name.” Same pattern as Lebovic. Three campaigns, beginning before October 7. Rose Chair at one of the oldest Holocaust history programs in the country.

Katharina Galor Signed 3 Anti-Israel Letters at Brown

Hirschfeld Senior Lecturer, Judaic Studies, Brown University

Galor signed AcademicsForPeace (October 2023), the 240 Jewish and Israeli Scholars BDS letter, and a separate letter on “systematic oppression.” Archaeologist specializing in the Levant. One of the most active scholars in Brown’s Judaic Studies program.

Shira Klein Signed All 3 AcademicsForPeace Petitions at Chapman

Associate Professor of History, Chapman University

Klein signed all three rounds of AcademicsForPeace. National Jewish Book Award finalist and a statement author, not just a signatory. Alongside Sternfeld and Bartov, she is an architect of the campaign, not merely a participant.

Tamir Sorek Signed the BDS Letter and AcademicsForPeace, and Authored a Statement

Professor of History, University of Florida

Sorek signed the 240 Scholars BDS letter and AcademicsForPeace, where he was a statement author. Dual role as BDS endorser and petition architect. Previously held a joint appointment in Sociology and Jewish Studies.

Mark LeVine Signed the Ceasefire Letter and AcademicsForPeace at UC Irvine

Professor of History, UC Irvine

LeVine signed the Ceasefire Letter (October 2023) and AcademicsForPeace (March 2024). Two campaigns, two organizing groups. Middle East history specialist.

Atalia Omer Signed the Ceasefire Letter and AcademicsForPeace: Carnegie Fellow

Professor of Religion, Conflict & Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

Omer signed the Ceasefire Letter (October 2023) and AcademicsForPeace (March 2024). Carnegie Fellow. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

David N. Myers Signed AcademicsForPeace and the UCLA Faculty Letter

Sady & Ludwig Kahn Professor; Director, Leve Center for Jewish Studies, UCLA

Myers signed AcademicsForPeace in August 2023, the earliest round, and a UCLA Jewish faculty/staff letter. He holds the Kahn Chair and directs the Leve Center for Jewish Studies. At UCLA, Myers runs Jewish Studies while Dov Waxman (until December 2024) ran Israel Studies. Both directors are on the record.

Benjamin Schreier Signed the May 2021 Declaration and “Not in Our Name” at Penn State

Mitrani Family Professor of English & Jewish Studies, Penn State University

Schreier signed the May 2021 declaration and “Not in Our Name” in March 2025, four years apart. He holds the Mitrani Family Chair and shares a department with Lior Sternfeld, the AcademicsForPeace spokesperson.

Arie Dubnov Signed the May 2021 Declaration and AcademicsForPeace From GW’s Israel Studies Chair

Max Ticktin Professor of Israel Studies, George Washington University

Dubnov signed the May 2021 declaration and AcademicsForPeace. Max Ticktin Chair, a position funded to promote scholarship on the modern State of Israel.

Liora Halperin Signed Twice, and Lost a $5M Endowment After the First Signature

Associate Professor, University of Washington

Halperin signed the May 2021 declaration, the signature that cost her university $5 million when donor Becky Benaroya pulled the entire endowment, and “Not in Our Name” in March 2025. The first signature triggered the only documented case of donor action in the audit. The second came three years later, after Halperin had been stripped of the Benaroya Chair, promoted to full professor, and given a new unnamed chair. Two campaigns. One endowment lost. Zero deterrent effect.

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Fifteen Repeat Signers, Eight Endowed Chairs, One Direction: Escalation

Fifteen faculty signed two or more petition campaigns. Eight of the fifteen hold endowed chairs funded by Jewish philanthropists. The pattern runs in one direction: no repeat signer is documented reversing course. The positions harden, the campaigns get larger, and the language escalates from “settler colonialism” (2021) to “genocide is plausible” (2024) to a $250,000 settlement (2026).

The repeat signers are disproportionately concentrated at the top-12 campuses that produce the next generation of Jewish Studies scholars. They are not outliers. They are the core.

The full dataset is in The Olam’s faculty database. The complete audit documents the methodology and lists every individually named professor.

A study by olam.business and the Ronn Torossian Foundation. The methodology is public. The data is sourced.

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https://olam.business/the-repeat-signers-faculty-who-signed-multiple-anti-israel-petition-campaigns

See Every U.S. Professor Who Signed Against Israel

Ronn Torossian

Publisher · The Olam

Aug 3, 2026

The full database: 2,499 American faculty records cross-checked against nine anti-Israel petition campaigns, searchable by institution and petition.

OLAM RESEARCH · THE DATABASE

2,499 records. 313 universities. Nine petition campaigns. The institutional and campaign-level data behind The Olam’s national faculty audit: every institution, every endowed chair, every source.

The dataset behind this page covers 2,499 faculty records across 313 U.S. universities, cross-checked against nine documented petition campaigns from 2021 to 2025. Each record is tied to a public institutional roster and a specific, named public document. The full record-level file is not published; the institutional and campaign-level findings are below.

This page is the on-site home of the dataset behind The Olam’s national faculty audit: Half Are on the Record Against Israel: methodology, institutional analysis, and complete findings.

Top Institutions by Faculty on the Record

Ranked by number of faculty publicly on the record against Israel.

Rank	Institution	On record
1	Columbia University	41
2	Princeton University	35
3	Penn State University	32
4	New York University	31
5	Yale University	30
6	University of Chicago	28
7	Brown University	27
8	University of Michigan	26
9	UC Berkeley	25
10	UCLA	24
10	Stanford University	24
10	University of Washington	24

Separately, a national faculty barometer records NYU as the single highest-count campus, with 148 documented faculty boycotters.

Endowed Chairs on the Record

Fourteen endowed chairs established to strengthen Jewish scholarship are currently held by faculty who have signed public statements critical of Israeli state policy. Chairs are identified by title and institution; this is a record of documented institutional funding, not a claim about any individual’s character or private beliefs.

Chair	Institution	Documented act
Yerushalmi Chair of Israel & Jewish Studies	Columbia	May 2021 + AcademicsForPeace + BDS letter + NION
Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History	Wake Forest	Multiple petitions + NION
Meyerhoff Professor Emeritus of Jewish History	Penn	NION
Gilbert Foundation Chair of Israel Studies	UCLA	NION
PenTishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies	UMass Amherst	May 2021
Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies	Lehigh	May 2021 + AcademicsForPeace + NION
Ticktin Professor of Israel Studies	GW	May 2021 + AcademicsForPeace
Kraft-Hiatt Professor Emerita (NEJS)	Brandeis	AcademicsForPeace
Rose Professor of Holocaust Studies	Clark	May 2021 + AcademicsForPeace + NION
Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies	U Louisville	May 2021
Benaroya Chair of Israel Studies (stripped)	U Washington	$5M endowment pulled + NION
Swig Professor of Jewish Studies	U San Francisco	May 2021 + AcademicsForPeace
Endowed Prof of Holocaust/Genocide Studies	Stockton	“Textbook genocide” + NION
Mitrani Family Professor of English & Jewish Studies	Penn State	May 2021 + NION

The Nine Petition Campaigns

The evidentiary backbone: each record tied to a specific, named public document.

Campaign	Date	Total signatories	DB records
May 2021 JS/IS Declaration	May 2021	~100 JS/IS faculty	298
Palestine and Praxis	May 2021	7,500+ academics	Sampled
AcademicsForPeace (4 petitions)	Aug 2023-Mar 2024	700-1,300+ each	586
JS Ceasefire Letter	Oct 2023	100+	27
240 Scholars BDS Letter	Various	240+	Sampled
60 Holocaust Scholars Letter	Dec 2023	60	Sampled
1,200 Jewish Professors vs IHRA	May 2024	1,200+	Sampled
“Not in Our Name”	March 2025	3,400+	242
U Michigan Jewish Faculty Letter	March 2025	297	Sampled

Selected Programs & Centers Audited

A sample of the programs in the audit universe. The complete institution-by-institution roster sits in The Olam’s research archive.

Institution	Program / Center	Field	State
Columbia University	Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies	Judaic / Israel Studies	NY
New York University	Skirball Dept of Hebrew and Judaic Studies	Judaic Studies / Hebrew	NY
Harvard University	Center for Jewish Studies	Judaic Studies	MA
Yale University	Program in Judaic Studies	Judaic Studies	CT
Brandeis University	Schusterman Center for Israel Studies	Israel / Judaic Studies	MA
Brown University	Program in Judaic Studies	Judaic Studies	RI
Stanford University	Taube Center for Jewish Studies	Judaic Studies	CA
UCLA	Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies	Judaic Studies	CA
UC Berkeley	Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies	Israel / Judaic Studies	CA
University of Michigan	Frankel Center for Judaic Studies	Judaic Studies	MI
University of Pennsylvania	Jewish Studies Program / Katz Center	Judaic Studies	PA
Emory University	Institute for the Study of Modern Israel	Israel Studies	GA
University of Maryland	Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies	Israel Studies	MD
Northwestern University	Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies	Judaic / Israel Studies	IL
Rutgers University	Dept of Jewish Studies / Bildner Center	Judaic Studies	NJ

By the Numbers

The whole dataset, in one table.

Metric	Value
Total records audited	2,499
Records of faculty publicly against Israel	1,298 (51.9%)
Jewish Studies-related faculty identified	1,014
JS-related faculty on the record	401 (39.5%)
Ivy League records	332
Ivy League records against Israel	240 (72.3%)
Institutions covered	1,136
Institutions with at least one flagged professor	313
Petition campaigns cross-referenced	9
FSJP chapters documented	130+
Endowed chair holders on the record	14
Largest single petition (“Not in Our Name”)	3,400+ signatories

How the Data Was Built

Faculty rosters were compiled from publicly available university websites during July and August 2026, covering every institutional member of the Association for Jewish Studies (70+), every US center listed by the Association for Israel Studies (~30), and additional degree-granting programs. Each faculty member was cross-referenced against nine documented petition campaigns using university affiliation, department, academic title, and full name. The study explicitly excludes support for a two-state solution, criticism of specific Israeli government policies, opposition to settlement expansion, and calls for accountability regarding civilian casualties. Read the full methodology.

19.08.26

Editorial Note

Recently, the Government of Canada published a report titled “Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE)” by the Department of Canadian Heritage. Deborah Lyons, the former Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism, requested the report.  The Association for Canadian Studies and the Metropolis Institute conducted and produced the report. 

The survey included approximately 900 Jewish students across Canada and was conducted in November and December 2025. A high number (95.7%) of the Jewish students reported experiencing or witnessing at least one antisemitic incident on campus over the prior year. (84%) of them indicated that antisemitism is a serious problem at their institution, and (70%) stated that their university or college does not take the issue seriously. A substantial number of respondents reported hiding indicators of their identity or limiting classroom discourse due to safety concerns.  More than (60%) have lost friendships due to antisemitism. (41%) avoid certain classes or events.  About (40%) claimed that their academic performance has suffered, and more than seven in ten say that their mental health is harmed.  Roughly one-quarter have even considered dropping out. The antisemitic incidents affected all aspects of campus life: online spaces (34%), student organizations and campus events (33%), classrooms and lecture halls (25%), nearby off-campus areas (23%), and even student residences (9%).

The report noted that university faculty, teaching assistants, and administrative staff were directly responsible for a significant portion of antisemitic incidents, with faculty involved in (18%) of cases, and Teaching Assistants and administrators accounting for (7%) each.  Furthermore, (36%) of students encountered biased course content or classroom discussion portraying Jews, Judaism, Israel, or Zionism in an antisemitic way, and 34% reported professors introducing unrelated topics concerning Jews or Israel. Only one-third of Jewish respondents reported the incidents they experienced, and among those who did (63%) were dissatisfied with how authorities handled their reports. Most non-reporters (52%) said they did not believe reporting would help, one-quarter did not know how to report, and 16% feared retaliation. Jewish students who did report were far more likely to turn to Jewish organizations (62%) than to campus security (40%) or deans and administrators (37%).

Some of the experiences reported by the students were far-fetched. For example, of the 1,200 written accounts submitted, one student said:  “I heard a professor say that Hitler was a hero.” A second student said, “Professor wrote that we should kill all Zionists, that she’s worked with them and sees how evil they are.” A third student said, “I cannot speak Hebrew with my parents on the phone on campus. I have stopped wearing Jewish symbols. I cannot talk about my holiday plans because they are Jewish. I have to hide who I am and where I come from.” Others said, “Professors sharing links to Holocaust denial websites as mandatory reading material.” Or that, “Professor assigned us to listen to a podcast that discussed how Zionism was similar to Nazism, which was unrelated to the course.”

Overall, some (45%) of the respondents stated that they were exposed to Holocaust denial or distortion, and 81% reported hateful or discriminatory treatment of Zionists. Other incidents, such as antisemitic vandalism (71%), discriminatory treatment of Jews (56%), intimidation or threats directed at Jews (54%), and physical violence (22%), were also reported. 

The report concluded that academic leadership must take greater responsibility and that leadership in higher education institutions should use the findings immediately to examine policies and practices. 

Universities Canada, a group dedicated to advancing Canada’s universities at home and abroad, and advancing education, research and innovation for the benefit of all Canadians, published a statement online on the CASE report, stating, “Universities Canada is deeply concerned by the findings in the Government of Canada’s Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences report. Antisemitism has no place on our campuses or in our communities. Jewish students, faculty and staff must be able to learn, teach, work and participate fully in university life without discrimination, harassment, intimidation or fear for their safety. Universities are taking action. Institutions across the country are strengthening policies and working with their communities to improve campus safety and inclusion. Antisemitism is not confined to campuses. It is a national concern that requires coordinated action from universities, governments, law enforcement and communities. Universities Canada is reviewing the report and its recommendations. We will work with our members, the federal government and community partners to identify where further action and support are needed and to share effective approaches across the sector.” 

Michael Geist, Professor of Law at the Center for Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa, who served as a member of the advisory board for the report, wrote an analysis of the report, titled “Canada’s Campus Antisemitism Crisis: National Survey Finds Antisemitism Nearly Everywhere and University Responses Nowhere.” Geist explained that for two years he has written about antisemitism on Canadian university campuses from a personal perspective. He also noted that when the government eliminated the role of Deborah Lyons, it made the situation worse. 

In response to Geist, an anonymous reader using the pseudonym “Stoparabhate” wrote an antisemitic comment: “Are you not an author of the report? Sounds like your bigoted bias is creeping in to what you do. There is no crisis of antisemitism but there is a genocide in Gaza and overall Jewish Canadians don’t seem that concerned about it. Their Zionist orgs tell them it is kosher and they believe it. Your BS is not selling like it once did. Too many dead Arab kids.”

In 2019, Canada adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Definition of Antisemitism which states: “Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews,” and “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” or “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel,” are identifiable acts of antisemitism. 

The experience of antisemitism in higher education is part of a larger and alarming trend in Canada. There has been a significant increase in violent antisemitic incidents, ranging from online harassment to physical assault, vandalism of synagogues and Jewish schools, and desecration of Holocaust memorials and Jewish property. 

But nothing has been done to implement the IHRA Definition. The government needs to enact legal measures against the perpetrators to clear its name of the shameful antisemitism phenomenon.

REFERENCES:

Canada’s Campus Antisemitism Crisis: National Survey Finds Antisemitism Nearly Everywhere and University Responses Nowhere

Canada’s Campus Antisemitism Crisis: National Survey Finds Antisemitism Nearly Everywhere and University Responses Nowhere 

August 6, 2026

For the better part of two years, I have written about antisemitism on Canadian university campuses from the vantage point of personal experience: a post I never thought I would need to write on the right of Jewish students to feel safe on campus, the normalization of antisemitism at encampments including at my own university, the trepidation that accompanied a new academic year, and the chilling effect on expression that I described to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. Those accounts, alongside those of many students who shared their experiences, were often downplayed by some as exaggerated or unrepresentative. Yet this week, the release of the Canadian Heritage-backed Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE) report, conducted through the Office of the former Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism and produced by the Association for Canadian Studies and the Metropolis Institute, puts that claim to rest. The report, for which I served as a member of the advisory board, provides the most comprehensive national data to date on the experiences of Jewish students at Canadian post-secondary institutions. The report makes for difficult reading as it confirms that Canada is facing an antisemitism crisis on campus, with the overwhelming majority of the Jewish students surveyed stating that they had experienced or witnessed at least one instance of antisemitism over the prior year.

The survey itself was conducted in November and December 2025 with participation from about 900 Jewish students and recent graduates. Most of the national coverage focused on the topline results: 95.7% of respondents experienced or witnessed at least one instance of antisemitism over the previous 12 months, 84% view antisemitism as a serious problem on their campus, and 70% say their university does not take antisemitism seriously. Culture Minister Marc Miller called the findings “alarming”. He was right, but a deeper dive into the data reveals how the cumulative effect of a hostile climate changes the way that Jewish students study, speak, and participate.

The effects on daily campus life are unmistakable. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (72%) limit what they say in class about being Jewish and two-thirds (66%) do the same online. A majority (57%) avoid wearing or displaying Jewish symbols due to safety concerns, while students who do wear visible markers of Jewish identity report notably higher exposure to intimidation and physical violence than those who do not. And more than 60% have lost friendships because of antisemitism, 41% avoid certain classes or events altogether, 40% say their academic performance has suffered, and more than seven in ten say the experience has harmed their mental health. Roughly one-quarter have even considered dropping out.

This affects every aspect of campus life as respondents identified online spaces (34%), student organizations and campus events (33%), classrooms and lecture halls (25%), nearby off-campus areas (23%), and even student residences (9%) as sites of antisemitic conduct. Fellow students were the most commonly identified source at 51%, yet the conduct is by no means limited to peers. Faculty members were cited in 18% of incidents and teaching assistants and administrators or staff each accounted for a further 7%. For anyone who cares about the academic mission, the classroom data is particularly troubling: 36% of respondents encountered course content or classroom discussion portraying Jews, Judaism, Israel, or Zionism in an antisemitic or biased manner and 34% said a professor raised those topics in ways unrelated to the course subject. Exposure to Holocaust denial or distortion was encountered often or sometimes by 45% of respondents. And 81% of respondents reported hateful or discriminatory treatment of Zionists as occurring often or occasionally, alongside antisemitic vandalism (71%), discriminatory treatment of Jews (56%), intimidation or threats directed at Jews (54%), and physical violence directed at Jews (22%). The more than 1,200 open-ended accounts of antisemitism are stunning in their breadth and include a student whose friend was chased from a campus building by a group shouting “there’s a Jew…let’s get him” and a professor telling a class that “Jews belong in Poland and need to go back.”

The report devotes an entire section to what it calls “institutional betrayal.” Only one-third of respondents reported the incidents they experienced, and among those who did, 63% were dissatisfied with how the report was handled. The majority of non-reporters (52%) said they did not believe reporting would help, one-quarter did not know how to report, and 16% feared retaliation. Perhaps most indicative of the trust deficit, Jewish students who did report were far more likely to turn to Jewish organizations (62%) than to campus security (40%) or deans and administrators (37%).

The report itself stops short of formal recommendations, concluding instead that academic leadership must take greater responsibility and that the findings should be used immediately by leadership in higher education institutions to examine their policies and practices. The recommendations came separately from the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics (NECA), a non-partisan group of more than 400 Jewish and non-Jewish academics from 54 institutions of which I am a member, which released ten recommendations alongside the report. The list will sound familiar to anyone who has followed this issue: applying existing policies to protect students targeted for any aspect of their Jewish identity including Zionism, institutional neutrality policies that apply across the institution, adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism together with the Canadian Handbook, a centralized and transparent incident reporting system with annual campus climate assessments, and a special advisor on antisemitism on every campus.

What has been missing is not knowledge of what to do, but the will to do it. Indeed, the release carries its own illustration of the problem: the survey was commissioned by former Special Envoy Deborah Lyons before the government eliminated her role, leaving the government to release the most comprehensive evidence yet of a systemic antisemitism problem on campus just months after creating a leadership void that has yet to be filled and a new anti-hate council that has yet to act.

I have been an academic for nearly 30 years, working in an environment where inclusion and safe spaces for all students to be their best were unquestioned priorities. Backed by a supportive University president, dean, and advisor on antisemitism, I still believe that to be the case. But this survey confirms that the vast majority of Jewish students encounter antisemitism on campus. If this were any other group — 95% of Indigenous students reporting discrimination or 70% of BIPOC students reporting mental health harm — this would be viewed as a major crisis requiring immediate action. But when 95% of Jewish students report encountering antisemitism, 70% report harm to their mental health, a majority hide their identity, and students report threats of violence and Holocaust denial, the response from some quarters is to ignore or take issue with the survey data.

The bottom line is that hundreds of Jewish students from campuses across the country report antisemitic conduct on campus that is stunning in scope and harm. Every university president in Canada should be investigating how much of the data reflects their own campus experience and committing to change through the NECA recommendations. Every faculty member should be examining whether the discriminatory conduct occurs in their class. And every faculty and student union should be working to fully protect their Jewish members. Years of willingness to tolerate or excuse the antisemitic reality – a Jewish exception – suggests this is unlikely to happen. But now no one can say they didn’t know what was happening.

Canada’s Campus Antisemitism Crisis: National Survey Finds Antisemitism Nearly Everywhere and University Responses Nowhere

August 6, 2026 at 9:00 am

Are you not an author of the report? Sounds like your bigoted bias is creeping in to what you do.

There is no crisis of antisemitism but there is a genocide in Gaza and overall Jewish Canadians don’t seem that concerned about it. Their Zionist orgs tell them it is kosher and they believe it.

Your BS is not selling like it once did. Too many dead Arab kids.

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https://univcan.ca/news/universities-canada-statement-on-the-case-report/

Universities Canada statement on the CASE report

August 06, 2026

Universities Canada is deeply concerned by the findings in the Government of Canada’s Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences report.

Antisemitism has no place on our campuses or in our communities. Jewish students, faculty and staff must be able to learn, teach, work and participate fully in university life without discrimination, harassment, intimidation or fear for their safety.

Universities are taking action. Institutions across the country are strengthening policies and working with their communities to improve campus safety and inclusion.

Antisemitism is not confined to campuses. It is a national concern that requires coordinated action from universities, governments, law enforcement and communities.

Universities Canada is reviewing the report and its recommendations. We will work with our members, the federal government and community partners to identify where further action and support are needed and to share effective approaches across the sector.

About Universities Canada

Universities Canada is the voice of Canada’s universities at home and abroad, advancing higher education, research and innovation for the benefit of all Canadians.

Media contact

Stéphanie Montreuil
Director, Communications
Universities Canada
communications@univcan.ca

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https://thehub.ca/2026/08/06/antisemitism-normalized-on-canadian-campuses-government-survey-finds-professors-blamed-in-1-in-5-incidents/Antisemitism ‘normalized’ at Canadian universities, government survey finds—professors blamed in 1 in 5 incidents

Analysis 

6 August 2026

A national survey of Jewish post-secondary students has found that antisemitism at Canadian universities is not an isolated problem but a pervasive feature of campus life, with the overwhelming majority reporting they have experienced or witnessed it in the past year.

The Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE) report, commissioned by the federal government and produced by the Association for Canadian Studies and the Metropolis Institute, surveyed roughly 900 Jewish postsecondary students. It found that 95.7 percent had experienced or witnessed at least one antisemitic incident in the previous year, and that 84 percent said antisemitism is now a serious problem on their campus.

The report, released Wednesday and initially requested by the now defunct Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, described the findings as pointing to “a troubling and urgent conclusion: antisemitism on Canadian campuses is not episodic or peripheral—it is persistent and proliferating, and on some campuses has become a normalized and systemic feature of campus life.”

The authors concluded that, “These accounts reveal a university culture that is both not welcoming to Jewish students and actively and systematically trying to exclude and vilify them.”

Seventy percent of respondents said their university does not take antisemitism seriously, and 68 percent said their campus is not a safe and inclusive place for Jewish students. More than 70 percent said they limit what they say in class about being Jewish, and 57 percent now avoid wearing or displaying Jewish symbols out of safety concerns.

Graphic Credit: Janice Nelson.

Cary Kogan, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Psychology, who sat on the report’s advisory board, said in an interview with The Hub that places of learning have failed the students they are meant to protect.

“You have these institutions that don’t know how or are unwilling to respond, and that’s what we call institutional betrayal,” Kogan said. “It’s essentially that nobody has your back. It’s not EDI [Equity Diversity and Inclusion] offices, it’s not human rights offices, it’s not leadership, etc.”

Kogan, also co-founder of the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics, explained that Canadian universities have a long history of antisemitism, demonstrated through enrollment quotas that lasted until the 1960s. While the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023 was the starting gun for a new round of hatred towards Jews, he said, the last few years have been a “quiet burn” of antisemitism that has become institutionalized in Canada’s postsecondary schools.

This week, news broke that a group of Jewish students was suing McGill University for more than $5 million, alleging they experienced assault and intimidation at pro-Palestinian encampments and protests two years ago.

Sources of hate

According to the report, antisemitism against students came in the form of “Holocaust denial and distortion; harassment and threats; normalization of antisemitic climate; pressure to disclose political views; academic/classroom bias; social exclusion; fear and emotional trauma; and a lack of institutional response.”

More than half (54 percent) reported intimidation or threats directed at Jews often or occasionally. For 22 percent of students, words escalated to physical violence directed towards Jews.

“My friend was walking through [redacted] Hall. He also wears a kippah, and a group of students shouted, ‘There’s a Jew…let’s get him.’ They then chased him out of the building,” described one student.

The report found that 18 percent of incidents cited faculty members as the source of antisemitism, with another 7 percent involving teaching assistants and 7 percent involving administrators or staff. Thirty-six percent of respondents said they had encountered course content or classroom discussion they viewed as antisemitic or biased, while 34 percent said a professor had introduced the subject of Israel or Zionism in a way that felt unrelated to the course.

Graphic Credit: Janice Nelson.

One student recounted being told by a professor, “in the middle of the lecture, that Jews belong in Poland and need to go back.”

Students under threat checking out

In response, Canadian Jewish students reported limiting what they say in class and avoiding wearing Jewish symbols to ensure their safety. Thirty-two percent reported considering dropping a class or program due to what they deem to be a professor or student’s antisemitic views.

Graphic Credit: Janice Nelson.

Kogan described it as a sense that Jews on campus now have to “self-silence a part of their identity.”

Still others are choosing to check out from campus entirely.

“There are students who are leaving programs, there are students who are leaving universities, there are [Jewish] faculty members choosing to retire earlier than planned because it’s just unpleasant,” described Kogan.

Equity, diversity, and inclusion

Kogan traced elements of this hatred back to the proliferation of EDI, critical race theory, and decolonization—narratives preached by the progressive Left at universities. He called this way of thinking an “incubator” for antisemitism and one that became a moral imperative for many students, aided by student and faculty unions.

“It’s like a perfect storm because you’ve got these well-intentioned [EDI] movements that are trying to negotiate serious inequalities in society,” said Kogan. “But it gets so easily co-opted because it essentially simplifies the world into those who are oppressed and those who are oppressors. It flattens everything into the good group and the bad group, and then becomes very quick, very easy to say, ‘Jews are privileged.’”

With various classrooms politicized—from the social sciences to increasingly medicine—Jewish students reported feeling pressure from their educators, who adopt this mode of thinking but also grade their work, to publicly signal that they agree.

“My class was forced to answer exam questions according to my professor’s biases,” detailed one student. “We were forced to draw positive connections between BLM and Hamas.”

“[A] professor wrote that we should kill all Zionists, that she’s worked with them and sees how evil they are,” said another.

One in five Jewish students responded that they felt pressure to join an anti-Israel protest.

The university response

The report also pointed to a major gap between antisemitism and institutional accountability.

It quoted the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights in 2024, which found that, “Universities are failing to enforce their own policies to protect Jewish students on campus.”

Only 33 percent of students who experienced or witnessed an antisemitic incident reported it, and of those who did, 63 percent said they were dissatisfied with how it was handled. More than half of respondents said they didn’t report because they believed it wouldn’t make a difference.

But, Kogan said universities may not understand the problem they are solving for, thinking they are addressing a political issue. While he believes most university leadership want to do the right thing and are no longer denying the problem exists, he said they remain undereducated around the issue of antisemitism.

“It’s very hard for leadership to react and understand that what they’re reacting to is not a geopolitical issue,” he said. “It’s an identity issue, like any other identity-based hate.”

“Universities Canada is deeply concerned by the findings in the Government of Canada’s Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences report. Antisemitism has no place on our campuses or in our communities. Jewish students, faculty and staff must be able to learn, teach, work and participate fully in university life without discrimination, harassment, intimidation or fear for their safety,” said the national association representing Canada’s universities in a statement to The Hub. “Universities Canada is reviewing the report and its recommendations. We will work with our members, the federal government and community partners to identify where further action and support are needed and to share effective approaches across the sector.”

While countries like Canada and the U.K. have left management of antisemitism to universities internally, other nations like the U.S. and Australia are resorting to direct government intervention—threatening and, in some cases, withholding public funds from post-secondary schools until the government believes the issues have been addressed.

Regardless of the approach, the current situation on Canadian campuses remains dire for many Jewish students. The report’s authors state that if the situation does not change, Canadian universities “risk becoming the breeding ground for anti-Jewish hate to spread across generations and communities.”

“We’ve got to put an end to it. [There’s] a culture change. To come back to the three pillars of the university: academic freedom, institutional neutrality, and open debate and dialogue,” explained Kogan. “Those are the three pillars, and we’ve lost all three of them.”

The national survey was conducted last November and December with respondents recruited through Jewish university groups.

Fault Lines examines the pressures pulling Canadian society apart and the principles that can hold it together. We look beyond headlines to understand how institutions, communities, and democratic norms are fraying. Our mission is to show how better choices can repair what is broken.

Harrison Lowman

Harrison Lowman is The Hub’s Managing Editor. He has worked for more than a decade in journalism

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Jewish students speak out after landmark campus antisemitism report

Jewish students speak out after landmark campus antisemitism report

‘I have to hide who I am and where I come from,’ one student said.

• North Star

• August 14, 2026

On Aug. 5, a new national study of antisemitism on Canadian university campuses revealed a startling reality: 95.7 per cent of Jewish students surveyed said they had experienced or witnessed antisemitism in the past year.

The report received wide coverage, including in The CJN, but there’s more to this story than that disturbing number. The 1,200 anecdotes submitted by students paint a vivid picture of being targeted by peers and professors for their faith and identities.

The research was originally commissioned by the office of Canada’s Special Envoy on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism, Deborah Lyons, before Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government scrapped both her office and the Islamophobia czar’s in February 2026. When Carney announced the makeup of a new federal Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion in June, he told the members to tackle antisemitism first, especially on campus. That’s when the study’s authors reminded the government it already had the research sitting there, which it had paid for.

But what else does this report tell us? What do Jewish university, college and CEGEP students actually say happened to them? And now that we have the research, what happens next?

On today’s episode of The CJN’s North Star podcast with Ellin Bessner, you’ll hear several of the students who spoke out, along with Cary Kogan, a University of Ottawa professor who was an advisor on the report and helped make it public last week, who spoke with The CJN’s Zenith Wolfe.

Transcript

Student 1: I heard a professor say that Hitler was a hero.

Student 2: Professor wrote that we should kill all Zionists, that she’s worked with them and sees how evil they are.

Student 3: I cannot speak Hebrew with my parents on the phone on campus. I have stopped wearing Jewish symbols. I cannot talk about my holiday plans because they are Jewish. I have to hide who I am and where I come from.

Ellin Bessner: Those are just three of the 1,200 written accounts submitted by Jewish students as part of that new national study on antisemitism on Canadian campuses that came out last week. I asked some friends and colleagues to read them for this podcast.

The report’s main findings already made headlines that 95.7% of Jewish students surveyed said they’d experienced or witnessed antisemitism in the past year. But there’s much more to this report than that number.

What else did the Jewish students tell the researchers? How did the study come to be? Why was it made public now? Did a mysterious bot attempt to hack the survey and skew the data?

And now that we have the research, what happens next?

The students’ accounts are hard to read, even though we at The CJN and many of you have been hearing stories like these since October 7 coming out of universities, colleges, and CEGEPPs, and about antisemitism happening not just in classrooms, but in washrooms, gyms, and even off campus. So much so that some students say they’ve considered withdrawing from a course or leaving university altogether. They’ve stopped wearing their Stars of David.

Some have stopped answering questions in class. And many say they don’t bother reporting what happens to them to the authorities because they’ve seen very little has happened when other Jewish students have complained before them.

Cary Kogan: Unfortunately, you know, that also comes across in the data is the invalidation of people’s experience. It’s not just the incidents themselves, which are terrible. 96% are saying in the last year they’ve witnessed or experienced an incident, at least an incident, and nine out of 10 are saying on a pretty regular basis, but it’s that there’s been no response.

Ellin Bessner: I’m Ellin Bessner, and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Friday, August the 14th, 2026.

Welcome to North Star, the flagship podcast of The Canadian Jewish News. And made possible thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granofsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.

The report came out August 5th and it received wide coverage, including here at The CJN, but there’s a story behind the study itself because it was commissioned by the former Federal Special Envoy on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism, Deborah Lyons, who had said on this program after she was appointed in October 2023 that she wanted hard numbers, bulletproof numbers that she could then show to the government and the country on what exactly was going on campuses.

A contract was signed, the research was paid for by the Canadian government, the Association for Canadian Studies – Metropolis Institute was hired, and the 38 questions in the survey covered everything from campus climate and classroom experiences to threats, violence, mental health, and academic consequences. It went out through Jewish campus clubs and online, and it went live November 2025 for a month.

More than 1,000 responses came in, but then one day something strange happened. Study co-author Jack Jedwab told me another 1,000 more survey answers came in all at once, overnight in December, all from Queen’s University, all with the same answers saying antisemitism was not a problem.

He said they couldn’t track the answers to real people and determined it was an attempt to skew the data, so those answers got thrown out.

Two months later, Canada scrapped the Special Envoy’s Office and the Islamophobia Office, too, and said a new advisory council on rights, equity and inclusion was going to take over. But this study got to see the light of day: A press conference in Ottawa at the National Press Theatre. Two Jewish students came and shared their stories.

Carleton University graduate student Alexa Barrett-Taller and Rachel Seguin from B.C., (who Zoomed in).

Alexa Barrett-Taller: What does it feel like to question whether it’s safe to tell someone that you’re Jewish? To walk across campus and wonder whether wearing a Star of David, a Jewish necklace, or a Kippah will change the way that people see you. To hear your parents say, “Maybe don’t wear that today,” not because they want you to hide who you are, but because they’re worried of you making it home. These questions, no student should be able to ask themselves here in Canada.

My name is Alexa Barrett -aller, and I’m a proud Jewish and Dominican graduate of Carleton University. I emphasize the word proud because my Jewish identity is my family, my history, my traditions, and the values who have shaped who I am today. Yet during university, it became something that I felt that I had to hide.

When I started university, I thought my biggest challenges would be exams and deadlines. I never imagined that one of the hardest parts would be navigating what it meant to be openly Jewish on campus.

After October 7th, I returned to class hoping difficult conversations could happen with care, nuance, and respect. Instead, I sat in a classroom where a professor said that the Jewish people were responsible for what had happened. After class, I spoke with my professor privately.

I wasn’t asking to shut down conversations. I was asking for fairness, context, and humanity. My story is not unique. I have spoken with countless Jewish students who hesitate before wearing a Jewish symbol, attending a Hillel or Chabad event, or simply telling other classmates that they’re Jewish, not because they’re ashamed, but because they’re afraid.

No student should have to calculate whether being honest about who they are will make them a target. Universities should challenge our ideas, not our right to exist. that no student has to hide a necklace, avoid a conversation, or stay silent about their identity just to make it through their school day. Every student deserves to feel safe, every student deserves to belong, and every student deserves to know that they never have to choose between their education and their identity. Thank you.

Rachel Seguin: Good morning. My name is Rachel Seguin, and I’m a fourth-year student at the University of British Columbia. Thank you for the opportunity to share one personal experience that changed how I viewed my place on campus as a Jewish student.

In February 2024, I attended a general meeting of the Social Justice Center and Alma Mater Student Society Resource Group at UBC because I wanted to engage in dialogue.

I wear a Star of David necklace every day and during the meeting it became visible. I wasn’t wearing it to make a statement or provoke anyone. It’s simply a part of who I am. After the meeting, I respectfully asked the group to cite the sources for the information it shared publicly and acknowledge the October 7th attacks alongside its discussion of the conflict.

Instead of addressing my questions, the conversation shifted away from what I had asked. While I was trying to explain why this mattered to me, the co-chair interrupted me and said, “Look, I’m a Muslim. I don’t hate you just because you’re Jewish.”

I’d never accused anyone of hating me. I came to the meeting to discuss ideas, but I left feeling that who I was had become more important than what I was saying…

I was advised that if I wished to pursue the matter further, I could file a complaint with the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal. As a student, I wasn’t looking to begin legal proceedings. I was looking for support, accountability, and a meaningful process within my own university community.

Instead, I was left wondering where a Jewish student is supposed to turn when they believe they have experienced discrimination. Universities and student societies have a responsibility to ensure that every student can participate in campus life, express their identity openly, and trust that concerns about discrimination will be taken seriously.

Ellin Bessner: Those were two students speaking publicly about their experiences. The researchers had heard though from hundreds more. The report includes written accounts. Here are some friends and colleagues of ours reading the accounts:

Student 4: In a course titled Canadian Law and Violence, the professor spent an entire semester discussing Israel’s occupation of Palestine while encouraging students to miss class to attend protests, showing Al Jazeera videos, and wearing pro-Palestine shirts and earrings every week.

Student 5: Working in my labs I’ve had people refuse to work with me due to my Jewish identity. And purposely try to mess up my data.”

Student 6: I and many other members of a Jewish organization unrelated to Israel received phone calls containing death threats after October 7th.

Student 7: Three minutes after the start of our presentation on breast cancer, my professor interrupted us to slander Israel, saying it was a sea of savages and barbarians. and that every second three babies in Gaza were being killed.

Student 8: I was spat on. Someone revved their car engine toward me in a crosswalk while I was wearing a kippah. I saw a Jewish student get punched. I heard a Jewish friend being called a “Zionist whore” and spat on because she was wearing a visible Magen David, a Star of David.I saw antisemitic graffiti in bathroom stalls and all over campus.

Student 9: When I was at the campus gym while wearing a kippah that made me visibly Jewish, a student came up to me and said he wished all Israelis would die because we’re a bunch of colonizers from Europe.

Student 10: I went to the bathroom. Someone saw my Star of David and said, “Welcome to your gas chamber” while people were vaping.

Student 11: Behind me in the study room, a group of students were talking about Hitler and the Holocaust, how it was supposedly false, how Hitler could have never killed Jews, and how the Holocaust was simply invented by Jews to obtain more money and remorse.

---

Ellin Bessner: Since the report came out, there has been some criticism that the study did not adequately represent the diversity of Jews, Jewish opinion, particularly when it comes to Jewish groups or students who oppose Israel. The authors tell me they did include students with those views in the data.

57 respondents identified themselves as anti-Zionist.

Another 44 said they didn’t consider anti-Semitism to be a problem.

The full report is publicly available on the government’s website, and we put a link to it in our show notes. The published report doesn’t include comments from any of those students.

So, what do the report’s authors and advisors want to happen now?

The CJN’s Zenith Wolfe covered the press conference in Ottawa and then interviewed Cary Kogan. He was one of the advisors on this report. He’s co-president of the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics. They have 10 recommendations.

Zenith Wolfe: I know that the collections process for the survey took place between November and December 2025, but I imagine there was work that was being done before that. Can you tell me how long this has been in the works?

Cary Kogan: This was commissioned by the former Special Envoy’s office, right? It was probably six months before that we got it got started. I was on the advisory committee for the development of the survey, for the dissemination of the survey, and for the interpretation of the results. But once it went out, I mean, the data collection was pretty quick, actually.

And it’s a sizable survey. I think it’s probably the largest per capita survey of students, arguably in the world, actually, if we do it on a per capita basis.

Zenith Wolfe: I’m wondering if you know why Canadian Heritage agreed to do this survey now?

Cary Kogan: The intention was to do it, but there was a K through 12 report that was done, led by Bob Brim. And then this was the follow-up study. And so, we knew anecdotally, certainly what was going on campus. We said we need to do the university piece and that a priority to then follow up.

It’s a little bit more complex in a university environment. You know, you’re dealing with different issues. And I think probably maybe we’ll talk about this, but the issues of academic freedom, and the way that universities are governed, that’s different from K through 12. So, they were looking for data, and this study had already been done.

And so, it became clear to, I think, to Heritage that, well, we’ve already got this study that we’ve essentially completed. We should really make use of that because the data is there, the report is ready, and it helps us in the work that we’re trying to do to understand this problem. So, Jack Jedwab and Paul Hawley are the two main co-authors. Then that became the task of that Advisory Council.

One of the priorities is antisemitism, as the Prime Minister mentioned when he spoke at Holy Blossom in Toronto, and specifically singled out universities. I can’t speak on behalf of the minister, so I don’t know, you know, who within Canadian Heritage would have said, let’s use that survey that exists. But clearly, this is an important issue for them. Clearly, they knew the survey existed and then it was commissioned by the Special Envoy’s Office.

And so, they supported the release of the report.

Zenith Wolfe: I mean, I think we both already recognize 96% is a vast majority of the surveyed students. I’m wondering from your perspective why it’s so common on university campuses?

Cary Kogan: I mean, that’s a complex question, right? We have to look at it as an evolution over time. Certainly, antisemitism existed before October 7th, but it accelerated precipitously post-October 7th. And I think, there’s a bit of a snowball effect because you’ve got, there was, I think, fair to say, not a lot of consequences to bad behaviour. If we look at the encampments, if we look at some of the types of vandalism. the kinds of things that were said about Jewish students and two Jewish students and very few consequences.

So that has an impact when there aren’t consequences to these kinds of incidents, they become normalized.

I think it’s also fair to say that like when there are these geopolitical conflicts, when you’ve got a war going on in the Middle East, we know that’s correlated with increased rates of antisemitism. And so,it comes out of the woodwork, unfortunately, and in this case, in a very coordinated way. So, you had situations in classrooms where it had nothing to do with the Middle East conflict, you know, whether it’s a physics class or a chemistry class or whatever, with no connection with the conflict that where professors …and [the] report supports this.

One in five of the participants reporting in the survey reported that antisemitism was coming from professors and a lot of that was the kind of rhetoric that is anti-Zionist. abusive rhetoric, really, that traffics in all sorts of tropes that are essentially a repetition of the kinds of things that we see in other forms of antisemitism. So essentially, Jews have excessive control, excessive power, and are essentially malevolent. And so, we saw a lot of that going on in classrooms. People felt liberated, so to speak, to use their platform to kind of spew this kind of rhetoric that that I think is very damaging.

And then student unions, there are a number of Boycott, Divest and Sanction motions that were passed. Faculty unions, it’s legitimate to criticize Israel. It’s legitimate to criticize the way that the war is being conducted. It’s legitimate to have these discussions. This was well beyond the pale when it comes to this kind of discourse.

It was targeted. Jewish students were called out. I think there was some coordination. Organizations like ISGAP have investigated that kind of potential foreign interference, for example, that the university is a good place to kind of promote these ideas that we are seeing on campus and the protection around speech that is vitally important, but in this case, I think just really crossed the line.

Zenith Wolfe: The discussion on Zionism brings me to another point. The report takes pains to differentiate between antisemitism, Zionism, and anti-Zionism. And I’m wondering how the people who were going through the answers were differentiating between legitimate criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism that bled into antisemitism and how that influenced the percentages or the numbers in the report.

Cary Kogan: Right. I mean, I think we have to, it’s interesting that the sort of questioning about legitimacy of what is and what is not antisemitism, and in this case, I think when you read the report, when you read the statements, I think, we certainly, with other minoritized groups, we listen to what they say. And I think if you look at the fact that 50% of Jewish students are telling us that they feel a need to hide their Jewish identity, that they can’t talk about their Jewish identity, 70% of them can’t talk about it during class, you know, where they are literally punished by people who are there, who are supposed to care for their career, you know, advancement and education, professors, literally punishing them if they have an opinion that differentiates from the professor’s opinion and, told things like, and there’s one story in there about a student who talked about talking about sexual violence on October 7th and was told, well, you’re getting a zero on this assignment and you should really talk about, you know, sexual assault by Israeli police officers. I think we need to trust these students to know what is antisemitism?

I don’t see in those comments, and I’ve read all 1,200 comments, anything that indicates to me that we’re talking about legitimate criticism of Israel. We’re talking about totally inappropriate comments, somebody saying we should kill all Zionists. When we know from Bob Brym’s work, 94% of Canadian Jews believe that Jews have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, ie., they’re Zionists, so that’s why we really were careful with the definitions, and we wanted to make sure that people weren’t, and people project all sorts of definitions onto Zionism. They’re simply incorrect, and… when you just explain it very straight in a straightforward way, I think we can understand that. I think most of the students, I mean, I can’t guarantee that 100%, but reading the narratives tells us that they do understand and are feeling, and look, 75% of them are explaining that they have mental health impact because of antisemitism on campus.

So, I think they know.

Zenith Wolfe: The report considered 900 of the students who reached out, but I believe it was a total of 1,038 who had sent in survey responses. How come? And that’s over 10% of respondents who had been left out.

Cary Kogan: Right, so you have a phenomenon of data confirmation, like you want to look at the quality of the data. Quality control. You may have incomplete data, like if somebody fills out one-tenth of the survey, can you use that data, right? So, for example, somebody just choosing all the same response option across a series of questions, that would be a problem.

Ellin Bessner: The Association for Canadian Studies told The CJN there were other more alarming problems.

They told us that on the final day of the survey being open in December, they received 1,000 exactly the same submissions overnight from an e-mail address involved with Queen’s University, all declaring they had no problem with any antisemitism. The researchers haven’t been able to trace the persons who sent them in, but they discounted these extra 1,000.

Here’s Professor Kogan again.

Cary Kogan: But basically, there were bots that were sending in, unsurprisingly, the same, like the same exact responses to the survey. And then this just goes to show you like that there are bad actors out there. Their responses were clearly trying to minimize antisemitism on campus and to present themselves as Jewish and anti-Zionist, if I can put it that way. And so, luckily, they picked that up.

Zenith Wolfe: How do you believe that this report will inform policy that is made around addressing antisemitism on university campuses?

Cary Kogan: I can tell you what we hope will be the case. What we hope will be the case is NECA, the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics, which I’m the co-president of., we’ve come up with 10 recommendations that you may see on our website. We plan to disseminate the report to all the university presidents and provide them with those recommendations.

I think what we’re hoping for now is action, right? We’ve talked a lot about the problem. It’s been three years almost now that we’ve known about this problem. I mean, as I said, it didn’t start on October 7th, but it certainly got worse.

And so, we’re hoping that, you know, I think the first recommendation we make is: enforce your policies. Like if you look at a student code of conduct policy, you know, the kinds of things that we’re talking about are unacceptable behaviors. And so, we, for a woman to walk on campus and threatened with rape is not acceptable. It’s in the sexual harassment policy, right?

So, being excluded from a student club because you’re Jewish is not acceptable. So, we do hope that this is a wake-up call for action. and not just further policy development but actually enforcing those policies that do exist. And if there are other policies that need to be implemented, and certainly as Martha Piper mentioned at the press conference, we need, we can do this. Like we can have clearly accountability mechanisms put in place to ensure that not just Jewish students, because this is not just a Jewish student problem, like it actually reveals a bigger problem.

If you can target a minoritized group like Jews, then you can target any group for any reason. And so, it speaks to, it’s a canary in a coal mine, I think is the expression.

Zenith Wolfe: You said that there are 10 recommendations. Of these recommendations, which do you think should be highlighted the most?

Cary Kogan: The implementation of institutional neutrality or institutional impartiality policies is really important. And we’re starting to see some universities, I think, you know, Carleton has just passed an institutional impartiality policy because what we’ve seen is we’ve seen the whole departments declare that they’re essentially anti-Zionist departments. whole departments basically say that we subscribe to anti-normalization. We won’t even talk about the issue because there’s such a clear moral stance here that Israel is, you know, is essentially made-up of moral monsters who are irredeemable and the Jewish state needs to be simply destroyed, that we shouldn’t even have this discussion. So that, to me, that is a clear violation of what the university is supposed to be about.

And I would also say the other big one is the third one around academic freedom. We need to strengthen academic freedom. The academic freedom of professors is under threat. The freedom of expression of students is under threat, significant threat. when you’ve got professors telling you what to think and not how to think, we have a real problem.

Zenith Wolfe: And then lastly, I wanted to know a bit more about the follow-up study that’s going to be done. The, I believe, 755 non-Jewish students were surveyed. Sorry.

Cary Kogan: It is done. The survey is done. The report is in progress.

Zenith Wolfe: 90 days until it’s done, correct?

Cary Kogan: Yeah, we hope it’s released within 90 days. So, it’s working its way through. And that’s the general population and their perception of antisemitism on campus.

Zenith Wolfe: It was split into two parts.

Cary Kogan: I think, you know, Jewish students are suffering. Like they’re really having a difficult time. We hear it. We hear the data speak to that.

We wanted the focus initially to be on what is the experience of the people who are the targets of antisemitism. Let’s start with that, right? Because these are the people who are, and by the way, like, I mean, just anecdotally, like, I’ve received all sorts of text messages after the press gallery conference.

And what people are saying is, “I cried”.

That was the response. I mean, several people have said that, and I think it’s because their voices haven’t been heard. And I think, unfortunately, that also comes across in the data is the invalidation of people’s experience. It’s not just the incidents themselves, which are terrible, but it’s that there’s been no response and the invalidation of that. So, we really felt this was a priority to make sure that we were honouring the Jewish students who took their time to complete this and to share their voice first and then follow up with how people who are not Jewish perceived the problem.

Ellin Bessner: The minister, Mark Miller, didn’t attend the press conference in person, but former Senator Marc Gold did and read a statement from the minister which called the study’s results alarming.

Miller’s office later told The CJN the findings will be an important resource for the advisory council.

But some students aren’t waiting for the government to act. There are ongoing legal actions and human rights complaints, including a class action lawsuit involving McGill University to hold institutions accountable.

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https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/canada-holocaust/antisemitism/campus-antisemitism-student-experiences.html

Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE)

On this page

• Authors of the report
• Background
• Executive Summary
• Terminology
• 1. Antisemitism is a Campus-Climate Issue
• 2. The Lived Experience of Jewish Students
• 3. Institutional Betrayal
• Conclusion
• Appendix A | Methodology and interpretation notes
• Appendix B | Why this should be understood as a Canada problem, not only a Jewish problem.
• Appendix C | Additional student comments
• Appendix D | Broader Campus survey provides critical insights into antisemitism
• Appendix E | Survey Instrument

A national report on the state of antisemitism at Canadian postsecondary institutions

Commissioned by the Government of Canada, this report was produced by the Association for Canadian Studies and the Metropolis Institute, August 2026

Authors of the report

Campus Antisemitism and Student Experience (CASE)

The Case Report was prepared byFootnote 1:Jack JedwabPresident & CEO, Association for Canadian Studies & Metropolis InstitutePaul HolleyResearch & Evaluation Director, Association for Canadian Studies & Metropolis Institute

Name	Title, Affiliation
Dr. Jean-Philippe Warren	Professor, Fellow Royal Society of Canada, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Concordia University
Dr. Howard Ramos	Professor, Western University
Dr. Jason Brown	Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Dalhousie University
Robert Levy	President, BrandSpark International
Dr. Jonathan Calof	Professor Emiratus, Special Advisor on Antisemitism, University of Ottawa
Dr. Matthew Flisfeder	Professor of Rhetoric and Communications, University of Winnipeg
Dr. Barbary Perry	Professor and Director, Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism, Ontario Tech University
Naomi Rosenfeld	Healthcare Entrepreneur | Former Non-Profit Executive
Seth Goren	Chief Executive Officer, Hillel Ontario
Dr. Michael Geist	Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-Commerce Law, University of Ottawa
Dr. Jacob A. Burack	Professor, McGill University Faculty of Education
Maxyne Finkelstein	President, Morris and Rosalind Goodman Family Foundation
Dr. Morton Weinfeld	Emeritus Professor of Sociology, McGill University
Dr. Cary Kogan	Professor, School of Psychology, University of Ottawa
Dr. Eran Shor	Professor, Department of Sociology, McGill University
Dr. Robert Brym	Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto
Dr. Yolande Cohen	Full Professor, UQAM, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Knight of the Legion of Honour, Knight of the National Order of Quebec

Background

Over the past few years, Canada has seen a dramatic rise in antisemitism. Despite only being 1% of the Canadian population, Jewish Canadians made up 68% of reported religiously motivated hate crimes and 18.8% of overall reported hate crimes in 2024—the largest in either category.Footnote 2 The Government response has included the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights report on Heightened Antisemitism in Canada and How to Confront It (House of Commons report) tabled on December 10, 2024 and the Standing Senate committee on Human Rights report titled Standing United Against Antisemitism: Protecting Communities and Strengthening Canadian Democracy [PDF document] tabled on April 21, 2026 (Senate report). Both reports included recommendations for combatting antisemitism with the Justice Committee report specifically highlighting recommendations for combatting antisemitism on campuses.Footnote 3 The Department of Canadian Heritage, which housed the former Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, has a mandate to foster and promote Canadian identity and values, cultural development, and heritage. To achieve this, it works with a range of partners that serves Canadians to enrich cultural experiences, promote multiculturalism and strengthen identity. The rise of antisemitism on postsecondary campuses stands in direct opposition to Canada-wide efforts to protect the human rights, security and dignity of everyone, including racialized and ethnoreligious minority communities.” Along with 45 countries and numerous jurisdictions, the Government of Canada adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition including the illustrative examples in 2019 through Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy. This defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews, the rhetorical and physical manifestations of which are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”Footnote 4 Addressing antisemitism in this context is therefore not a niche issue, but a core test of Canada’s broader anti-racism commitments. Ultimately, if Jewish students are not safe on campus, it signals a broader failure of institutional safeguards, because a campus that is unsafe for one group is unsafe for all.

To respond to the growing crisis and the recommendations of the two committees, the former Special Envoy commissioned the Association for Canadian Studies to survey Jewish students on their lived experiences of antisemitism on campus, as well as to survey the broader student population on attitudes toward Jews and antisemitism. The resulting CASE project, which comprises this report and a future report of the general student population’s views on antisemitism, specifically support Recommendation 3 of the House of Commons report, which called for expanded quantitative and qualitative data collection on Jewish experiences on university campuses. Additionally, they support Recommendation 6 of the Senate report, which calls for the Government of Canada to support improved research and disaggregated data collection relating to hate, bias, and antisemitism in Canada. This includes the monitoring of trends across sectors such as education, workplaces, and digital platforms.Footnote 5

Executive Summary

“My friend was walking through [REDACTED] Hall. He also wears a kippah, and a group of students shouted, ‘there’s a Jew…let’s get him.’ They then chased him out of the building.”Student voice

This report presents the findings of a comprehensive Canada-wide survey of Jewish postsecondary students on their experiences of all forms of antisemitism. A separate report will be released with the findings from the survey of the general higher education student population.

In response to increasing accounts of antisemitism on Canadian campuses, the former Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism commissioned the Association for Canadian Studies to survey Jewish students on their lived experiences of antisemitism on campus, as well as to survey the broader student population on attitudes toward Jews and antisemitism.Footnote 6 The resulting Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE) project provides the most comprehensive national evidence to date on antisemitism in Canadian postsecondary institutions. Drawing on parallel surveys of approximately 900 Jewish students and 755 students from the broader campus population, the findings point to a troubling and urgent conclusion: antisemitism on Canadian campuses is not episodic or peripheral—it is persistent and proliferating, and on some campuses has become a normalized and systemic feature of campus life.

By documenting the experiences of Jewish students on Canadian campuses, the CASE project responds directly to recent calls for stronger Canadian evidence on campus antisemitism. In December 2024, for example, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights released an important report on Heightened Antisemitism in Canada and How to Confront It.Footnote 7 The findings reported in this report should be used immediately by leadership in higher education institutions to examine their policies and practices and determine how best to restore a truly inclusive campus climate.

The results of this survey reveal an alarming prevalence of campus antisemitism, along with a troubling institutional failure to respond to serious concerns about campus climate and student safety. The findings indicate that many Jewish students experience widespread and persistent antisemitism on Canadian campuses as a defining feature of postsecondary life that shapes their behaviour, their ability to fully participate in campus life, their safety, and their wellbeing.

Key findings of the CASE survey of Jewish students include the following:

• 84% of Jewish respondents said antisemitism is a serious problem on campus.
• 95.7% said they had experienced or witnessed at least one instance of antisemitism over the previous 12 months
• 70% said their university does not take antisemitism seriously, and 68%said their campus is not a safe and inclusive place for Jewish students.
• 72% limit what they say in class about being Jewish, and 57% avoid wearing or displaying Jewish symbols because of safety concerns.
• 18% of incidents cited faculty members, 7% involved teaching assistants, and 7% involved administrators or staff.
• 36% encountered course content or classroom discussion they experienced as antisemitic or biased, while 34% said a professor introduced Jews, Judaism, Israel, or Zionism when unrelated to the course subject.
• 45% encountered Holocaust denial or distortion often or sometimes, and 65% encountered it “at least rarely.”
• 81% reported hateful or discriminatory treatment of Zionists on campus often or occasionally; 71%reported antisemitic vandalism; 54%reported intimidation or threats directed at Jews; and 22% reported physical violence directed at Jews.
• 34% identified online or social media spaces as a location where incidents occurred, 33% identified student organizations or campus events, 25%classrooms or lecture halls, 23%nearby off-campus spaces, and 9% in student residences and housing.
• 33% reported the incident they described. Among those who reported, 63% were dissatisfied with how it was handled, and 52% of non-reporters said they did not think reporting would help.

Source: CASE Jewish student survey. See Part II and Appendix A for exact item wording, bases, and methodology.

In addition to the structured data, participants provided over 1200 accounts of antisemitic incidents through open ended questions. A select few, representative of broad themes, are highlighted in the “student voice”. These accounts reveal a university culture that is both not welcoming to Jewish students and actively and systematically trying to exclude and vilify them. The most prevalent themes of antisemitic incidents cited by Jewish students can be grouped into the following themes: holocaust denial and distortion; harassment and threats; normalization of antisemitic climate; pressure to disclose political views; academic/classroom bias; social exclusion; fear and emotional trauma; and a lack of institutional response.Footnote 8

“Have been spat on and had someone rev car engine at me in crosswalk while wearing kippah. Have seen a Jewish student punched, have heard a Jewish friend … called a Zionist whore and spat on for having a Magen David [Star of David] visible. Have seen antisemitic graffiti in bathroom stalls and all over campus.”Student voice

Terminology

“Professor wrote that we should kill all Zionists, that she’s worked with them and sees how evil they are.”Student voice

Antisemitism: This report uses the IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism including its illustrative examples, which was adopted by the Government of Canada in 2019:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews, the rhetorical and physical manifestations of which are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.Footnote 9

Zionism: Zionism refers to the belief that Jewish people have the right to self-determination in part of their ancestral homeland.Footnote 10

Antizionism: Antizionism refers to a movement that calls for the erasure of Israel and denies the Jewish people the right to self-determination in part of their ancestral homeland.

Scholarship defines antizionism as relying on “libel and distortion to claim that the Jewish collective, Israel, rather than the individual Jew, is uniquely evil. It further asserts that Jews, who have thousands of years of history in this place, are fabricating a legitimate claim to their ancestral homeland. Antizionism claims that Israel, exceptionally, is the one state that must be eradicated. Footnote 11

“I heard a professor say that “Hitler was a hero”Student voice

1. Antisemitism is a Campus-Climate Issue

When it comes to the rise of antisemitism on university campuses, the Canadian evidence base remains underdeveloped relative to that of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. It continues to rely heavily on institutional reviews, parliamentary deliberations, community reporting, journalism, and adjacent educational research, rather than on national, comparative survey research. This gap is especially notable given related Canadian findings at the primary and secondary school levels, including Robert Brym’s Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools,Footnote 12 which was commissioned by the former Special Envoy and points to antisemitism as a broader educational and societal issue rather than one confined to universities alone. The CASE design—a Canada-wide survey of Jewish students paired with a comparison survey of the general student population, and with a combination of fixed-response and open-ended questions—therefore responds directly to a clear gap in the documentation and to recent calls for stronger Canadian evidence on campus antisemitism.

In the CASE survey of Jewish students, antisemitism appears across much of campus life, with faculty, peer interactions, and online spaces playing a central role in its spread. Jewish students report a range of incidents, from Holocaust denial to swastikas graffitied on bathroom walls to physical threats or intimidation. They also describe numerous classroom incidents, with Jewish students singled out for their opinions about Israel and professors assigning blatantly biased and antisemitic or antizionist literature while omitting any scholarship that reflects the Jewish connection to their ancestral homeland. The accounts of classroom incidents are an especially troubling indicator of the pervasiveness of antisemitism on Canadian campuses, where even the classroom is not a safe space.

The evidence points to a reframing of campus antisemitism. It cannot be understood as a matter of discrete acts or individual prejudice, but must be seen as a broader campus-climate issue with systemic characteristics in certain contexts. The data makes it clear that its impact is cumulative and pervasive, shaping whether Jewish students feel able to participate fully in academic and social life and express their identity. Treating antisemitism as isolated and episodic obscures its broader effects and allows harmful conditions to persist. The deeper point is that antisemitism on campus is not a private problem for Jewish students to manage on their own. It is a campus-governance problem, a classroom-culture problem, and a Canadian problem that is especially virulent across postsecondary campuses.

Terminology note: Zionism

Zionism refers to the belief that Jewish people have the right to self-determination in part of their ancestral homeland.

2. The Lived Experience of Jewish Students

“Residents at my on-campus residence started rumors about me that I am a child killer, white supremacist, racist, and Zionist all because these people found out that I was Jewish.”Student voice

84%

said antisemitism is a serious problem on campus

71%

reported antisemitic vandalism

96%

said they had experienced at least one instance of antisemitism over the previous 12 months

68%

said their campus is not a safe and inclusive place for Jewish students

72%

limit what they say in class about being Jewish

70%

said their university does not take antisemitism seriously

18%

of antisemitic incidents cited faculty members

57%

avoid displaying Jewish symbols because of safety concerns

The CASE survey documents a campus climate that many Jewish students experience as exclusionary, coercive, and unsafe. Moreover, the survey’s open-ended responses show what sits behind the topline numbers: fear, humiliation, coercion, isolation, and in some cases withdrawal from campus life altogether. “After openly mentioning I was Jewish within my program,” reported one student, “nobody wanted to work with me for group projects and ignored me any way they could.” Another student dropped out of a sociology programme “because of the level of hatred against Jews” in the department. Such responses underscore the human impact of a toxic campus environment.

“I dropped out. My anxiety level was too high and no one at school seemed to care. It is open season on Jewish students.”Student voice

2.1 Hostile Campus Climate

“Working in my labs, I have had people refuse to work with me due to my Jewish identity, and purposely try to mess up my data.”Student voice

The campus climate is widely experienced as hostile to Jewish students. It should be emphasized that Jewish students are not describing ordinary and expected discomfort at the introduction of challenging ideas or a few isolated bad incidents. Rather, they are describing a toxic environment in which antisemitism is not only tolerated but perpetuated by people in positions of authority. They do not trust their institutions, do not feel safe in their dorm rooms and their classrooms, and do not believe that standards of fairness and impartiality will protect them.Figure 1: Share of Jewish respondents expressing a negative view of campus climateShare of Jewish Respondents expressing a negative view of campus climate — alternative text

This hostile climate changes how students speak, study, and move through campus. Jewish students report changing what they say, where they go, what they wear, and whether they remain engaged in academic and campus life at all. More than 70% limit what they say in class about being Jewish, two-thirds limit what they say online, and more than 60% say they have lost friendships because of antisemitism. 40% report academic harm, and roughly 25% have considered leaving their university because of antisemitism.

2.2 Toxic Classroom Dynamics

“I was told by a professor, in class in the middle of the lecture, that Jews belong in Poland and need to go back.”Footnote 13Student voice

The classroom is not insulated from the overall campus climate. In the CASE findings, it is one of the places where students most clearly describe coercion, power imbalance, and fear of academic penalty.

The pattern is cumulative. 36% reported encountering course content or classroom discussions that portrayed Jews, Judaism, Israel, or Zionism in an antisemitic or biased way. 34% said a professor introduced those topics in ways unrelated to the course. Nearly half felt pressured to share their opinions about Israel with other students, more than one-third felt pressure to conform to a professor’s views on Israel, and about one in five felt pressured to join an anti-Israel protest.

36%

reported encountering course content or classroom discussions that portrayed Jews, Judaism, Israel, or Zionism in an antisemitic or biased way

47%

felt pressured to share their opinions about Israel with other students

20%

felt pressured to join an anti-Israel protest

34%

reported a professor introducing Jews, Judaism, Israel or Zionism in ways unrelated to the course

36%

felt pressured to conform to a professor’s views on Israel

25%

of antisemitic incidents on campus were witnessed in the classroom or lecture hall

“Professors sharing links to Holocaust denial websites as mandatory reading material”

“Professor assigned us to listen to a podcast that discussed how Zionism was similar to Nazism, which was unrelated to the course”Student voices

In the open-ended responses, students report numerous instances of the demonization, delegitimization and disinformation regarding Israel.Footnote 14 They also recount many examples of professors introducing the topic of Israel and the Israel-Hamas war in courses that have nothing to do with the conflict in the Middle East – including courses on Canadian constitutional law, on the technical aspects of film, and on statistical methods in health research. “A professor last year gave readings on Palestinian liberation,” reported one student, “for a course completely unrelated to the conflict.” The students’ comments also evince considerable anxiety over the pressure to conform to a professor’s anti-Israel views. One professor of medicine reportedly told students that “if we support Israel and don’t denounce the genocideFootnote 15, we would not be good doctors/don’t belong.” These examples of classroom politicization for the purposes of antizionist indoctrination are among the most worrying of the CASE findings.

Terminology note: Antizionism

Antizionism refers to a movement that calls for the annihilation of Israel and denies the Jewish people right to self-determination in part of their ancestral homeland.12

As the CASE survey results make clear, the problem is not only peer-to-peer: authority figures also appear in the data. Whereas fellow students are the most frequently identified actors, they are not the only ones. Faculty, teaching assistants, administrators, and staff all appear as perpetrators in students’ descriptions of campus antisemitism.Figure 2: Where incidents occurredWhere incidents occurred — alternative textFigure 3: Who students cite as perpetrating antisemitism on CampusFootnote 16Who students cite as perpetrating antisemitism on campus — alternative text

Among the incidents students described, 51% involved fellow students, 18% involved faculty members, 7% involved teaching assistants, and 7% involved administrators or staff. These categories are derived from multiple-response questions and should not be added together, but they clearly show that authority-linked conduct is not anecdotal or negligible. Significantly, the survey of the general student population, which will appear in a second report, confirms the perceptions of Jewish students by locating the problem in the same places Jewish students do. Among those in the general student population who encountered incidents, 54% pointed to other students, 44% to social media or online platforms linked to campus, 38% to campus protests or demonstrations, 19% to the classroom or lectures, 14% to professors, instructors, or teaching assistants, and 11% to administrators or staff. These statistics mirror the results found in Robert Brym’s report, Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools, which demonstrates the rise of antisemitism from Kindergarten through Grade 12 across Ontario educational institutions. In this report nearly one out of six incidents were initiated or approved by a teacher or involved a school sanctioned activity.Footnote 18

“In an international law class, my professor asked the Jewish students to raise their hands, and I felt very uncomfortable as no one raised, so I chose not to.”Student voice

Respondents describe numerous instances of faculty bias, abuse of podium, and inappropriate politicization, with professors offering one-sided accounts of complex issues and treating highly contentious claims as matters of settled fact. In one especially concerning example of classroom politicization, a student recounts how his or her professor forced students to find positive connections between the Black Lives Matter movement and Hamas.”Footnote 19 Students also report pressure by those responsible for their learning and for grading their work to sign petitions and to attend pro-Palestinian demonstrations. This politicization of the classroom represents a serious betrayal of academic norms of fairness, integrity, and responsibility.Footnote 20

Academic leadership must take greater responsibility for classroom environments. The CASE survey underscores the need for clearer guidance, standards, and accountability to ensure that course content is relevant, that contentious issues are handled with rigor and care, and that discussions do not reproduce exclusionary or discriminatory dynamics. Academic freedom protects rigorous inquiry, not harassment, coercion, or discriminatory misuse of classroom authority. Moreover, while academic freedom protects the right of faculty to express strong, even controversial, views, students must retain freedom to question, dissent, or remain silent without academic penalty. Universities have a duty to provide learning environments free from identity-based discrimination or harassment. Pressuring students to articulate political positions because they are Jewish may constitute unequal treatment and undermine both religious accommodation principles and academic freedom norms.

“A Women and Gender Studies professor graded me 0% on an assignment because I spoke about sexual assault on October 7, 2023. He suggested I focus instead on the Israeli Police’s role in sexual assaults.”Student voice

2.3 Prevalence and Severity of Campus Antisemitism

“I was told to go die when I said I was a Jew from Israel”Student voice

While the classroom is a major site of concern, antisemitism is not confined to one space, one channel, or one type of actor. Students encounter it online, in residences, in student life, in classrooms, and near campus. Particularly worrying is the normalized physical violence towards Jews. 22% of Jewish respondents (i.e., 198 students) reported that they had often or occasionally experienced or witnessed physical violence directed at Jews on their campus. Confirmation of this phenomenon comes from the general student survey wherein 20% of non-Jewish students reported having observed intimidation, bullying, or physical violence directed at Jews.Figure 4: Share reporting selected incidents often or occasionallyShare reporting selected incidents often or occasionally — alternative text

Separating intimidation, threats, and physical violence from the broader set of reported incidents makes clear that campus antisemitism is experienced not only as discrimination or hostile expression, but also as a direct safety issue. Although exclusion, hateful treatment, vandalism, and antisemitic remarks remain prominent across the wider incident profile, a substantial share of respondents also report intimidation or threats directed at Jews often or occasionally (54%), and more than one in five report physical violence (22%). These findings suggest that the problem extends beyond a hostile climate alone and, for many students, includes fear, vulnerability, and concern for personal security.Figure 5: Share reporting threats or violence often of occasionally

Source: CASE Jewish student survey. Percentages show the share selecting often or occasionally.Share reporting threats or violence often or occasionally – text version

“One of my friends was wearing her Magen David [Star of David] and was spat on by someone. She has been afraid to wear her necklace since.”Student voice

2.4 Online Platforms Amplify Antisemitism

The CASE data show that digital spaces are central to how antisemitism is experienced, amplified, and normalized. Institutions can no longer treat online environments as external or secondary. Policies, monitoring, and response mechanisms must reflect the reality that online and offline campus life are deeply interconnected.Figure 6: On which platforms have you seen this kind of contentOn which platforms have you seen this kind of content? — alternative text

“I was harassed online … She went as far as spamming my art page for 5 days straight sending me radical reels, calling my elderly family ‘killers’.”Student voice

2.5 The Harms of Antisemitism to Jewish Students

Jewish students remain connected to community and identity even in a hostile campus environment. Approximately half of Jewish student’s surveyed continue to be engaged regularly in Jewish activity on and off campus. However, Antisemitism on campus is affecting the way Jewish students are moving through and experiencing their academic journey.

The CASE data suggest that visibility and attachment can increase exposure to hostility. Students who are visibly Jewish risk experiencing more direct hostility, intimidation and exclusion than those who do not display visible symbols.Figure 7: Witnessed antisemitism on campus, by visibility of Jewish identityWitness Antisemitism on Camous, by Visibility of Jewish Identity — alternative textFigure 8: Experiences of antisemitism on campus, by visibility of Jewish identityExperiences of Antisemitism on Campus, by Visibility of Jewish Identity — alternative text

This, together with the climate of systemic antisemitism, is having a profound impact on Jewish student’s mental health, career choices and contribution to campus dialogue and life. Jewish students are changing their behaviors and choices to minimize their exposure to these hostilities. In a society that prides itself on equity and inclusion, 56% of Jewish students avoid wearing Jewish symbols, 71% limit what they say in class and 32% have considered dropping a course or a program due to the professor’s antisemitic views.

“I was dropped from research projects for saying I wished for safety and security of both Palestinians and Israelis. I faced extreme pressure from other student organizations to release a statement against Zionism in my position as president of the [REDACTED] student union, and had my name placed on a list circulating on and off campus as a “known Zionist”Student voice

Social and Mental Health Impacts

72% of Jewish students report that antisemitism on campus has affected their mental health. Furthermore, 60% have lost friends due to antisemitism. The result is that Jewish students are removing themselves from certain parts of civil society, which is isolating them from public life and undermines the democratic principals that protect safety, dignity and equality of all people.Figure 9: Agreement with statements about antisemitism and campus experienceAgreement with Statements About Antisemitism and Campus Experience — alternative textFigure 10: Agreements with statements about antisemitism and campus experienceAgreement with Statements About Antisemitism and Campus Experience — alternative text

“Students have asked me to take off my chai necklace because it is too Jewish”Student voice

3. Institutional Betrayal

“Previously discussing issues with administration did not help; I was warned by administration against making public complaints.”Student voice

In addressing the problem of campus antisemitism, the issue is not only whether incidents occur, there is also the question of institutional response. CASE findings suggest a reluctance on the part of campus authorities to address the issue of antisemitism with the urgency that the problem requires, and a failure to apply the same standards that are ensured to other minoritized groups. Ultimately, this study demonstrates an unwillingness by postsecondary institutions to apply their own policies and standards to combat systemic antisemitism.

3.1 Incident Reporting

Only 33% of respondents reported the incident they described. Among those who reported an incident, 63% were dissatisfied with how the matter was handled and just 37% were satisfied. The most common reason for not reporting was a belief that it would not help (52%), followed by the view that the incident was too minor (38%), uncertainty about reporting routes (25%), and fear of retaliation (16%). The gap between reporting and satisfactory outcomes is not a marginal issue—it is a central failure point that undermines trust and fuels underreporting.Footnote 21Figure 11: Reporting channels usedReporting channels used — alternative textFigure 12: Reasons for not reporting

Source: CASE Jewish student survey. Reporting-channel and non-reporting items are multiple response.Reasons for not reporting — alternative text

Low reporting should not be read as evidence of a low incident rate. The CASE data demonstrates that many students do not believe institutional channels will help them. “I have reported things to the university and human rights office in my first year,” reports one student, “but it never was taken seriously.” Another attributed the decision to not report an incident to the belief that “the school will most likely not care or even side with the aggressors.” Student responses indicate that reporting rates are low because institutional trust is low.

“After reporting the projection of a documentary glorifying Hamas on campus, the university involved diversity and inclusion and did absolutely nothing. So why bother reporting any other incident?”Student voice

3.2 Double Standards

Having students go on ‘strike’ and bar others from attending their lectures or accessing their studies goes against the contract that students have with their universities when they pay tuition.”Student voice

In its report on heightened antisemitism in Canada, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights found that “universities are failing to enforce their own policies to protect Jewish students on campus.”Footnote 22The CASE survey of Jewish students supports the findings of the Standing Committee. The double standard is what has been painful for many Jewish students. They watch as Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) offices implement policies and practices that raise awareness about racism and other forms of identity-based hate, for example, while remaining silent on antisemitism. Without visible and credible enforcement of campus codes of conduct, reporting systems risk becoming merely symbolic when it comes to the concerns of Jewish students.Footnote 23

“My classmates demanded I share my views on Israel as a condition for joining a student-led EDI initiative that should have been open to all graduate students from my department.”Student voice

Conclusion

“The only reason I have not realistically considered switching schools is because I do not believe other schools are necessarily better.”Student voice

Since October 7, 2023, rates of antisemitism have surged around the world, shattering the sense of peace and security for Jewish communities globally. In Canada, university campuses have become a microcosm of a national crisis. Read alongside the widely documented global rise in anti-Jewish hate, including in Canada, the evidence presented here points to serious concerns about campus climate, student safety, and confidence in institutional response.

For Jewish students, the burden described in this report is cumulative. Students are not only reporting insults, threats, graffiti, classroom hostility, exclusion, and online abuse; they are also reporting the constant calculation that follows from those experiences. These include whether to speak in class, whether to display visible Jewish identity, whether to file a complaint, whether a professor or classmate can be trusted, and whether remaining on campus is worth the cost. The data reported here point clearly to the conclusion that campus antisemitism is a climate problem rather than as a collection of isolated incidents.

Nearly one in five Jewish students report that their professors are the source of antisemitic incidents.Footnote 24 This raises serious concerns about our higher education system. Whereas grappling with new and uncomfortable ideas is an important part of higher education, faculty are also entrusted with ensuring a safe learning environment that balances academic freedom with academic integrity and responsibility. This becomes even more pertinent when the upcoming survey on the broader student population shows that the majority do not consider several forms of anti-Jewish targeting as antisemitic, including boycotting Jewish-owned businesses because of their perceived Israel tie (54%) and protesting outside Jewish houses of worship (54%). Additionally, more than half (55%) did not identify the statement that Jews have too much influence on the economy as antisemitic. If this concerning trend continues, these beliefs risk being carried into the workplace and all sectors of society.

In the CASE survey, 95.7% of Jewish students experienced at least one antisemitic incident in the last year, with 89.1% reporting that they experienced antisemitism on campus often or occasionally. Placed beside the wider Canadian context of sharply elevated anti-Jewish hate,Footnote 25 the evidence also underscores a broader point— campuses are not sealed environments. They concentrate and reproduce pressures that are visible across the country, but they do so in settings that directly shape students’ safety, learning, belonging, and future opportunities. Universities are therefore not merely observing a social problem from the outside. They are one of the institutions in which that problem is now being experienced, contested, and judged most directly. Most concerningly, they risk becoming the breeding ground for anti-Jewish hate to spread across generations and communities. History has shown that rising antisemitism is a “canary in the coal mine” for the spread of hatred and bigotry towards other groups. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of decision-makers to use these findings to change our current trajectory and ensure that all Canadians can learn in safety and dignity, regardless of their identity.

“I dropped out. My anxiety level was too high and no one at school seemed to care. It is open season on Jewish students.”Student voice

Appendix A | Methodology and interpretation notes

Jewish student survey

• Fielded November 17 to December 19, 2025.
• 1,038 responses received; 900 retained after screening and data-quality review.
• Recruited through Jewish student organizations, community networks, and related channels.
• Comprehensive, spanning the broad variation in demographic variables expected from the Canadian Jewish population
• Reported descriptively as valid percentages by item; not weighted.

The CASE Jewish student survey comprised 38 questions covering eligibility, background characteristics, Jewish identity, belonging and engagement, campus climate, experiences of antisemitism, incident reporting, online antisemitism, impacts, and optional gift-card draw entry. The instrument used a combination of response formats, including Likert-type agreement and frequency scales, single-response items, “select all that apply” questions, and open-ended free-text boxes. The open-ended responses were examined for common recurring themes, and illustrative examples were included throughout the report to contextualize and highlight the findings from the quantitative survey items.

Survey architecture and scope

The Jewish student survey was built to capture the lived experiences of Jewish Canadian students, whether and how they are exposed to antisemitism, whether their institutions took action and whether they believe that authorities would hold perpetrators to account, as well as the downstream impacts on their safety, mental health, and wellbeing. Many of the incident questions asked respondents to reflect on their experience in the previous 12 months, which allows the report to reflect the current campus climate.

Respondent universe and terminology

CASE includes students and recent graduates across Canadian postsecondary pathways, including university, college, CEGEP, and other professional or training streams where relevant. For that reason, the report uses “postsecondary” or “campus” as the default framing, unless a finding is specific to a narrower setting.

Fielding, recruitment, and screening

The Jewish survey was fielded from November 17 to December 19, 2025. Recruitment was facilitated by Jewish student organizations on campus, Jewish community networks, and related dissemination channels. This resulted in the reception of a wide range of views from across the Jewish community. The survey received 1,038 responses; 900 of whom were retained after eligibility checks and data-quality screening. An anomalous surge of identical responses occurred on December 10, 2025, after the survey link was publicly shared on social media. As a result, the original link was closed, a new secure link was issued for controlled dissemination, and flagged cases were purged from the final analytic dataset.

Weighting and valid percentages

The Jewish survey is not weighted. This is a deliberate methodological choice rather than an omission. Due to the uneven mobilization of the survey across student and community networks, provinces, institutions, and program types, post-stratification weights were not applied. They would have generated a level of representativeness not supported by survey participation. The Jewish-sample results are therefore reported as valid percentages among respondents who answered each item and are interpreted descriptively rather than as precise population estimates. Nonetheless, the demographic characteristics of the respondents is largely consistent with those observed in representative studies of the Canadian Jewish population of Canada.Footnote 26

Development and interpretation

Survey development was informed by a review of recent survey instruments, methodology notes, and campus-climate studies examining Jewish student experiences, antisemitism, safety, belonging, reporting, and institutional response. These included the Brandeis University Cohen Center’s In the Shadow of War survey of Jewish undergraduates at 51 U.S. colleges and universities; the Social Research Centre’s Australian Jewish University Experience Survey; the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism’s post–October 7 mixed-methods survey of Jewish students and staff, Antisemitism in Australian Universities Post 7 October ; Columbia University/NORC’s Student Belonging and Exclusion Survey; the Ipsos/Jewish on Campus poll on antisemitism at U.S. colleges and universities, Jewish on Campus Poll: Antisemitism at Colleges and Universities; and the ADL/Jewish Federations of North America survey report on antisemitic experiences in the United States, Portrait of Antisemitic Experiences in the U.S., 2024-2025. The CASE survey also drew on Canadian research provided by Robert Brym’s report, Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools, including both the Government of Canada–commissioned report and the related brief submitted to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, which documents a parent-reported survey of 599 Jewish parents and 781 antisemitic incidents in Ontario schools.Footnote 27 Together, these sources helped inform question wording, response categories, attention to both closed- and open-ended items, treatment of reporting barriers, and the interpretation of findings as descriptive evidence of campus climate rather than as population-level prevalence estimates.

Survey development and promotion were informed by an Expert Advisory Committee composed of academics, researchers, and practitioners, including observers from the Department of Canadian Heritage. This process strengthened question wording, recruitment strategy, and the interpretive framing of the final report. Open-ended responses allowed the study to contextualize the quantitative results in students’ own language while preserving anonymity in the reporting of quotations.

Percentages

For readability, the report rounds percentages to whole numbers. Small differences of one point between a figure label, a narrative sentence, and a background table can therefore be the result of rounding rather than contradictory source data.

Frequency measures should likewise be read carefully. “Often or occasionally” and “Often or sometimes” (which have been used depending on the question) capture more concentrated exposure. “At least rarely” combines often, occasionally, and rarely. Several of the most important figures are reported in these combined forms so that readers can distinguish between intensity, breadth, and overall direction.

Where questions allowed multiple selections—such as locations, actors, or reporting channels—percentages will add up to more than 100 percent. Open-ended quotations are included to allow respondents to describe their experiences in their own words. These responses are lightly edited for punctuation, spelling, length, and anonymity where needed, but they are not treated as stand-alone prevalence estimates.

Figure 13: Case Survey Sample Characteristics

Case Survey Sample Characteristics – Background profile of survey respondents (valid %)

Table A1: Number of Responses by Province and School

Totals by province and schools	Respondents
Ontario	418
Quebec	243
British Columbia	55
Nova Scotia	41
Manitoba	22
Alberta	14
New Brunswick	2
Saskatchewan	1
Unknown/Other	3
Ontario
Queen’s University	65
University of Toronto	62
University of Guelph	50
University of Ottawa	37
Toronto Metropolitan University	32
McMaster University	31
York University	26
Western University	23
University of Waterloo	21
Wilfrid Laurier University	17
Carleton University	16
Osgoode Hall Law School	13
University of Windsor	8
Other	17
Quebec
McGill University	135
Concordia University	43
Dawson College	19
Université de Montréal / University of Montreal	11
Vanier College	11
John Abbott College	8
Other	16
British Columbia
University of Victoria	25
University of British Columbia (UBC/UBC Vancouver/Allard Law)	17
Simon Fraser University	9
Other	4
Alberta
University of Calgary	9
Other	5
Manitoba
University of Manitoba	11
University of Winnipeg	11
Nova Scotia
Dalhousie University	28
Other	13
Unknown/Other
Unspecified “University/College” / “University” / miscellaneous placeholders	6

Appendix B | Why this should be understood as a Canada problem, not only a Jewish problem.

Antisemitism on campus should not be understood as an isolated Jewish concern, but as part of a broader Canadian problem. The House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights heard evidence in 2024 that Jewish students and faculty were experiencing a “toxic culture of antisemitism on campus,” marked by fear, exclusion, and weak institutional response. The same pattern extends beyond universities. A 2025 Government of Canada–commissioned study— Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools, by Robert Brym documented widespread incidents, inadequate school responses, and serious consequences for students’ well-being and sense of belonging. Read together with Statistics Canada’s hate crime data, these findings indicate that antisemitism is not only a problem for Jewish communities; it is a Canadian problem that touches education, public safety, and social cohesion.Footnote 28

The persistence of antisemitism is sustained by normalization and inaction. Its proliferation is enabled by gaps in understanding, and its impact is amplified by institutional shortcomings. The consequences have manifested across the country as Jews are more likely than any community be victims of hate crimes in Canada. Despite only representing 1% of the population, 18.8% of all reported hate crimes were motivated by antisemitism in 2024. 68% of all religiously motivated hate crimes targeted Jews. The Jewish community was the largest in either category, according to StatsCan. What is happening on postsecondary campuses cannot be separated from what is happening across the country. Rather, they are continuums of each other.

959

police-reported hate crimes targeting Jewish people in Canada in 2023Footnote 29

70%

of religiously motivated police-reported hate crimes targeted Jewish people in Canada in 2023Footnote 30

19%

of police-reported hate crimes targeted Jewish people in Canada in 2023Footnote 31

10%

of Jewish school-age children are estimated to have directly experienced antisemitismFootnote 32

920

police-reported hate crimes targeting Jewish people in Canada in 2024Footnote 33

68%

of religiously motivated police-reported hate crimes targeted Jewish people in Canada in 2024Footnote 34

19%

of police-reported hate crimes targeted Jewish people in Canada in 2024Footnote 35

49%

is the share of reported K–12 incidents that parents said were not investigated by schoolsFootnote 36

Appendix C | Additional student comments

Appendix C presents a selected sample of the more than 1,200 open-ended comments submitted by Jewish student survey respondents. These comments were reviewed thematically and grouped into recurring categories that reflected common patterns across responses, while recognizing that many comments touched on more than one theme. The most prominent themes included harassment and threats; Holocaust denial, distortion, and Nazi references; hostile classroom or academic environments; social exclusion and pressure to conceal Jewish identity; antizionist or Israel-related targeting experienced as antisemitic; fear, anxiety, and withdrawal from campus life; and perceived institutional inaction or inadequate response. These comments demonstrate the public nature of what Jewish students are experiencing, whether it be in a washroom or a classroom, from their peers or educators. Simultaneously, they reflect the social exclusion, withdrawal, and fear of institutional inaction experienced by Jewish students. The comments are not intended to replace the quantitative findings or function as prevalence estimates; rather, they provide qualitative context for understanding how the survey findings were experienced by students in their own words.

Student voices: Harassment and threats

Someone wrote on the walls of a bathroom at [UNIVERSITY REDACTED]: “All Jews must die,” with swastikas.

I was told that it was a shame Hitler did not finish the job.

I was told “Hitler should have finished you off” when people found out that I was Jewish.

I went to the bathroom; someone saw my [Star of David] and said welcome to your gas chamber while people were vaping.

Various [protesters] shouted antisemitic slurs at visibly Jewish students on campus, including phrases such as “Hitler should have killed all of you.”

I saw graffiti saying “Zionism is a death cult,” “Zionists invent false allegations of sexual assault,” “Death to Zionism,” and “Death to Israel.” People at a campus protest shouted “go back to Poland” at students who looked Jewish. I was yelled at when entering Hillel and followed after leaving Hillel.

A professor wrote that we need to kill all Zionists, that she had worked with them and saw how evil they were.

I was told to go die when I said I was a Jew from Israel.

Someone called me a “Jewish Nazi” because I was wearing my chai while walking past a protest, without even participating in it.

I and many other members of a Jewish organization unrelated to Israel received phone calls containing death threats after October 7.

A classmate of my wife approached her and said, “I thought you were a bad person because you are Jewish, but you are actually quite nice.”

My brother was wearing a kippah and a random person started yelling at him that he was a baby killer, that he was evil, and so on, and threatened to follow him home and attack him.

My friend was walking through the [REDACTED] building. He also wears a kippah, and a group of students shouted: “there is a Jew… let’s get him.” They then chased him out of the building.

When I was at the campus gym, while wearing a kippah that made me visibly Jewish, a student came up to me and said he wished all Israelis would die because we are “a bunch of colonizers from Europe.”

I was locked in a room, a water bottle was thrown at my friend, people gave the Nazi salute, there were chants of “Jews, Jews, you cannot hide,” on the bathroom wall “kill all Jews allahu akbar,” a teacher posted “kill them all,” windows were broken, there were bullet holes in the building, I was spat on, yelled at, and doxxed.

In first year, several mezuzot were torn from the doors of my residence. They never caught the people who did it, which made us wonder who was behind it and also made us look over our shoulders a little more often.

One of my friends was wearing her Magen David and someone spat on her. Since then, she has been afraid to wear her necklace.

I saw posters and heard discussions about the number of countries that have historically expelled Jews, implying that we must be the problem.

Several of my classmates cornered and surrounded me to ask where my family was from, where they were born, and where my grandparents were born.

I was in the library and saw written on a desk: “just because Hitler killed 6 million Jews does not mean he is a bad person #love #peace #tolerance.”

I was spat on and someone revved their car engine toward me in a crosswalk while I was wearing a kippah. I saw a Jewish student get punched; I heard a Jewish friend being called a Zionist whore and spat on because she was wearing a visible Magen David [Star of David]. I saw antisemitic graffiti in bathroom stalls and all over campus.

Student voices: Pressure to disclose political views

When people find out that I am Jewish, they always ask me what I think about Israel, and if they do not like the answer, they call me a horrible person.

When people discover that I am Jewish, there have been a few situations where they say something like “oh, but you are probably one of the good Jews who is anti-Israel.”

Teachers pressured me to take a position or give my opinion [on the Middle East conflict] because I am openly Jewish.

My classmates required me to share my opinions on Israel as a condition for joining a student-led EDI initiative that should have been open to all graduate students in my department.

I have always been asked the question “are you a good Jew or a bad Jew,” which means “do you support Jews having a country.” They always expect me to give my political opinion before they “respect” me as a Jew.

Students often ask me where I am from and then expect me to pass an ideological test. In addition, as soon as students find out that I am Jewish, they ask me what I think about Gaza, genocide, the Israeli government, etc. They ask these questions very aggressively. Professors and students have told me that I am not a real Jew because I am a Zionist.

Student voices: Lack of institutional response

On Instagram or TikTok, the university did not monitor students from [UNIVERSITY REDACTED] who were creating forums to joke about the Holocaust and deny its scale and severity.

We were excluded from our EDI community when it held a “pro-Palestinian” support meeting and said it was not offering a support group for Jewish/Israeli students. So we created our own support group.

After reporting the screening on campus of a documentary glorifying Hamas, the university brought in diversity and inclusion and did absolutely nothing. So why report another incident?

Discussing problems with the administration in the past did not help; the administration warned me not to make public complaints.

A member of my anti-racism research lab at the university minimized the impact of the Holocaust while the other lab members remained silent. For example, she said: “the Holocaust was not the first time gas chambers were used. They were first used against Indigenous peoples in Canada.” When I raised this with my research supervisor, now tenured, her reaction was to protect the student responsible. For example, she said: “what happens in the lab stays in the lab.”

A group of Jewish students, including me, was eating outside where the encampment was located when it was in place, and a girl came up to us shouting: “Hitler was right.” One of the Jewish students with us jumped up and followed her when she left. She entered a classroom and he went up to her, on video, and asked: “Did you really say that you wish Hitler were still alive?” She answered “Yes,” and then the professor removed the Jewish student.

Student Voices: Social exclusion

Students asked me to remove my chai necklace because it was too Jewish.

I was told to leave a public space because I was wearing a kippah.

One of my friends asked me what I was doing for Christmas, and I answered that I do not celebrate it because I am Jewish. She immediately asked whether I was Zionist. I answered yes, and she began excluding me from activities and making hateful remarks when she saw me on campus.

Please keep my statement anonymous for my safety: A faculty member with whom I had volunteered for years raised Gaza in front of other students and asked me to justify Israel’s position on more than one occasion. He did this even though he knew I had never lived in Israel and only because he knows I am Jewish. He made the situation uncomfortable enough that I felt unsafe and stopped volunteering, which cut me off from a community that had been important to me for many years.

A member of my group project heard me speaking Hebrew and asked out loud whether I was Israeli. After I answered yes, my group and several other people in my class stopped acknowledging me and excluded me from the group project, then gave me the longest and most difficult section while they worked together.

I was removed from research projects for saying that I wanted safety for Palestinians and Israelis. I faced extreme pressure from other student organizations to publish a statement against Zionism in my role as president of the [REDACTED] student union, and my name was placed on a list circulating on and off campus as a “known Zionist.”

I made no friends in a cohort of 17 students at [UNIVERSITY REDACTED] because I openly identified as Jewish and Israeli; my peers therefore distanced themselves from me.

Residents in my campus residence spread rumours that I am a child killer, a white supremacist, a racist, and a Zionist, simply because they discovered that I was Jewish.

Student Voices: Normalization of an antisemitic climate

Several faculty members in my program minimized the Holocaust or used it to condemn the Israeli response immediately after October 7.

Several students and faculty members in my courses frequently minimized or trivialized the Holocaust.

The campus is a hotbed of hate. Jewish students have to use back entrances to attend events in order to avoid hateful crowds of protesters, who often include professors. Hillel tables during welcome week were harassed by students and professors with megaphones.

In the anti-racist module of my psychology course, students had an image of a Jew who looked angry and scary, while the images representing people of other religions looked happy and friendly.

Shortly after October 7, I told my PhD supervisor that I did not feel safe on campus and she replied: “well, you should see the other side.”

Jews were described as greedy for money in a lecture.

When discussing characters in a book, my professor described one character by saying that “based on his last name, he is clearly Jewish and probably has a hooked nose.”

In an international law class, my professor asked the Jewish students to raise their hands, and I felt very uncomfortable because no one raised their hand, so I chose not to do so.

During class, a professor told me that Jews belong in Poland and should go back there.

I heard a professor say that Hitler was a hero.

Jews face double standards that no other group experiences on campus. The fact that students “strike” and prevent other people from attending their classes or accessing their education goes against the contract students have with their universities when they pay tuition.

Student Voices: Classroom bias

In a course that had nothing to do with Israel, my professor spent three weeks talking about Gaza and the creation of the State of Israel. He never mentioned the Holocaust as a precursor to its founding, repeatedly calling the state a “Zionist political project.”

In a course titled CANADIAN Law and Violence, the professor spent the entire semester discussing Israel’s occupation of Palestine, while encouraging students to miss class to attend protests, showing Al Jazeera videos, and wearing pro-Palestine shirts and earrings every week.

My class was forced to answer exam questions according to my professor’s biases. We were forced to draw positive connections between BLM and Hamas.

I wrote my final exam on Israel’s health care system because the assignment was about the health care system of a country. I failed the assignment, and I believe one comment said: “Israel is not a country.”

A professor cancelled class on October 7 so that students could attend anti-Israel protests.

We were evaluated on the situation in Gaza and Israel even though our course syllabus had absolutely nothing to do with it.

My professor, who openly participated in the Free Palestine movement, made comments in class such as “those fucking Israelis.”

My professor said that Zionism is an evil ideology.

My professor gave a lecture saying that if we supported Israel and did not denounce the genocide, we would not be good doctors or did not belong.

My geography course presented Hamas as a community organization with a high approval rating in Palestine.

Three minutes after the start of our presentation on breast cancer, my professor interrupted us to slander Israel, saying it was a sea of savages and barbarians and that, every second, three babies in Gaza were being killed.

A professor removed course content because it had been developed by a Jewish Israeli doctoral student.

During a class on an unrelated subject, my professor talked about Israel and forced the class to participate in a discussion about why protests and encampments were good.

A professor of women’s and gender studies gave me 0% on an assignment because I had discussed sexual assault on October 7, 2023. He suggested that I instead focus on the role of Israeli police in sexual assaults.

My Canadian criminal law professor left to join the Sumud flotilla, sending the class messages thanking us for our “solidarity.” She gave an emotional speech before leaving, in tears, and told us to contact her through her personal email, add her on Signal, and expect our communications with her to be intercepted by the ISG. Upon her return, she devoted an hour of instructional time to a presentation on the flotilla, referring to the IDF as the “IOF.” She had structured the course so that grading was not anonymous, which made it impossible to express disagreement. I felt completely violated and demoralized in her class.

My professor had us act out scenes from a film about a Palestinian woman accepting her sexuality and began the class by saying: “it looks like there are no Jews here either, so we will do this one.” He then described survivors who immigrated in 1945 as a repressive military regime, saying “they stole everything.” He clearly meant Jews.

During class, a professor shared a social media post describing an off-campus pro-Palestinian protest and encouraged students to attend. Another professor assigned us a podcast that explained that Zionism was similar to Nazism, which was unrelated to the course.

In laboratories, people refused to work with me because of my Jewish identity and deliberately tried to sabotage my data.

Student Voices: Fear and emotional impacts

I have been harassed, insulted, and antagonized both publicly and privately in attempts to make me say “politically incorrect” things about my nationality. My professors cancel classes in solidarity with the protests, so I do not feel comfortable asking them for help.

I was waiting for a music exam, to play a solo before a jury, when a large group of students wearing green Hamas headbands marched through the hallway of the education building with Palestinian flags. I hid my Star of David while they passed noisily with megaphones. It made me anxious and shaken during my exam and affected my performance.

I have only one semester left in my four-year bachelor’s degree and I am seriously considering dropping out because of the stress caused by my experiences of antisemitism.

I had to drop my archival cinema course last year because the instructor was very antisemitic and constantly talked about how our projects had to be very political, mainly using anti-Zionism in his examples.

I dropped out. My anxiety level was too high and no one at the school seemed to care. It is open season on Jewish students.

The only reason I have not seriously considered changing institutions is that I do not believe other institutions are necessarily better.

I dropped out. My anxiety level was too high and no one at the school seemed to care. It is open season on Jewish students. The fact that anyone can mask their face on campus, destroy property, etc., with no consequences is terrifying. I never felt safe.

I cannot speak Hebrew with my parents on the phone on campus, I have stopped wearing Jewish symbols, I cannot talk about my holiday plans because they are Jewish; I have to hide who I am and where I come from.

Antisemitism contributed to making me lose interest in academia.

There are often campaigns on campus inviting students to participate in walkouts, which creates significant anxiety among Jewish students who fear being identified as “Zionists” if they do not participate.

Student Voices: Holocaust denial and distortion

Behind me in the study room, a group of students were talking about Hitler, the Holocaust, how it was supposedly false, how Hitler would never have killed Jews, and how the Holocaust was simply invented by Jews to obtain more money and remorse.

At a school event, students ranked the Holocaust as “less serious” than other more recent genocides. Students and staff compared the Holocaust to the destruction of Indigenous peoples in Canada; they compared the Israel-Hamas war to the Holocaust and said the former was “worse.” Staff members specifically compared Israeli Jews to Nazis.

Teachers say they do not believe the Holocaust happened or that it was greatly exaggerated.

Someone waiting in line in front of me said: “the Holocaust did not really happen. But if it did, Hitler was right.”

People, especially those active in the pro-Palestine movement, very loudly and publicly sympathize with Hitler, saying he should have finished the job, that not enough Jews were killed, that what he did was right, and that he should be brought back, while also flatly claiming that it did not happen, that it was not as bad as Jews say, and that Jews invented the Holocaust to manipulate the West.

Professors describe Holocaust survivors who moved to Israel in 1945 as members of an oppressive military regime. Many students minimize the Holocaust and Jewish trauma, say that Gaza is the modern Auschwitz, and accuse Jews of “becoming what you swore to destroy.”

One of my current professors has already claimed that Jews exaggerate the Holocaust to make Israel more legitimate.

The professor spoke about the experiments at Auschwitz as “mere research conducted unethically during the Second World War.”

A notable case occurred when the student-faculty group “Solidarity for Palestine” at [UNIVERSITY REDACTED] invited a person who falsely claimed to be a Holocaust survivor. During the event, this person made historically inaccurate statements about the Holocaust and minimized well-documented facts.

There was one moment where people came up to me to engage in dialogue but claimed that the Holocaust was not a horrific event, but rather a plan Jewish people made to have an excuse to steal the land of Israel.

My law professor compared the Holocaust to the war in Israel and Gaza. He said Israelis are the modern Nazis.

The Holocaust was omitted from a lesson on the history of the Second World War.

Speakers distort the history of the Holocaust to adapt it to current struggles, such as BLM, EDI programs, or reconciliation. Professors share links to Holocaust-denial sites as required reading material.

In my ethics course, we were shown a photo of Joseph Mengele and told that he was a product of his society, then we quickly moved on, as if he had done nothing abominably evil.

I heard students compare Holocaust deaths to medically necessary abortions. It is a controversial topic, but hearing a student compare a medically performed procedure, done with consent, to genocide was shocking.

Appendix D | Broader Campus survey provides critical insights into antisemitism

Gaps in awareness and recognition within the broader student population are creating a postsecondary environment that allows for concerns about antisemitism to be minimized, misunderstood, and ignored. The broader Canada-wide campus survey, which will be the focus of the ensuing report of the general student population, will expose why an overwhelming majority of Jewish students feel that their experiences are being denied, reframed, and downplayed by professors, administrators, and their fellow students. As it stands, majorities did not consider several forms of anti-Jewish targeting antisemitic, including boycotting Jewish-owned businesses because of their perceived Israel tie (54%) and protesting outside Jewish houses of worship (54%). More than half (55%) did not identify the statement that Jews have too much influence on the economy as antisemitic. It will expose a campus environment in which recognition of blatant antisemitism is inconsistent, Holocaust literacy is limited, and political framing obscures plainly anti-Jewish conduct.

What Jewish students experience as repeated, visible, and routine antisemitism is still misinterpreted or misunderstood by much of the general student population as ambiguous, politicized, or peripheral. This asymmetry, which will be explored by the broader campus survey, will help unpack why institutional responses are experienced as slow, equivocal, or incomplete by Jewish students. It is evident that the surrounding campus environment does not register the same conduct with the same seriousness.

This pillar of CASE will therefore broaden rather than soften the Jewish student survey report’s central argument. The problem is not only that Jewish students are being harmed. It is that too many people around them do not reliably recognize contemporary antisemitism, and a substantial minority worry they will be judged or excluded if they speak up. As a result, it is imperatives to expand the focus beyond perpetrators and targets and explore how bystanders, interpretive norms, and administrative cultures can also reinforce how antisemitism thrives on Canadian postsecondary campuses.

Appendix E | Survey Instrument

The final survey instrument is included below in its original English form.

Preamble

This survey aims to better understand how Jewish university students across Canada have experienced campus life over the past 12 months, with particular attention to antisemitism, belonging, campus engagement, feelings of safety and inclusion, among other key themes.

The study has been commissioned by the former Office of the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism and is being conducted by the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS).

Participation in the survey is voluntary, and all responses are anonymous and will be analyzed only in aggregate form. No identifying information will be shared or published. The survey takes approximately 12-15 minutes to complete.

As a token of appreciation for your time, students who complete the entire survey and provide their e-mail will be entered into a draw to win one of fifteen (15) $100 Visa gift cards.

Findings from this study will help universities and policymakers strengthen efforts to address antisemitism and promote inclusion across Canadian campuses.

Eligibility to participate in this survey is limited to individuals who self-identify as Jewish and are enrolled in a Canadian post-secondary institution. The following questions will be used to confirm eligibility.

1. Are you currently enrolled in a Canadian post-secondary institution (e.g., university, college, or CEGEP) or did you graduate within the past two years?

• Yes
• No

Jewish Identity

2. Do you identify as Jewish (religiously, culturally, or ethnically)?

• Yes
• No

Jewish Denomination

3. What is your religious denomination?

• Traditional
• Orthodox
• Conservative
• Reform
• No denomination
• Other (please specify):

Background Information

4. What post-secondary institution are you currently attending?

(answer)

5. What is your current student status?

• Undergraduate
• Graduate
• Recent Alumni (graduated in past 2 years)
• Other (please specify)

6. What is your primary field of study?

(answer)

7. How long have you been enrolled at this institution?

• Less than 1 year
• 1-2 years
• 3-4 years
• 5+ years

8. Are you an in-province, out-of-province or international student?

• In-province
• Out-of-province
• International

9. Which of the following best describes your current living situation?

• On campus (e.g., residence, dormitory, student housing)
• Off campus — living alone
• Off campus — with roommates or friends
• Off campus — with family
• Other (please specify)

10. What is your gender?

(answer)

11. What is your primary language?

• English
• French
• Other (please specify)

12. Were you born in Canada?

• Yes
• No

13. If you were born outside of Canada, in what country were you born?

(answer)

Belonging and Engagement

14. How many of your friends are Jewish?

• All
• Most
• Some
• A few
• None

15. Do you wear or display items that identify you as Jewish on or around campus? (e.g., Kippah, Star of David)

• Yes
• No

16. Are you currently involved with Hillel, Chabad, or another Jewish student organization?

• Yes
• No

17. How involved are you in the following activities?

(Scale: Very involved / Somewhat involved / Not very involved / Not at all involved)

• Jewish activities on-campus (e.g., Hillel, Chabad, Jewish fraternity or sorority, student-led Jewish group)
• Jewish activities off-campus (e.g., synagogue, community or cultural organization, volunteer program)

18. How important are each of the following to your identity?

(Scale: Very important / Somewhat important / Not very important / Not important at all)

• My religion
• My local Jewish community
• Jewish culture
• The Holocaust / Shoah
• Zionism
• Israel

19. Have you personally seen or encountered examples of Holocaust denial or distortion on-campus (e.g., claims that the Holocaust was exaggerated, fabricated, or justified)?

• Often
• Sometimes
• Rarely
• Never

20. If you have seen or encountered Holocaust denial or distortion on-campus, please briefly describe an instance that stands out most to you.

(Open response)

Campus Climate and Discourse

21. Please indicate how much you agree or disagree with each of the following statements.

(Scale: Strongly agree / Somewhat agree / Somewhat disagree / Strongly disagree)

• My university fosters a campus environment where people of all backgrounds are treated with respect.
• Faculty encourage open and respectful discussion about sensitive issues.
• My university takes antisemitism seriously.
• My campus is a safe and inclusive place for Jewish students.

22. Please indicate how much you agree or disagree with each of the following statements.

(Scale: Strongly agree / Somewhat agree / Somewhat disagree / Strongly disagree)

• I have felt pressured to share my opinion(s) about Israel with other students.
• I have felt pressured to conform to views on Israel expressed by my professor.
• I have felt pressured to join an anti-Israel protest on or near campus.

23. If you have felt pressured by any of the above situations, please briefly describe what happened.

(Open response)

24. Thinking about your courses over the past 12 months, have you encountered any of the following in your classes?

(Scale: Yes / No / Not sure)

• Course content or classroom discussions that, in your view, portrayed Jews, Judaism, Israel, or Zionism in an antisemitic or biased way?
• Course content or classroom discussions in which a professor or instructor brought up Jews, Judaism, Israel, or Zionism in a way that felt unrelated to the course topic or discussion?

25. If yes, please describe briefly what concerned you.

(Open response)

Experiences with Antisemitism

26. Over the past 12 months, how often have you experienced or witnessed the following on your campus?

(Scale: Often / Occasionally / Rarely / Never)

• Antisemitic remarks/gestures directed at you.
• Antisemitic remarks/gestures directed at others.
• Hateful or discriminatory treatment of Jews.
• Hateful or discriminatory treatment of Zionists.
• Hateful or discriminatory treatment of Israelis.
• Exclusion from an event or group (on campus).
• Vandalism of school property motivated by antisemitism.
• Intimidation or threats directed at Jews.
• Physical violence directed at Jews.

27. If you experienced or witnessed any of the situations listed above, please briefly describe one or two instances that stand out most to you. What happened?

(Open response)

28. Where did the incident(s) you just described occur? (Select all that apply)

• Classroom or lecture hall
• Student organization, club, or campus event
• Residence, dormitory, or student housing
• Online or on social media
• Off campus, near the university
• Other location (please specify)

29. Who was involved in the incident you witnessed or experienced? (Select all that apply)

• Fellow student(s)
• Faculty member
• Teaching assistant
• Administrator or other staff
• Individual(s) not affiliated with the university
• Unknown individual(s)
• Other (please specify)

30. Did you report the incident?

• Yes
• No

Documenting Antisemitism (reported incident)

31. To whom did you report it? (Select all that apply)

• Campus security
• Equity or human rights office
• Dean or administrator
• Faculty/staff member
• Police
• Jewish organization
• Other (please specify)

32. How satisfied were you with how the report was handled?

• Very satisfied
• Somewhat satisfied
• Somewhat dissatisfied
• Very dissatisfied

Documenting Antisemitism (did not report incident)

33. If you did not report the incident, why not? (Select up to two)

• Didn’t think it would help
• Didn’t know how to report it
• Fear of retaliation
• Too minor of an incident
• Other (please specify)

Antisemitism Online

34. In the past 12 months, have you seen or experienced hateful or discriminatory content about Jewish people on university-affiliated social media or other online platforms?

• Yes, frequently
• Yes, occasionally
• Rarely
• No, never

35. If yes, on which platforms have you seen this kind of content? (Select all that apply)

• Instagram
• X (Twitter)
• TikTok
• Facebook
• Reddit
• Discord
• Telegram
• Other (please specify)

Impacts and Responses

36. Please indicate how much you agree or disagree with each of the following statements.

(Scale: Strongly agree / Somewhat agree / Somewhat disagree / Strongly disagree)

• Antisemitism is a serious problem in Canada.
• Antisemitism is a serious problem on my university campus.
• I avoid wearing or displaying Jewish symbols because of safety concerns.
• I avoid attending certain classes or events because of antisemitism.
• I limit what I say online about being Jewish.
• I limit what I say in class about being Jewish.
• I have lost friendships because of antisemitism.
• Antisemitism has negatively affected my mental health.
• Antisemitism has negatively affected my academic performance.
• I have considered dropping a course or leaving my program because of antisemitic views from professors or other students.
• I have considered leaving my university because of antisemitism.

37. Is there anything else you would like to share about your experiences or perspectives related to antisemitism on campus that was not covered in this survey?

(Open response)

Gift Card Draw Entry (Optional)

38. To thank you for your participation, you may choose to enter a draw to win one of fifteen (15) $100 gift cards.

Participation in the draw is optional, and your email address will be stored separately from your survey responses to ensure anonymity.

If you wish to enter, please provide your email address below.

Footnotes

Footnote 1

The authors thank Lisa Abramowicz for her support in coordinating the CASE study and convening the Expert Advisory Committee

Return to footnote 1referrerFootnote 2

Statistics Canada, Police-Reported Hate Crime in Canada, 2025 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, July 22, 2026).

Return to footnote 2referrerFootnote 3

House of Commons Canada, Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, Heightened Antisemitism in Canada and How to Confront It, 44th Parl., 1st sess., December 2024,.; Senate of Canada, Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights, Standing United Against Antisemitism: Protecting Communities and Strengthening Canadian Democracy [PDF document], 45th Parl., 1st sess., April 2026.

Return to footnote 3referrerFootnote 4

Canadian Heritage, Changing Systems, Transforming Lives: Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy 2024-2028 (Ottawa: Canadian Heritage, 2024).

Return to footnote 4referrerFootnote 5

Senate of Canada, Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights, Standing United Against Antisemitism: Protecting Communities and Strengthening Canadian Democracy [PDF document], April 2026.

Return to footnote 5referrerFootnote 6

For further information regarding the broader campus population survey, please refer to Appendix D.

Return to footnote 6referrerFootnote 7

The survey also responds to Recommendation 6 of the Canada’s Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights: Standing United Against Antisemitism: Protecting Communities and Strengthening Canadian Democracy [PDF Document], which calls for “improved research and disaggregated data collection relating to hate, bias, and antisemitism in Canada, including the monitoring of trends across sectors such as education, workplaces, and digital platforms.” Senate of Canada, Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights, Standing United Against Antisemitism: Protecting Communities and Strengthening Canadian Democracy [PDF document], April 2026.

Return to footnote 7referrerFootnote 8

For examples grouped by themes, please refer to Appendix C.

Return to footnote 8referrerFootnote 9

Canadian Heritage, Canadian Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism(Gatineau, QC: Government of Canada, 2024).

Return to footnote 9referrerFootnote 10

Ibid.

Return to footnote 10referrerFootnote 11

Izabella Tabarovsky, “Zombie Anti-Zionism,” Tablet Magazine, July 31, 2024; Cary Kogan, Deidre Butler, and Pamela Walker, Antizionism in Canada: The Evolution of Antisemitism, submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights (RIDR) [PDF document], November 17, 2025.

Return to footnote 11referrerFootnote 12

This study was also commissioned by the former Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism.

Return to footnote 12referrerFootnote 13

The commonly accepted interpretation of this epithet is that Jews should go back to Poland and the death camps of the Holocaust/Shoah, and continues the antisemitic trope that Jews are rootless foreigners who can never belong. Historically, these tropes have been used to justify genocide, ethnic cleansing, and pogroms against Jewish communities across the world. American Jewish Committee, “Cosmopolitan Elite,”#TranslateHate glossary,

Return to footnote 13referrerFootnote 14

These defamatory statements are antizionist conspiracies that repeat propaganda from the Soviet era about the world’s only Jewish state. (see Izabella Tabarovsky, Tabarovsky, “Zombie Anti-Zionism.”). Importantly, they function to stigmatize Jews worldwide, including in Canada, for expressing their identity and for having an emotional connection to their ancestral homeland, leading to exclusion, hate, and violence. Also see Shaul Kelner, “American Antizionism,”Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas(Fall/Winter 2025). Criticism of Israeli policies and practices in not antizionist or antisemitic as clearly articulated in the Government of Canada’s adopted definition of antisemitism, IHRA.

Return to footnote 14referrerFootnote 15

No court, international or otherwise has determined that the War in Gaza is a genocide.

Return to footnote 15referrerFootnote 16

Faculty and teaching assistants were separate categories in the Jewish student survey but a single category in the general population survey. To facilitate comparison, these two categories were combined for the Jewish response. However, because the original survey structure differed, the resulting figure may not be directly comparable and the actual number for the Jewish student sample is somewhere between 18 and 25%.

Return to footnote 16referrerFootnote 17

Ibid.

Return to footnote 17referrerFootnote 18

Robert Brym, Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2025),.

Return to footnote 18referrerFootnote 19

Since November 27, 2002, the Government of Canada has listed Hamas as a terrorist group. Public Safety Canada, Currently Listed Terrorist Entities, Government of Canada, September 29, 2025.

Return to footnote 19referrerFootnote 20

On academic freedom and academic responsibility, Network of Engaged Canadian Academics (NECA), “International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and Academic Freedom,” NECA.; Ibid, “International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) on Campus,” NECA.

Return to footnote 20referrerFootnote 21

The Ontario government is attempting to address these concerns through Bill 166. Ontario Legislative Assembly, Bill 166, Strengthening Accountability and Student Supports Act, 2024, 43rd Parl., 1st sess., S.O. 2024, c. 11.

Return to footnote 21referrerFootnote 22

House of Commons Canada, Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, Heightened Antisemitism in Canada and How to Confront It, 44th Parl., 1st sess. (Ottawa: House of Commons Canada, December 2024), 33.

Return to footnote 22referrerFootnote 23

Canadian Heritage, Canadian Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, 2024.

Return to footnote 23referrerFootnote 24

This is consistent with the results of a survey of Ontario K-12 students, which found that “nearly one in six antisemitic incidents were initiated or approved by a teacher or involve a school-sanctioned activity” (Brym, Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools [2025]).

Return to footnote 24referrerFootnote 25

According to the calculations of Robert Brym, in 2024 “the rate of anti-Jewish hate crime was nearly five times higher than in 2014,” with “one anti-Jewish hate crime for every 366 Jews in the country. (Brym, “Avi Lewis and Independent Jewish Voices are gaslighting Canadians about antisemitism,” National Post, January 26, 2026).

Return to footnote 25referrerFootnote 26

Robert Brym, Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2025).

Return to footnote 26referrerFootnote 27

Graham W. Wright, Sasha Volodarsky, Shahar Hecht, and Leonard Saxe, In the Shadow of War: Hotspots of Antisemitism on US College Campuses (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, December 14, 2023); Social Research Centre, Jewish University Experience Survey [PDF document], (Melbourne: Social Research Centre, July 2023), prepared for the Zionist Federation of Australia, Department of Education (Australia) submission.; Andrew Markus, Efrat Eilam, and Suzanne Rutland, “Antisemitism in Australian Universities Post 7 October,” [PDF document], Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism, May 2025.; NORC at the University of Chicago, “Student Belonging and Exclusion Survey Report: Report #3: Task Force on Antisemitism,” [PDF document], Student Belonging and Exclusion Survey Report – Report #3: Task Force on Antisemitism, June 2025.; 1. Annaleise Azevedo Lohr and Mallory Newall, “Jewish on Campus Poll: Antisemitism at Colleges and Universities,” [PDF document], Ipsos, September 8, 2023. Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Federations of North America, “Portrait of Antisemitic Experiences in the U.S., 2024-2025,” Portrait of Antisemitic Experiences in the U.S., 2024-2025, October 6, 2025.; Robert Brym, Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools [2025].; Andrew Markus, Efrat Eilam, and Suzanne Rutland, “Antisemitism in Australian Universities Post 7 October,” [PDF document] Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism, May 2025.; NORC at the University of Chicago, “Student Belonging and Exclusion Survey Report: Report #3: Task Force on Antisemitism,” [PDF document]. Student Belonging and Exclusion Survey Report – Report #3: Task Force on Antisemitism, June 2025.; Annaleise Azevedo Lohr and Mallory Newall, “Jewish on Campus Poll: Antisemitism at Colleges and Universities,” [PDF document], Ipsos, September 8, 2023.

Return to footnote 27referrerFootnote 28

Brym, Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools [2025]

Return to footnote 28referrerFootnote 29

Government of Canada, Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2023, March 25, 2025.

Return to footnote 29referrerFootnote 30

Ibid., Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2023, March 25, 2025.

Return to footnote 30referrerFootnote 31

Ibid., Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2023, March 25, 2025,

Return to footnote 31referrerFootnote 32

Brym, Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools, 2025

Return to footnote 32referrerFootnote 33

Ibid., Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2024, March 30, 2026.

Return to footnote 33referrerFootnote 34

Ibid., Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2024, March 30, 2026.

Return to footnote 34referrerFootnote 35

Ibid., Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2024, March 30, 2026,

Return to footnote 35referrerFootnote 36

.Ibid, Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2024, March 30, 2026.

Return to footnote34referrerFootnote 35

Ibid., Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2024, March 30, 2026,

Return to footnote35referrerFootnote 36

Ibid.

Return to footnote36referrer

Page details

Date modified:

 2026-08-05

12.08.26

Editorial Note

The Socialism 2026 Conference, to be hosted by Haymarket Books from September 4, 2026 to September 7, 2026, in Chicago, has many anti-Israel panels, including academic-related issues:

In the workshop “From Prairie to Poppy: How Struggles for Land, War, and Farming Are Connected from Chicago to Palestine,” participants will learn “how the struggles for food sovereignty are intertwined with struggles against imperialism and militarism. Join Chicago Dissenters and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) for an interactive session where participants will discuss, research, and leave with tools for how to divest from capitalist food systems.” 

Another workshop, “Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew,” will discuss how “For over one hundred years, Palestinians have struggled for liberation in their homeland. This session will take direct analytical aim at the ideology and institutional structures animating Israel’s brutal rule over Palestinian lives, and argue that Zionism is colonial and racist in essence and practice and that decolonization in Palestine predicated on redistribution, reparations and refugee return remains the only just way forward.” Speakers include Noura Erakat, Professor of Africana Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

The panel “Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Palestine, Internationalism, Abolition,” will discuss how “The struggle against state terror extends from the occupied lands and bombed homes of Palestine to the prisons and detention camps of Trump’s America. Join Angela Y. Davis for a conversation on Palestine solidarity, Black feminism, and the abolitionist fight for the future.”  The first speaker is Angela Y. Davis, Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, an activist, writer, and lecturer. Her work “focuses on prisons, police, abolition, and the related intersections of race, gender, and class.” The second speaker is Naomi Murakawa, an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the editor of the Abolitionist Papers book series at Haymarket Books.

Another panel is “Break the Board: Neoliberalism in Crisis and the Popular University as Abolition.” This panel “introduces the Board of Butchers framework, an abolitionist project in opposition to the neoliberal university, actualized through the pursuit of the Popular University. The panel further strategizes how academics and intellectuals can use their skills to effectively support the Palestinian liberation movement and the abolition of the university.” The speakers: Adam Alex, Fiona Laith. The sponsor: National Students for Justice in Palestine.

The next panel “Building the People’s Embargo for Palestine: Strategy, Assessment, and the Path to Freedom During the Time of Genocide,” discusses how “Last year, the Palestinian Youth Movement launched the People’s Embargo for Palestine (PEP), a grassroots campaign uniting the international movement for arms embargo under a single banner: by intervening in the weapons supply chain, we can stop the genocide on Gaza. Sharing powerful campaign lessons from the U.S. and Europe, this session will share key insights into the PEP’s strategy and framework while equipping participants on how to identify local targets and take on PEP in their locales.” The sponsors are Palestinian Youth Movement and People’s Embargo for Palestine. 

A panel titled “Thought and the Prisoners’ Movement, What lessons does the Palestinian left offer today?” will explore “the history of prison writing in Palestine and key texts from the Palestinian left. Panelists will anchor the discussion in recently translated texts by Palestinian revolutionaries, including Ahmad Qatamesh and Walid Daqqa.” The speakers include Danya al-Saleh, who “developed her commitment to Palestinian community and youth education while organizing in the Palestine movement in North America.” Jenan Awaida, a “long-time community organizer in the Palestine movement based in Southern California. Her work has focused on grassroots mobilization, political education, Palestinian cultural programming, and coalition-building.” Ribhi Hussein, another featured speaker, is a “Palestinian-American born in San Francisco. He spent much of his life living in Ramallah. He was active as a student organizer at Birzeit University, where he graduated from the Department of Sociology.” He recently published an article titled “Another Dimension of Genocide: Interrogation in Zionist Prisons” about interrogation in Israeli prisons. The panel is sponsored by the People’s Center for Palestine.

The session “End the Genocide Behind Bars: Freedom for Palestinian Political Prisoners” will discuss how “Since October 2023, Israel has waged a genocide behind bars, systematizing and intensifying historic tactics of abuse and degradation against Palestinian prisoners, and turning prisons into death camp as part of Israels broader campaign to break the will of the Palestinian People. Palestinian Political Prisoners are the Compass of the National Struggle for Palestinian Liberation, the demand for their freedom must be amplified.” Featured speakers are Nawaf A, and Jenan A. This session is sponsored by the Freedom for Palestinian Political Prisoners and the Palestinian Youth Movement. 

The last panel deals with “Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Resisting Attacks on Schools, from Gaza to Chicago,”  and looks at K-12 schools as “sites of imperial violence and attacks on knowledge, including scholasticide in Palestine and repression in the U.S. Demystifying the Anti-Defamation League’s assaults on antiracist teaching, this session grounds us in the knowledge needed to organize our schools — for Palestine, against racism, and with our communities.” The first speaker is Hadeil M. Abdelfattah, Ed.D., a Palestinian-American and the co-founder of the Justice Coalition, a grassroots political organization dedicated to building power through community organizing, civic education, and legislative advocacy.  She is also the founding director of Education Rising International, an organization that supports Palestinian students with accessing, navigating, and thriving in higher education and workforce pathways. Other speakers include David Stovall, Professor in the departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois, is a “leader in Critical Race Theory.” Emmaia Gelman, the director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and Nora Lester Murad, a writer and activist, co-founded Dalia Association, Palestine’s community foundation, and Aid Watch Palestine, a community-driven aid accountability initiative. Lester Murad serves on the board of Visualizing Palestine and shares K-12 teaching resources about Palestine and DropTheADL From Schools. The panel is sponsored by Chicago Educators for Palestine, DropTheADL from Schools, and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. 

As can be seen, this Socialism Conference is a poster child for the highly troubling academic trend in which activism, especially pro-Palestinian activism, has supplanted scholarly inquiry. Ideological advocacy has taken precedence over intellectual rigor. Starting with the critical studies trend in the humanities, the phenomenon has spread across much of the liberal arts over the past two decades.

Interestingly, a recent study by Vanderbilt University illustrates the breadth of this development. According to Paul Boghossian, Professor of Philosophy at NYU, the chair of the committee conducting this study, the problem arises, “when the scholarly enterprise itself is subordinated to political or social values, when certain important questions are not asked, or certain plausible answers disallowed, because they would be politically inconvenient…. The subordination can assume a variety of forms. At its most extreme, there are calls within some disciplines – anthropology and sociology stand out – to abandon, or anyhow downgrade, the idea of trying to understand the world in favor of changing it.” He adds, “to think that this could justify proposing that the academic discipline of, say, anthropology abandon its traditional goal of understanding the human world in favor of ‘serving people’ is simply not a coherent option: academic disciplines are constitutively about understanding and knowledge. If your main aim is to serve a community’s interests, rather than advance our understanding of the world, there are lots of other occupations for you, from community activism to politics.”

As Israel Academia Monitor noted before, perhaps the most astonishing manifestation of the scholars’ political activism is the AAUP’s recent decision to engage in explicitly partisan activity by endorsing a political candidate—a striking departure for an organization founded in 1915 to defend academic freedom and faculty governance. Not incidentally, the current president of the AAUP, Todd Wolfson, a professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, is a longtime leader of the Rutgers Academic Workers Union. 

Although the brunt of political activism is currently directed against Israel, the credibility of the liberal arts is ultimately at stake. What is presented as scholarship increasingly risks becoming an instrument of political advocacy, eroding the distinction between academic inquiry and ideological activism on which the legitimacy of any university depends.

The academic participants of the conference Socialism exemplify the trend.

REFERENCES

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/events/798-socialism-2026

September 4, 2026 – September 7, 2026 at 9.00am – 2.00pm

Hyatt Regency McCormick Place

Socialism 2026

Join Haymarket Books for the Socialism 2026 Conference in Chicago!

Hyatt Regency McCormick Place

2233 S Martin Luther King Dr
Chicago, IL 60616 United StatesRSVP

We are living through the reshaping of the world.

Neighborhood raids and imperial aggression aim to create compliance and pacification. But against the forces of fear and division, our communities are standing up with stunning acts of bravery and organization. Old networks and tactics are being revived, and new alliances are being forged in the heat of struggle. It has never been more urgent for us to come together and strengthen our movements by learning from one another.

This September, the Socialism 2026 Conference will bring together activists, organizers, and communities from across the country and around the world. A four-day conference featuring over a hundred participatory discussions, lectures, and workshops, Socialism is the place for both seasoned radicals and new activists to sharpen analysis, hone strategy, and build community.

For information on speakers, schedules, and logistics, visit the Socialism Conference website.

Some portion of the conference program will be live-streamed, sign up for our mailing list to stay tuned about details!

Please note: Haymarket Books is committed to making the Socialism Conference as affordable as possible, and for that reason we are keeping our prices as low as possible. However, the conference costs hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, and is funded almost entirely by registration revenue. If you can afford to purchase a higher tier ticket or make an additional donation, please do so! We depend on your solidarity to sustain the conference and provide scholarships to those who need them.

========================================================

About Our Lantern

The Socialism conference stands in the tradition of abolitionist, emancipatory, and working-class struggles, both large and small. At a time of increasing attacks on immigrants, queer and trans people, and workers, Socialism is a place for strengthening our connections and reaffirming our commitment to fighting for each other.

Endorsing Organizations

Socialism 2026 is brought to you by Haymarket Books, in partnership with the following organizations and media:

JewishCurrents Jewish Voice For Peace justseeds.com Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign Law for Black Lives Los Angeles Tenants Union Labor Power Publications Long-Haul Lux Magazine Muslim Counterpublics Lab Movement Media Alliance Mother Jones Heritage Project National Students for Justice in Palestine Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work New Politics N Plus 1 Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) Palestinian Youth Movement People’s Center for Palestine Pilsen Community Books Play Fair ATL Pluto Press PM Press Red Black And White Political Research Associates The Progressive Protean Puno Rethinking Schools RevLeft Radio Rosa Luxemburg Siftung logo Railroad Workers United SASSI: Southerners Against Surveillance Systems and Infrastructure Scalawag Science for the People Solidarity Southern Workers Assembly Speak Out Now Spectre Spirit of Justice Storytelling and Organizing Project Tempest Truthout Upend Ukraine Solidarity Network – US Verso W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction Writers Against the war on Gaza Workers’ Voice La voz de los trabajadores Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing Howard Zinn Book Fair: December 6, 2026, San Francisco, CA

2026 Schedule

From Prairie to Poppy: How Struggles for Land, War, and Farming Are Connected from Chicago to Palestine
Friday September 4, 2026 2:30pm – 4:00pmCDT
TBA
You’re walking through the produce section and spot your favorite fruit! But how did it get to this grocery store? Whose labor, land, and future is tied up in the farming, packaging, and shipping of that fruit? In this workshop, participants will learn about how the struggles for food sovereignty are intertwined with struggles against imperialism and militarism. Join Chicago Dissenters and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) for an interactive session where participants will discuss, research, and leave with tools for how to divest from capitalist food systems.
Speakers
Heather Aubry
A. Funk
Rumsha S.
Sponsors
Dissenters
Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism

Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew
Friday September 4, 2026 4:30pm – 6:00pmCDT
TBA
For over one hundred years, Palestinians have struggled for liberation in their homeland. This session will take direct analytical aim at the ideology and institutional structures animating Israel’s brutal rule over Palestinian lives, and argue that Zionism is colonial and racist in essence and practice and that decolonization in Palestine predicated on redistribution, reparations and refugee return remains the only just way forward.
Speakers
Noura Erakat
Noura Erakat is Professor of Africana Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs, and co-author of Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew. She is a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya and an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Erakat has served as legal counsel for a Congressional subcommittee in the US House of Representatives, and as legal advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights.  Noura has also produced video documentaries, including “Gaza In Context” and “Black Palestinian Solidarity.” She is a frequent commentator in television, print, and radio media.
Brekhna Aftab
Anti-colonial Politics

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Palestine, Internationalism, Abolition
Friday September 4, 2026 7:30pm – 9:00pmCDT
TBA
The struggle against state terror extends from the occupied lands and bombed homes of Palestine to the prisons and detention camps of Trump’s America. Join Angela Y. Davis for a conversation on Palestine solidarity, Black feminism, and the abolitionist fight for the future.
Speakers
Angela Y. Davis
Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition, and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.

Naomi Murakawa
Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America and the editor of the Abolitionist Papers book series at Haymarket Books.

Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism

Break the Board: Neoliberalism in Crisis and the Popular University as Abolition
Saturday September 5, 2026 12:00pm – 1:30pmCDT
TBA
This panel introduces the Board of Butchers framework, an abolitionist project in opposition to the neoliberal university, actualized through the pursuit of the Popular University. The panel further strategizes how academics and intellectuals can use their skills to effectively support the Palestinian liberation movement and the abolition of the university.
Speakers
Adam
Alex
Fiona
Laith
Sponsors
National Students for Justice in Palestine

Building the People’s Embargo for Palestine: Strategy, Assessment, and the Path to Freedom During the Time of Genocide
Saturday September 5, 2026 5:00pm – 6:30pmCDT
TBA
Last year, the Palestinian Youth Movement launched the People’s Embargo for Palestine (PEP), a grassroots campaign uniting the international movement for arms embargo under a single banner: by intervening in the weapons supply chain, we can stop the genocide on Gaza. Sharing powerful campaign lessons from the U.S., and Europe, this session will share key insights into the PEP’s strategy and framework while equipping participants on how to identify local targets and take on PEP in their locales.
Speakers
TBD
Sponsors
Palestinian Youth Movement
People’s Embargo for Palestine
Anti-colonial Politics

Palestinian Revolutionary Thought and the Prisoners’ Movement
Sunday September 6, 2026 12:00pm – 1:30pmCDT
TBA
What lessons does the Palestinian left offer today? This session explores the history of prison writing in Palestine and key texts from the Palestinian left. Panelists will situate this discussion in relation to recently translated texts by Palestinian revolutionaries, including Ahmad Qatamesh and Walid Daqqa.
Speakers
Danya al-Saleh
Danya al-Saleh developed her commitment to Palestinian community and youth education while organizing in the Palestine movement in North America. She has contributed as an editor to translation projects of Palestinian literature into English. Danya’s writing has been published in The Nation, Mondoweiss, and journals such as Climate and Development. She has a PhD in Geography from the University of Wisconsin.
Jenan Awaida
Jenan Awaida is a long-time community organizer in the Palestine movement based in Southern California. Her work has focused on grassroots mobilization, political education, Palestinian cultural programming, and coalition-building. She has contributed to national initiatives for the Palestine movement in North America, including the 2025 People’s Conference for Palestine.

Ribhi Hussein
Ribhi Hussein is a Palestinian-American born in San Francisco. He spent much of his life living in Ramallah, until recently. He was active as a student organizer at Birzeit University, where he graduated from the Department of Sociology. He recently published a piece about interrogation in Israeli prisons, titled “Another Dimension of Genocide: Interrogation in Zionist Prisons.

Sponsors
People’s Center for Palestine
Anti-colonial Politics

End the Genocide Behind Bars: Freedom for Palestinian Political Prisoners
Monday September 7, 2026 10:00am – 11:30amCDT
TBA
Since October 2023, Israel has waged a genocide behind bars, systematizing and intensifying historic tactics of abuse and degradation against Palestinian prisoners, and turning prisons into death camp as part of Israels broader campaign to break the will of the Palestinian People. Palestinian Political Prisoners are the Compass of the National Struggle for Palestinian Liberation, the demand for their freedom must be amplified.
Speakers
Nawaf A
Jenan A
Sponsors
Freedom for Palestinian Political Prisoners
Palestinian Youth Movement
Anti-colonial Politics

Building a Rank-and-File Working Class Antiwar Movement Today
Monday September 7, 2026 10:00am – 11:30amCDT
TBA
Drawing on lessons from the hidden history of US working class antiwar resistance in the Vietnam war and beyond to build a working class antiwar movement today.
Speakers
Michael Letwin
A third-generation political activist, and a revolutionary socialist since the 1960s, Michael Letwin has participated in movements against the Vietnam War, apartheid South Africa, and U.S. imperialism in Iran, Central America, the Middle East, and around the world. In 1971, he was a founding member of the Red Tide, a Marxist high school underground newspaper in Los Angeles that later became the youth organization of the International Socialists, with which he relocated to Detroit in 1975. He is a former New York City public defender (1985-2002) and former president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys-UAW 2325 (1990-2002), and is a cofounder of New York City Labor Against the War (2001), Labor for Palestine (2004), Labor for Standing Rock (2016), and UAW Labor for Palestine (2023).
TBD
Sponsors
Labor for Palestine National Network
Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism  

Resisting Attacks on Schools, from Gaza to Chicago
Saturday September 5, 2026 3:00pm – 4:30pm
CDT
TBA
This panel looks at K-12 schools as sites of imperial violence and attacks on knowledge, including scholasticide in Palestine and repression in the U.S. Demystifying the Anti-Defamation League’s assaults on antiracist teaching, this session grounds us in the knowledge needed to organize our schools — for Palestine, against racism, and with our communities.
Speakers
Hadeil M. Abdelfattah, Ed.D
Hadeil M. Abdelfattah, Ed.D. is a Palestinian-American born and raised on the northside of the city of Chicago. She is an educator of nearly 28 years and is currently a Lead Instructional Coach at Chicago Public Schools. She holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership and wrote an Autoethnographic study of her experiences as the child of immigrants in a large urban school district. Hadeil is a co-founder of The Justice Coalition, a grassroots political organization dedicated to building power through community organizing, civic education, and legislative advocacy. She is also the founding director of Education Rising International, an organization that supports Palestinian students with accessing, navigating, and thriving in higher education and workforce pathways.

David Stovall, Ph.D
David Stovall, Ph.D. is a professor in the departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His scholarship investigates three areas 1) Critical Race Theory, 2) the relationship between housing and education, and 3) the intersection of race, place and school. In the attempt to bring theory to action, he works with community organizations and schools to address issues of equity, justice and abolishing the school/prison nexus. His work led him to become a member of the design team for the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice (SOJO), which opened in the Fall of 2005. Furthering his work with communities, students, and teachers, his work manifests itself in his involvement with the Peoples Education Movement, a collection of classroom teachers, community members, students and university professors in Chicago, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area who engage in collaborative community projects centered in creating relevant curriculum. In addition to his duties and responsibilities as a professor at UIC, he also served as a volunteer social studies teacher at the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice from 2005-2018. He is the author of Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago published by Haymarket Books.

Emmaia Gelman
Emmaia Gelman is the author of The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State (UC Press, 2026) and co-editor of The Anti-Defamation League: A Critical Reader (Pluto Press, 2026). She is the director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.
Nora Lester Murad
Nora Lester Murad is a writer and activist. She is the author of the award-winning young adult novel, Ida in the Middle, editor of I Found Myself in Palestine (2020) and co-author of Rest in My Shade (2018). Nora writes commentary for outlets including Mondoweiss, The New Arab, Markaz Review, Aljazeera, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and more. She co-founded Dalia Association, Palestine’s community foundation, and Aid Watch Palestine, a community-driven aid accountability initiative. Nora serves on the board of Visualizing Palestine and shares K-12 teaching resources about Palestine at www.IdaInTheMiddle.com and DropTheADL From Schools.
Sponsors
 Chicago Educators for Palestine
DropTheADL from Schools
Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
  Education Justice

05.08.26

Editorial Note

The Association for Social Anthropologists of the UK (ASA) held its annual gathering on May 29–31, 2026, at the University of Edinburgh. 

The ASA was founded in 1946 to “promote the study and teaching of anthropology and to uphold the interests and status of the discipline, primarily in the UK, but also extending to the Commonwealth, where it works collaboratively with fellow anthropology associations. The ASA’s major role is to assist its members in planning and conducting research, and to represent social anthropology and anthropologists in the academy, and in relation to policy and funding.”

During its conference, an exhibition titled “Killing the Messenger” of all the “Palestinian journalists murdered by Israel” was shown. As stated in the invitation, this exhibit “stands as a site of remembrance for those who have been murdered and a site to resist the genocidal narratives that frame these victims as something other.” 

Accompanying the exhibition, a film was screened, titled “Gaza Fixer: A chronicle of survival,” by George Azar and Mariam Shahin. The film talks about “Raed Athamneh is a six-time war survivor, patriarch and trusted news fixer to foreign reporters covering Gaza. As he gives aid workers and journalists tours, he is the one who actually talks to the people, and translates the story of their fate to the foreigners eagerly recoding, writing, filming, the tragedy that Gaza has become.” After the screening, a discussion took place with director Mariam Shahin that covers the last 20 years of journalism in Gaza.  

In December 2025, the ASA voted to support the Palestinian call to boycott “complicit” Israeli academic and cultural institutions. According to the official announcement, following a member ballot, the Association voted to join the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).  Forty-seven percent of members voted in favor of a boycott (171 votes in favor, 37 against, and 11 abstentions). The organization now “advocates for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions for their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights stipulated in international law.”

The ASA announcement added, “To be clear, this is a boycott of complicit institutions, and the ASA remain committed to freedom of expression as stipulated in the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and, as such, rejects on principle boycotts of individuals based on their opinion or identity.”  

It was also decided that “As part of our role as a professional and educational association, we are offering materials to contribute to broader understanding about what has occurred, and continues to occur, in Palestine from the perspectives of international law, history, anthropology, critical theory, journalism and forensic architecture.”

The Association issues a Resource Pack on its website to justify the boycott, intended to be a “living document’ to be “continually updated.”  The Pack includes a long list of items such as “United Nations (UN), International Court of Justice (ICJ) and other Reports: Gaza Genocide, A Collective Crime by the Special Rapporteur about human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” (A/80/492). 20 October 2025. 

The section on Accountability reads: “The architecture of genocidal starvation. This report published by Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London shows the strategy and tactics of the Israeli government and the IDF since October 2023, mapping out the details of what it describes as a systematic genocidal intent.” Among other items.   

The Videos section featured “‘In Search of Palestine,’ a short video by Edward Said who shows the house where his grandparents once lived, now occupied by Israeli settlers. Said asks, how did this happen and how does it relate to what is happening in Palestine today?”

“Our Genocide: The Guardian series of interviews published by The Guardian, that explores the views of ordinary residents of Tel Aviv—often considered Israel’s liberal capital—on the war on Gaza.”

“The IDF: This video explores the origins of the IDF and challenges its claim to be the ‘most moral army in the world’. It focuses on early actions to expel Arabs from the Palestinian territory.”

“Inside Israeli apartheid: The video explains why the concept of ‘apartheid’ is relevant to understanding the Israeli government’s policies toward, and treatment of, Palestinians.”

Another section is “The Role of Universities and Academia,” which showcases the work of Dr. Maya Wind (whom Israel Academia Monitor discussed previously). The Resource Pack states, “Through ethnographic research on university campuses in Israeli and analysis of government documents, Wind outlines the role universities have played in settler-colonialism and in the persecution of Palestinians within all occupied territories.” Usher, Alex and Wind, Maya. 2025. “Why Boycott? Maya Wind on the Case Against Israeli Universities,” 6 March. 

The last section, Higher Education Strategy Associations: “Palestinian-led Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel Established in 2004 by a group of Palestinian academics and intellectuals in the West Bank as part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign, PACBI aims to isolate Israel in order to force change in its actions towards Palestinians including the oppressing the academic freedom of Palestinians (as evidenced by Maya Wind’s 2024 ethnography).”

Clearly, the materials in the Pack follow the propaganda line of the Palestinian anti-Israel campaigns. It is totally decontextualized to present the Palestinians as totally lacking in agency: none of their decisions, including the rejection of the 1947 UN Partition proposal, the effort by Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, to destroy the Oslo Accords, have been mentioned. Hamas’s violent attack on Israeli communities in which civilians were murdered was omitted as well.  Instead, the Pack includes materials that purport to demonstrate Israel’s “genocidal” assault on the Gaza population using the report by Forensic Architecture. Nowhere does the Pack explain that Prof. Eyal Weizman, the head of Forensic Architecture, is a well-known Israeli anti-Israel activist whose lifelong expertise is fabricating materials to show “systematic genocidal intent.”

As an academic organization, the ASA should be condemned for all its falsifications and distortions.

REFERENCES

https://theasa.org/about/news/boycott-israel.phtml

The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK (ASA) joins the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

Photo by luzitanija – stock.adobe.com

Following a ballot of members the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK (ASA) has voted to join the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). With a strong rate of return of 47.8%, members voted overwhelmingly in favour of a boycott (171 votes in favour, 37 against and 11 abstentions). Alongside PACBI, the ASA therefore advocates for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions for their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights stipulated in international law. Details of the campaign, and its precise objectives and terms of reference, can be found on the BDS Freedom Justice Equality PACBI page.

To be clear, this is a boycott of complicit institutions, and the ASA remain committed to freedom of expression as stipulated in the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and, as such, rejects on principle boycotts of individuals based on their opinion or identity. As part of our role as a professional and educational association, we are offering materials to contribute to broader understanding about what has occurred, and continues to occur, in Palestine from the perspectives of international law, history, anthropology, critical theory, journalism and forensic architecture. The Resource pack which accompanies this announcement of a boycott is intended as a ‘living document’ that will be continually updated and changed as new information becomes available or as circumstances change.

==========================================================

https://www.theasa.org/

https://theasa.org/publications/resources-palestine.phtmlASA Resource Pack for further education and understanding on Palestine

As part of our role as a professional and educational association, we are offering materials to contribute to broader understanding about what has occurred, and continues to occur, in Palestine from the perspectives of international law, history, anthropology, critical theory, journalism and forensic architecture. This is by no means an exhaustive resource list, but rather a selected range of writings and media representations for understanding the historical and political background and context to the current conflict and atrocities we have witnessed in Palestine.

We also see this as a ‘living document’ that will be continually updated and changed as new information becomes available or as circumstances change.

Table of Contents

1. Law and Legislation

2. Accountability

3. Audiovisual/Videos

4. Historical Context

5. Academic Articles

6. Theoretical Texts

7. Palestinian Voices

8. The Role of Universities

1: International Law Reports and Legislation

United Nations (UN), International Court of Justice (ICJ) and other Reports

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Gaza Genocide, A Collective Crime by the Special Rapporteur about human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 (A/80/492). 20 October 2025. Advance unedited version. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/special-rapporteur-report-gaza-genocide-a-collective-crime-20oct25/

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UNRWA Situation Report #195 on the Humanitarian Crisis in the Gaza Strip and Occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem

https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/unrwa-situation-report-195-situation-gaza-strip-and-west-bank-including-east-jerusalem. November 4, 2025

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United Nations: The Question of Palestine. Commission of Inquiry: Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have committed and are continuing to commit genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – Conference room paper (A/HRC/60/CRP.3). 16 September 2025.

https://www.un.org/unispal/document/commission-of-inquiry-report-genocide-in-gaza-a-hrc-60-crp-3/

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Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (A/HRC/59/26). 16 June–11 July 2025

https://www.un.org/unispal/document/report-of-the-independent-international-commission-of-inquiry-on-the-occupied-palestinian-territory-including-east-jerusalem-and-israel-a-hrc-59-26/

In this report, submitted following Human Rights Council resolution S-30/1, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel examines violations of international human rights law, international humanitarian law and possible international crimes relating to attacks against educational facilities and religious and cultural sites.

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Human Rights Council Sixtieth session.Legal analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. 16 September 2025

https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session60/advance-version/a-hrc-60-crp-3.pdf

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International Court of Justice, Palestine/Israel: Israel must immediately stop its criminal forcible displacement in Gaza. 30 June 2025.

https://www.icj.org/palestine-israel-israel-must-immediately-stop-its-criminal-forcible-displacement-in-gaza/

2: Accountability:

The architecture of genocidal starvation

https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/aid-in-gaza/investigation/a-cartography-of-genocide

This report published by Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London shows the strategy and tactics of the Israeli government and the IDF since October 2023, mapping out the details of what it describes as a systematic genocidal intent.

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Demanding Accountability, Seeking Justice

https://www.hindrajabfoundation.org/

Hind Rajab (named after a 5-year-old girl murdered by an IDF tank) is a Legal organisation based in Belgium that is filing cases against individuals serving in the IDF who it believes have committed genocide. The individual cases offer insight into what types of law have been broken by Israel and its IDF soldiers, often evidenced through their own social media accounts.

3: Audio-Visual Sources: Videos

‘In Search of Palestine’

In this short video Edward Said shows the house where his grandparents once lived, now occupied by Israeli settlers. Said asks, how did this happen and how does it relate to what is happening in Palestine today?

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Our Genocide The Guardian

A series of interviews published by The Guardian, that explores the views of ordinary residents of Tel Aviv—often considered Israel’s liberal capital—on the war on Gaza.

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The IDF

This video explores the origins of the IDF and challenges its claim to be the ‘most moral army in the world’. It focuses on early actions to expel Arabs from the Palestinian territory.

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Secret Hebron: the school run

This video focuses on the everyday dynamics of occupation and segregation in the West Bank town of Hebron showing the dangers to which children going to school are exposed to as a result.

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Inside Israeli apartheid

The video explains why the concept of ‘apartheid’ is relevant to understanding the Israeli government’s policies toward, and treatment of, Palestinians.

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Gaza: Dying for Food 

This is a BBC documentary focusing on starvation in Gaza, exploring how people were murdered while trying to access sites where food was being distributed.

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How three terrorist groups formed the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) | The Big Picture

This Middle East Eye documentary outlines how the Israeli Defense Force has its origins and history in three terrorist groups that displaced Palestinians and British colonial forces in the 20th century despite being portrayed as the “most moral army in the world”.

4: Important texts/novels providing historical context to the Israeli-Palestine conflict

Khalidi, Rashid. (2020) The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest & Resistance, 1917–2017. Henry Holt and Company: New York.

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Makdisi, Saree. (2022) Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture ofDenial. University of California Press: California.

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Kanafi, Ghassan. (2022) On Zionist Literature. Translated into English in 2022. Ebb Books: Oxford.

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Albulhawa, Susan. (2006) Mornings in Jenin. Bloomsbury: London.

A moving account of Palestinian displacements set over three generations and 60 years of settler colonialism.

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Pappe, I. (2024) A Very Short History of the Israel Palestine Conflict. Oneworld Publications: London.

In this short and accessible handbook written Ilan Pappé shows how villages evacuated by Palestinian during the 1948 Nakba were flattened, covered over with grass and turned into golf courses to eliminate any remnant of the previous society

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The Conversation(2023) has also published a review of ‘10 books to help you understand Israel and Palestine’, recommended by experts’, (21 November 2023)

5: Key Articles and Journal Special Issues:

Lamrani, Myriam (2025). ‘Arab Images: Musings on Disjointed Grief for Palestine.’ Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, vol. 21 no. 1, pp. 122-131. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960529.

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Allen, Lori and Heidi Mogstad (2025) Special Issue: Speaking Out Against Genocide and Repression, edited by Lori Allen and Heidi Mogstad Public Anthropologist. Volume 7 (2025): Issue 2

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Khalidi, Rashid and Sherene Seikaly (eds) (2023).

Gaza: Nearly Two Decades of Israeli Incursions, Siege, and Blockade

(17 articles) in the Journal of Palestinian Studies, October 2023.

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Ivasiuc, Ana. ‘Palestine as Method: A Public Anthropology against Empire.’ Public Anthropologist 7.2 (2025): 345-371 (included in Open Access).

6: Useful Theoretical Texts

Césaire, Aimé. (2023) ‘Discourse on colonialism.’ In Postcolonialism. pp310-339. London: Routledge.

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Said, Edward. (1978) Orientalism. Pantheon Books: New York.

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Wolf, Patrick (2006). Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of genocide research 8(4), 387-409.

7: Prominent Palestinian Journalists and Voices

People in Palestine have continuously tried to make their voices heard, for example, here on the Voices of Gaza website of the Palestinian Anthropology Network Insanniyat. And also through their journalists:

Mariam Abu Daqqa

Anas Al-Sharif

Saleh al-Jafarawi

Plestoa Alaqad

Wael Al-Dahdough

8: The Role of Universities and Academia

Wind, Maya. (2024) Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. Verso books: London.

Through ethnographic research on university campuses in Israeli and analysis of government documents, Wind outlines the role universities have played in settler-colonialism and in the persecution of Palestinians within all occupied territories.

Towers of Ivory and Steel

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Usher, Alex and Wind, Maya. 2025. ‘Why Boycott? Maya Wind on the Case Against Israeli Universities’, 6 March. Higher Education Strategy Associations.

URL: https://higheredstrategy.com/why-boycott-maya-wind-on-the-case-against-israeli-universities/
Youtube: https://youtu.be/Ash04O0wSEM
Podcast: https://worlded.transistor.fm/episodes/why-boycott-maya-wind-on-the-case-against-israeli-universities

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PACBI – Palestinian-led Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

Established in 2004 by a group of Palestinian academics and intellectuals in the West Bank as part of the boycott, diverstment and sanctions campaign, PACBI aims to isolate Israel in order to force change in its actions towards Palestinians including the oppressing the academic freedom of Palestinians (as evidenced by Maya Wind’s 2024 ethnography).

Guidelines can be viewed here: https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/academic-boycott-guidelines

29.07.26

Editorial Note

The University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa has debated the issue of academic boycotts of Israel on numerous occasions. For example, in 2014, the UCT responded to calls to support anti-Israel measures and stated that “while UCT as an institution is unable to support the call to take a stand on the specific issues condemning Israel, we uphold the rights of individual academics and students to do so and will facilitate the promotion of all views and serious debate.” Likewise, in 2017, a proposal was put forward by the Palestine Solidarity Forum, which has called on UCT to implement an academic boycott of Israeli universities, and the University debated it.

However, on June 24, 2024, UCT published a notice online titled “UCT Council adopts two Senate resolutions on Gaza conflict,” during its plenary meeting. Two resolutions were passed by a majority vote regarding the Gaza conflict, originally passed by the Senate at a meeting held on April 19, 2024. The first resolution, on the destruction of scholarship and education in Gaza, the Senate resolved, among other things, to: 1. “express concern and opposition to any attempts to curtail academic freedom by labeling criticism of Israel or Zionist policies as antisemitism.” 2. “reject the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s conflation of critique of Zionism and Israel’s policies as antisemitism in favor of the Jerusalem Declaration’s dynamic understanding of what constitutes antisemitism.” 3. “express support for academic colleagues in Gaza who are surviving under appalling conditions and our intention to assist in the rebuilding of the academic sector after the war.” 4. “express solidarity with academic colleagues victimized for their willingness to speak out against the educaracide in Gaza.” 

The second resolution concerned research collaborations with members of the Israeli Defense Force and the wider Israeli military establishment. In terms of this resolution, no UCT academic may enter into relations, or continue relations with, any research group and/or network whose author affiliations are with the Israeli Defense Force, and/or the broader Israeli military establishment. 

As a result, the UTC faces consequences. On June 10, 2026, the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education of the Parliament of South Africa convened in order to engage with UCT. The Portfolio Committee is a group of members of Parliament from the National Assembly assigned to oversee and process legislation. The meeting engaged with UCT stakeholders and the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) on institutional matters.

According to the transcript of the meeting published online, Karabo Khakhau MP asked the Chair of the UCT Council to explain the resolution to boycott Israel.

Adv Norman Arendse, Chair of Council, UCT, said that “the resolution had its origins in a resolution adopted in the Senate. He noted that he was not sure the resolution explicitly spoke to a boycott of Israel… the resolution spoke to collaborating with Israeli tertiary institutions that were either actively supporting or complicit in supporting the IDF in its war on Gaza. He added that, to the extent that some academics might also have a relationship with those institutions, that too fell within the scope of the resolution. He stated that “the resolution had in fact not been implemented.” He added that, “while Council adopted resolutions, implementation was left to the executive, and a committee in the Senate had been appointed to look into the implementation.” He said “the issue was debated by Council, and all relevant factors were considered, including a loss or potential loss of donor funding. The resolution was adopted on the 22nd of June 2024, following a debate and a vote conducted by a secret ballot.”

Ms Khakhau said she was satisfied “that implementation was nowhere near commencement.” However, “her concern was that students had raised that the university had lost funding from particular donors and that students had been disadvantaged as a result. She said where she was stuck was in understanding the relationship between the resolution, its inaction, and the loss of donor funding… Her problem, however, was with an institution making decisions that would have a negative, direct impact on students’ ability to access academic freedom and to exit an academic institution without impediment.”

Prof Musa Moshabela, VC, UCT, confirmed that “there had indeed been an impact on student funding, as some donors held strong views regarding the position the university had taken… As a result, funding for students had been lost, and the impact had been real.” He said those were matters that had been discussed at the time the resolutions were debated, “but the impact had been severe.” He said “the university had lost approximately R200 million [approx. $12 million] that was designated for an institute for neuroscience at UCT, and a further R50 million [approx. $3 million] in total from various donors.”

Ms Khakhau confirmed that “the figures were R200 million for the neuroscience institute and a further R50 million.”  

Prof Moshabela added that “a large portion of that, approximately R15 million [approx. $900 thousand] annually, had been for student bursaries.” He said, “all of that had been lost in terms of new funding… affected donors had continued to fund students already in committed cohorts but had chosen to do so directly rather than through the institution, and had not taken on new students.”

Ms Khakhau said “that was a problem for her. She said the primary responsibility of the institution was to ensure that students entered, studied, graduated… that was the institution’s job and that no decision could sideline that fact. The institution had a greater responsibility to advance the academic project of South African students than to take a position on what was happening in Gaza.” She acknowledged that “academic reflection was part of the institutional mandate and that individuals had the right to protest but said none of that could stand between a South African child, particularly a poor South African child dependent on funding, and their ability to access education.”

Mr S Lonzi (EFF) rose on a point of order. He said, “with the greatest respect, that what had been presented was a total distortion of global solidarity. He pointed to the history of South Africa and noted that part of what had assisted in defeating apartheid was global solidarity, including from universities in America, Germany, and the United Kingdom. It would be unfair to the university to suggest that by demonstrating global solidarity it was reducing its mandate of serving students. He said that was incorrect and a distortion and felt he had to make that point.”

The Chairperson said that “to be fair to the university, it had not been management that had taken the decision but the Council.” He noted that “the university’s statement, for those who had read it, had been mostly about the destruction of institutions of higher learning in Gaza and the killing of teachers and lecturers.” He said, “that was what the institution had been responding to, and the statement was publicly available.” He said “he did not think it was appropriate for Parliament, which had itself gone to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against genocide, to then vilify the Council’s resolution as an act of international solidarity.” He said that “the posture was not correct for Parliament to adopt, and while different political views could be expressed in political forums, Members should be mindful of what message was being sent to South Africans in a democratic house.” He suggested “the Committee refrain from entering that space, noting it was a dangerous one,” and said “it was not fair to imply the university had neglected its academic mandate simply because it had taken a position on international solidarity.”

Ms Khakhau said “the bottom line was that she fully respected UCT as an academic institution with the African and global intellectual standing it commanded, and she had no problem with that. She equally respected the human rights of each and every individual student and staff member. Her problem, however, was that under no circumstance could solidarity with any cause cost a South African child their ability to study.” She said “the primary mandate of UCT was not the production of papers or alignment with any discourse but ensuring that a South African student could present themselves at the institution, study, and that everything in the institution’s power was done to protect that student’s ability to do so.” She said that “where a decision threatened the funders of a student, the institution had a responsibility as the responsible adult to balance the political equation with its core mandate of funding students, and that was the area in which she believed the Chair of Council could have done more work.”

To understand the nuances of the boycott debate, it is imperative to note that South Africa is struggling with severe economic and social challenges.

The university authorities understand that higher education can help break the cycle of violence and poverty in the country and therefore did not implement the boycott. It is also clear that donors who provided students with grants declined to continue their charitable donations.  

Ultimately, South African universities should ask whether boycotting Israeli universities advances the welfare of South Africans. In a nation that suffers from so many endemic problems, it is the duty of universities to devote their resources to their own society. 

There is always the worry that Iran and Qatar might fill in the void.

REFERENCES:

https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-africa-south-2026-6-donors-pulled-millions-from-uct-over-gaza-resolutions-mps-told/

11 Jun 2026

Donors pulled millions from UCT over Gaza resolutions, MPs told

By Linda Nordling

Revelation prompts parliamentary debate over whether global solidarity should ever trump funding for education

The University of Cape Town in South Africa lost around 250 million rand (US$15m) in funding after its council adopted resolutions critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, according to the university’s vice-chancellor.

Mosa Moshabela made the disclosure during a 10 June hearing before the parliamentary portfolio committee on higher education, where he detailed the financial fallout from two resolutions adopted by a council majority in June 2024. 

The first resolution denounces the destruction of Palestinian academic institutions and rejects a widely used definition of antisemitism in favour of one that allows for broader criticism of Israel and Zionism. The second prohibits UCT academics from engaging with research groups affiliated with the Israeli military. A UCT professor has challenged in court whether the council was adequately informed of potential consequences before adopting the resolutions. Judgement is still pending.

“UCT is a place where historically there are people who support Israel and people who support Palestine, and our donors and alumni community is also sometimes aligned like that. So, as a result, we have lost funding for students, and it has had an impact,” Moshabela told MPs.

He said the losses include around R200 million that had been pledged to a neuroscience institution at UCT, as well as R50 million from other donors. This includes a R15 million annual hit for student funding, he said.

‘Global solidarity’

The revelation sparked sharp disagreement among committee members about whether a university should take positions on international conflicts.

Democratic Alliance MP Karabo Khakhau argued that UCT’s obligations to students should take precedence over geopolitical solidarity. “Human beings have the right to associate with whomever they want, and if they want to protest, they must protest,” she said. “But none of that must stand between a South African child and funding to access education.”

But Sihle Lonzi from the Economic Freedom Fighters argued that condemning the resolutions missed a deeper historical point. “If someone were to look at the history of South Africa, part of what assisted us to defeat apartheid was global solidarity. It will be unfair to the university to say that by demonstrating global solidarity they are reducing their mandate,” he said.

Committee chair Tebogo Letsie from the African National Congress urged colleagues to be careful about the precedent they were setting. Noting that South Africa’s own government had taken the matter further than any university—filing genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice in December 2023— he called on MPs to refrain from criticising UCT’s council for following a similar moral impulse.

Khaukau was unmoved by the appeal for consensus. “I don’t know where this culture comes from. We don’t have to agree on everything,” she said.

Researchers clash

The debate mirrored one that took place on the pages of the March/April issue of the South African Journal of Science last year.

In one commentary, Nithaya Chetty, the dean of science at the University of the Witwatersrand, wrote that universities should refrain from taking official standpoints in polarising debates such as the Israel-Gaza conflict to “preserve academic integrity”.

However, other academics vehemently opposed Chetty’s argument. Jonathan Jansen, former president of the Academy of Science of South Africa, argued that universities are “by their very nature, political and not neutral”.

Another paper, authored by researchers from the universities of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town, Pretoria and Stellenbosch, said neutrality in the face of human rights violations can undermine moral authority. “Public universities in South Africa have an obligation to serve the public good,” it argued.

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https://pmg.org.za/committee-meeting/43289/

UCT governance, administration, teaching and learning and related matters, with Ministry

Higher Education

10 June 2026

Chairperson: Mr T Letsie (ANC) 

Meeting Summary

Video

The Portfolio Committee convened in Parliament to engage with the University of Cape Town (UCT), its stakeholders, and the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) on governance, financial sustainability, student funding, transformation, and related institutional matters. The Ministry opened by confirming that the University of Cape Town remained a functional and stable institution from a governance perspective, having received an unqualified audit opinion with findings relating primarily to conflict of interest non-compliance. It noted UCT’s strong financial recovery in 2025, with a net surplus of R1 35 billion against R852 million in 2024, while cautioning that mounting student debt and the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) accommodation cap continued to exert structural pressure on the institution.

The NSFAS (NSFAS) accommodation cap emerged as the dominant and most contested issue of the engagement. UCT management reported that the cumulative net debt arising directly from the cap shortfall had reached R537 4 million between 2023 and 2026, with 3 465 NSFAS-funded students carrying accommodation balances in 2026 alone. It further noted that NSFAS first-time entering students had declined sharply from 1 431 in 2025 to 834 in 2026, with no confirmed funding policy at the start of the academic year.

The Student Representative Council (SRC) called on the Committee to exempt university-owned residences from the cap and to introduce regional differentiation, citing the Cape Town private market, where comparable accommodation reached R16 773 per month. UCT management rejected the characterisation that it made a profit on residences, maintaining that all costs went directly into services, including insourced staff, student life programming, and residence administration, and that the institution could not absorb the gap between what the NSFAS paid and the actual cost of delivery. Members disagreed with the institution’s management, questioning why UCT, when advertising and accrediting private leases after the cap was introduced, did not restrict those leases to NSFAS-rated pricing, given that NSFAS-funded students had been placed in accommodation above the cap and thereby put into debt.

Management acknowledged the structural tension but argued that placing NSFAS-funded students exclusively in lower-cost residences carried transformation and inclusion risks, and called for a collective multi-stakeholder solution rather than unilateral institutional concessions. The Ministry added that national expenditure on accommodation within the NSFAS budget now exceeded spending on academics, describing the imbalance as unsustainable and calling for accelerated infrastructure investment and a comprehensive review of the funding model.

UCT’s Council resolution on Israeli academic institutions was raised by Members. The Chair of Council clarified that the resolution was directed specifically at Israeli tertiary institutions actively supporting or complicit in the Israel Defence Force’s (IDF) operations in Gaza and confirmed that implementation had not commenced. Donor funding had consequently declined, with approximately R200 million in earmarked neuroscience funding and a further R50 million from various donors lost, of which around R15 million annually had been directed at student bursaries. Management confirmed the impact on student funding was real but noted that overall donor funding had increased by over 11% since 2024, despite a reduction in the number of donors. Divergent positions on the resolution and its consequences were held by Members.

Transformation across the academic pipeline was examined in detail. Members noted that at the Prof level, foreign national academics outnumbered Black African, Coloured, and Indian academics combined, which Human Resources confirmed and characterised as unacceptable. UCT outlined a range of programmes aimed at accelerating black academic progression, including the Next Generation Profiate, the Accelerated Transformation Academic Programme, an Emerging Research Programme, and targeted use of the Employment Equity Fund to recruit at senior academic levels. It acknowledged a persistent gap in undergraduate success rates for African students relative to other racial groups, attributed in part to legacy curriculum structures, and described interventions including curriculum reform, self-assessment tools, and pedagogically enriched first-year courses. Members challenged the framing, arguing that the gap reflected a systemic failure that should not be analysed through the lens of student preparedness, and requested written detail on causes and corrective measures.

Public and Administrative Support Staff (PASS) unions presented a picture of a chronically dysfunctional labour relations environment, citing a collective agreement concluded in February 2026 that was reversed on two key provisions shortly after signing, the absence of a promotion policy for Public and Administrative Support staff despite the gap being formally identified in UCT’s own Employment Equity Plan in 2022, mandatory quarterly consultation meetings that had not taken place once in 2026, and a structural pay disparity between Public and Administrative Support staff benchmarked at the 60th percentile of the general market and academic staff benchmarked at the 75th percentile of their specific labour market. Unions requested direct representation on Council. Members noted that this request was not grounded in the Higher Education Act as currently constituted and proposed that unions instead seek more meaningful recognition through expanded bargaining forum arrangements, observer status, or consultation mechanisms comparable to those at other institutions.

Members raised the issue of withheld academic certificates, with the Chairperson reiterating the Committee’s proposal that the approximately 13 000 certificates withheld by UCT be released through a mechanism involving memoranda of understanding between the DHET, National Treasury, and the South African Revenue Service (SARS), so that graduates entering employment could be identified and reminded of their debt obligations. UCT management indicated qualified support for the proposal but noted that it could not absorb the associated financial risk without a credible repayment undertaking from the state. The Committee requested that UCT consider allowing affected graduates to attend graduation ceremonies while the certificate remained retained, given the generational and social significance of that milestone for first-generation graduates.

The Committee closed with a commitment to convene a dedicated second engagement on student accommodation in the following term, bringing together the Department, the NSFAS, the Competition Commission, Infrastructure South Africa (ISA), Universities South Africa (USAf)), relevant Chapter Nine institutions, and other stakeholders to address the regulatory, pricing, and infrastructure dimensions of the crisis comprehensively. It warned that without intervention, the NSFAS budget, which currently funded approximately 800 000 students at R53 billion, would fund significantly fewer students within five years despite real-term increases in appropriations, as accommodation costs continued to absorb a disproportionate share of available funding. Written questions would be submitted to UCT on accommodation cost breakdowns, academic success rates, transformation pipeline data, and the foreign national workforce, with a response period of more than fourteen days.

Meeting report

Opening Remarks by the Chairperson

The Chairperson welcomed everyone present and announced that the purpose of the meeting was to engage with the University of Cape Town (UCT) and its stakeholders regarding governance, administration, financial matters, and other related issues. He noted that there was a social cluster engagement at the National Assembly from 3 p.m. and therefore emphasised that the day’s engagement needed to be succinct, efficient, and direct in both questions and responses.

The Committee also welcomed representatives from the Russian Consulate responsible for Education. The Chairperson noted that he had met with the Consul-General and representatives of the Consulate the previous day, during which they had discussed a number of progressive views. He therefore invited them to attend the engagement as observers.

He explained that the importance of bringing all stakeholders together in a single engagement was to ensure that the Committee obtained a comprehensive picture and overall perspective of the functioning of the institution. He stated that the Committee wanted to see the Post-School Education and Training (PSET) system remain stable and universities continue to progress effectively. He further noted that he had submitted a motion in Parliament the previous day, recognising Wits University’s achievement of being ranked number one on the Centre for World University Rankings (CWUR). While Wits had often acknowledged that UCT held an advantage and was ranked among the top 1% of universities globally and first in Africa, he felt it was equally important to highlight Wits University’s accomplishment. He added that, as Parliament had previously celebrated UCT’s achievements in other rankings, it was appropriate to recognise this achievement as well.

The Chairperson expressed the hope that the engagement would be fruitful and urged all parties to work together wherever gaps existed. He noted that UCT’s Vice-Chancellor (VC) had recently appeared before Parliament through USAf. He cautioned that no university would be able to survive for more than five years if the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) were to collapse and stressed that it was the collective responsibility of all stakeholders to work with NSFAS to ensure that its governance instability was resolved. He explained that NSFAS beneficiaries often complained that they were unable to register because of outstanding NSFAS payments. However, when Members followed up on such cases, NSFAS would sometimes indicate that UCT had not provided the necessary registration data, preventing NSFAS from confirming which students were eligible for payment. He further warned that if NSFAS were to collapse in July, universities would be unable by September to pay salaries or employ staff to administer examinations. For this reason, he emphasised the need for all parties to work together to find solutions for the sector.

Referring to a statement issued the previous day, the Chairperson noted that the Services Sector Education and Training Authority (SETA) had confirmed bursary funding amounting to R520 million in partnership with USAf. He stated that this was the type of initiative the Committee wished to see, as it represented a progressive development which the Committee welcomed. He also appealed to USAf to ensure that the funds were administered effectively so that affected students, particularly those on the verge of writing examinations, would not be disadvantaged.

Apologies and introductions

The Chairperson acknowledged apologies and allowed everyone present to introduce themselves. He then invited the Deputy Minister of Higher Education and Training, Ms Nomusa Dube-Ncube, to deliver her introductory remarks.

Opening remarks by the Deputy Minister

Deputy Minister Dube-Ncube opened by noting that UCT remained one of South Africa’s leading institutions of higher education, ranked first in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Sub-Saharan Africa rankings for 2026, with continued strength in academic reputation, employer reputation and sustainability. She indicated that the Department monitored governance, financial sustainability, compliance and transformation across the post-school education and training sector, including at UCT.

She described UCT as a functional and stable institution from a governance perspective. Prof Mosa Moshabela was appointed Vice-Chancellor and Principal with effect from October 2024, following due institutional process, contributing to continuity in leadership. UCT had five ministerial appointees serving on its Council for the period 2024 to 2028, reflecting the required demographic diversity and representativity across race and gender. The Department had received no reports of significant governance instability during the 2025 academic year to date.

On compliance, UCT had submitted its 2024 annual report and financial statements within prescribed timeframes. The institution received an unqualified audit opinion with findings, those findings relating primarily to instances where staff members had failed to declare conflicts of interest prior to the university procuring goods or services from entities in which they held an interest. The Deputy Minister noted that this constituted non-compliance with section 34 of the Higher Education Act and reflected weaknesses in internal controls and in the implementation of the university’s own conflict of interest policies.

On finances, UCT had generated a total surplus of R852 million in 2024, compared to R1.39 billion in 2020, with the decline partly attributable to fair value losses on financial instruments. Key pressures included lower-than-expected tuition fee increases, declining government appropriations, rising personnel costs, increased expected credit losses, and broader inflationary conditions. Personnel expenditure accounted for approximately 50% of total income, and student debt stood at R836 million in 2024, with impaired debt having increased substantially. UCT nonetheless continued to maintain substantial income from state subsidies, tuition and accommodation fees, and third-stream activities.

The Deputy Minister noted that the Institutional Forum (IF) continued to play an important advisory and oversight role, including over senior executive appointments and structures focused on transformation, inclusion, diversity and employment equity. She identified transformation as a strategic imperative and indicated that the Department expected UCT to demonstrate rigorous and sustained attention in this regard.

She advised that the Department was aware of disputes arising from the decommissioning of the Philip Kgosana residence and subsequent eviction proceedings involving former students, which had evolved into court proceedings raising concerns about compliance with the Prevention of Illegal Eviction Act. She encouraged all institutional bodies to handle student accommodation matters with the sensitivity and fairness the law required.

The Deputy Minister also raised the issue of students being withheld from graduating on account of outstanding debt. She recalled that at a prior engagement convened by the Minister, VCs and Registrars had committed, including through USAf, that institutions would not prevent students from graduating where debt was owed, but would withhold the certificate only. She noted that UCT’s reported practice appeared inconsistent with that commitment and indicated that the Department intended to pursue the matter with all relevant stakeholders.

In conclusion, the Deputy Minister stated that while compliance and financial pressures required ongoing attention, the Department regarded UCT as a functional institution with generally stable governance structures, and would continue to engage with the institution to strengthen its compliance, governance, financial sustainability and transformation.

Briefing: UCT Management

UCT’s unaudited financial results for the year ended 31 December 2025 showed that total revenue amounted to R9.15 billion, representing an increase of 5.4% compared with 2024, while the net surplus stood at R1.35 billion, reflecting a 59% improvement on the R852 million recorded in 2024. Total assets were reported at R19.34 billion, including investments valued at R11.79 billion and a bank balance of R2.20 billion. Despite this apparent financial recovery, student debt remained a significant structural concern. Gross student fees receivable reached R1.007 billion at year-end, with an expected credit loss provision of R465.9 million, representing 46% of gross receivables. More than 13,000 student accounts carried debit balances. It was further reported that the NSFAS accommodation cap had materially exacerbated the situation. Between 2023 and 2026, the cumulative net debt arising directly from the cap shortfall amounted to R537.4 million, while 3,465 NSFAS-funded students owed UCT accommodation balances in 2026 alone.

On student funding, UCT highlighted a critical structural risk. The number of NSFAS first-time entering students (FTENS) declined significantly from 1 431 in 2025 to 834 in 2026, with no confirmed NSFAS funding policy in place at the start of the academic year. The total number of funded students was 237 below budget. UCT reported that it accommodated more than a third of its student population across 8 765 managed beds, with monthly rates in university residences ranging from R6 199 to R10 217, substantially above the NSFAS accommodation cap. By comparison, private accommodation providers in the Cape Town market charged up to R16 773 per month, further illustrating the inadequacy of a nationally averaged cap applied within a city characterised by a broad-market rental environment.

UCT reported that its research output remained globally competitive. Total external research income in 2025 amounted to R2.33 billion, while 1,843 contracts were signed with a combined value of R2.752 billion. The institution filed 47 patents during 2025 and held equity in spin-off companies valued at approximately R445.8 million. UCT was ranked 150th globally in the QS rankings, 164th in the Times Higher Education rankings, and first in Africa across all major ranking systems. International research collaboration had increased by 75.9% since 2014 and accounted for 63.1% of publication output. However, the institution identified a significant risk arising from its heavy reliance on international funders, particularly the concentration of funding from the United States, alongside declining support from national agencies and industry.

On gender-based violence (GBV), UCT reported 94 incidents through trauma-informed informal pathways in 2024 and 87 in 2025, while on-campus incidents increased from 41 to 51 over the same period. Formal complaints referred to the Special Tribunal totalled 13 in 2024 and 15 in 2025, covering allegations of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and discrimination based on sexual orientation. UCT indicated that it operated a 24-hour GBV hotline, implemented a survivor-centred Sexual Misconduct Policy, maintained a dedicated Special Tribunal aligned with the DHET National Policy Framework, and supported a network of 3 000 Gender Marshals and 400 First Responders. Concerning broader campus security, the institution reported that total incidents declined from 295 in 2024 to 205 in 2025, although theft remained the most prevalent category, accounting for 132 incidents.

See attached for full presentation

Student Representative Council

The SRC stated that its presentation focused primarily on the NSFAS accommodation cap, which it described as the most significant challenge facing UCT students. It traced the origins of the crisis to the 2017 presidential announcement of fully subsidised free higher education, under which accommodation was intended to be covered through government grants rather than loans. The SRC explained that, in 2023, NSFAS introduced a cap on accommodation allowances based on a World Bank study, applying a national average of approximately R5,500 per month without taking into account regional variations, the Cape Town private housing market in which UCT students competed, or the reality that existing accommodation providers could not reduce rates to cap levels without experiencing reductions of up to 50% in per-student revenue. It noted that neither universities nor private landlords had reduced their prices as a result of the cap and that accommodation costs had continued to increase.

The SRC stated that the consequences had been severe. It reported that NSFAS-funded students were unable to attend graduation ceremonies because of outstanding debt arising from the shortfall between the accommodation cap and actual accommodation costs. It further noted that registration concessions during the year had been restricted to NSFAS-funded, NSFAS loan-funded, and bursary-funded students, while the broader concessions previously extended to self-funded students and those whose debt had been partially reduced were no longer available. As evidence of the growing hardship experienced by students, the SRC submitted a series of Back-a-Buddy crowdfunding campaigns, which it said demonstrated that students were being compelled to publicly advertise their financial difficulties in order to remain enrolled.

On transformation, the SRC noted that no persons living with disabilities occupied any of UCT’s 22 senior management positions and that none of the 18 staff members with disabilities classified as professionally qualified or middle management were Black. It argued that this highlighted the intersectional nature of the transformation challenges that remained. The SRC further noted that UCT’s position on Gaza had resulted in the withdrawal of certain donors and bursary providers, which had negatively affected student funding. It also indicated that GBV remained a persistent threat to student safety.

The SRC called on the Committee to exempt all university-owned residences from the accommodation cap, review the cap to better reflect regional market rates, and introduce alternative regulatory mechanisms that would prevent students from accumulating debt as a result of disputes between NSFAS and accommodation providers.

See attached for full presentation

Institutional Forum

The IF presented an overview of its mandate and current activities, drawing on its statutory foundation under section 31 of the Higher Education Act and the UCT Institutional Statute of 2022. It explained that its role was proactive rather than reactive, requiring it to identify policy gaps and concerns relating to institutional culture on its own initiative. The Forum further noted that Council was obliged to provide written reasons within seven days whenever it rejected the Forum’s advice. It reported that, in 2025, Council approved revised Terms of Reference which strengthened the Forum’s proactive mandate, tightened reporting lines, and made provision for the removal of inactive members.

With regard to senior management, the Forum noted that eight significant leadership positions had been filled over the previous two years, including those of the VC and two Deputy VCs, which contributed to greater leadership stability. It highlighted ongoing work undertaken through its Employment Equity Forum substructure, including oversight of the Employment Equity Plan and the incorporation of a new Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) into recruitment and selection policies. The Forum further reported that the Transformation Forum had endorsed the Gender Equity Policy and initiated a review of the Anti-Racism Policy, which was expected to lead to the development of a broader framework for discrimination and harassment.

The Forum identified a number of persistent institutional culture concerns, including the recurring pattern of fee-related student protests at the beginning of each academic year, growing concerns regarding GBV among students, and inadequate accessibility and support for staff and students living with disabilities. It acknowledged that a Culture Change Programme was underway, incorporating unconscious bias training, peer support initiatives for racial trauma, and anti-racism education.

The Forum’s recommendations to the Department included the development of a sustainable NSFAS funding model and a review of the accommodation cap. Its recommendations to university management included expanding disability inclusion initiatives, increasing mental health support, and strengthening mechanisms for monitoring transformation.

See attached for full presentation

Organised Labour Unions

The three PASS staff unions presented what they described as a picture of a fundamentally broken relationship with UCT management, characterised by a consistent pattern of agreements being concluded and subsequently disregarded. They stated that a collective agreement signed on 27 February 2026 had been reversed on two key provisions shortly thereafter: that executive-level participation in bargaining had occurred only once and was never repeated, and that more than 15 issues raised during a post-bargaining review meeting had not received any feedback. The unions further noted that the mandatory quarterly consultation meetings required under the Collective Bargaining Agreement had not taken place at any point during 2026.

The unions identified the absence of a promotion policy for PASS staff as a critical equity concern. They explained that, while academic staff benefited from a structured Ad Hominem promotion pathway that allowed advancement without requiring them to vacate their existing posts, PASS staff had no equivalent mechanism. They noted that UCT’s Employment Equity Plan, dated October 2022, had identified this gap as an employment equity barrier, yet no policy had been developed four years later. The unions further stated that a formal six-month ultimatum issued in August 2025, warning that continued inaction would amount to an unfair labour practice, had been ignored.

The unions also raised concerns regarding the exclusion of union representatives from UCT Council. They noted that, despite a previous directive from the Portfolio Committee requiring management to engage with unions on the matter, the Chairperson of Council had not taken any action. On remuneration, they argued that PASS staff were benchmarked against the national all-jobs market at the 60th percentile, whereas academic staff were benchmarked against their specific labour market at the 75th percentile, thereby entrenching a two-tier compensation structure within the same institution.

The unions called on management to include the Executive Director of Human Resources as a permanent member of the bargaining team, reinstate biannual information sessions with the university executive, and resolve outstanding Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) referrals internally. They further called on the Committee to urgently address the NSFAS funding crisis, which they described as posing a direct threat to the stability of students, staff, and public institutions.

[See presentations for full details]

Consideration and adoption of minutes and UWC Oversight Visit Report

Consideration and adoption of outstanding committee minutes and the University of the Western Cape (UWC) Oversight Report

Mr S Lonzi (EFF) noted that on 30 April, when they were engaging on vacancies in the sector, they spoke about the National Skills Fund (NSF), and the DG’s response was that they had asked for more material and that he would revert to the Committee. This was not reflected in the minutes.

At the 29 May meeting with the Minister, it was correct that a meeting would be held to discuss the conflicting versions of the Board members and the Minister’s versions. The Committee had not had time for that engagement.

For the 27 May meeting, with USaF and the South African College Principals Organisation (SAPCO), Members had asked for additional information from the remaining 30 TVET colleges that had not submitted statistics about their student debt. Disaggregated information was also requested to break the student debt information down accordingly.

With the note of these issues, he would happily move for adoption.

Dr D Christians (DA) also commented on the 29th of May meeting, indicating that she had submitted her corrections via the WhatsApp group, with the following amendments: NSFAS CEO position, concerns about NSFAS being placed under administration for the third term, and issues related to governance disputes. She had no issues with the adoption of the minutes granted the minor grammatical errors were also rectified.

Ms K Khakhau (DA) stated that she did not appreciate looking clumsy in front of visitors and had asked previously that the Committee deal with housekeeping matters privately to avoid these minor issues being discussed in front of guests. She noted that there was one thing missing, which was the inputs made by Members on the NSFAS comprehensive funding model and what it must look like. She acknowledged that the Committee had not yet agreed as a collective on the final model, but each party’s input must be recorded accordingly. Their inputs could be tagged under each Member’s inputs as separate inputs from resolutions. She felt this part was missing, especially the part relating to the decentralisation of administrative functions to institutions and National Treasury to disburse the NSFAS funds.

The minutes were adopted, with the corrections noted.

The Chairperson noted the draft oversight report of the Committee to the University of Western Cape, tabling it before Members to correct and adopt it.

The report was adopted. See full report here https://pmg.org.za/tabled-committee-report/6683/

Discussion

Ms Khakhau extended her deepest condolences to the university community, the family, loved ones, and friends of the late Mlingani ‘Mli’ Matiwane. She spoke warmly of Mli, recalling him as a very vibrant “shutdownist”. She said she was saddened when she spoke to his husband and had shared her last memories at the same time. She recalled that after the elections, where she had been dubbed president, they could not believe it, having spent two years shutting down the institutional mandate. She remembered a conversation she had had with Mli, noting that while he had been clear about his politics, he had always been a warm person, committed to self-identification at all costs and an advocate of simply being a human being and being the best one could be. She expressed the hope that Mli’s soul would rest in peace and that comfort would be found in knowing that, at least at UCT, there was much that could be pointed to as Mli’s contribution, not only at UCT but in his communities.

She then proposed that the Committee deal first with the matter before it. She asked the Chair of Council to take the Committee through the Council resolution to boycott Israel, what had informed it, and how it had come about.

Adv Norman Arendse, Chair of Council, UCT, said that the resolution had its origins in a resolution adopted in the Senate. He noted that he was not sure the resolution explicitly spoke to a boycott of Israel.

Ms Khakhau asked what his understanding of the resolution was.

Adv Arendse said the resolution spoke to collaborating with Israeli tertiary institutions that were either actively supporting or complicit in supporting the IDF in its war on Gaza. He added that, to the extent that some academics might also have a relationship with those institutions, that too fell within the scope of the resolution. He stated for the record that, as he understood it, the resolution had in fact not been implemented. He noted that the VC was present and that, while Council adopted resolutions, implementation was left to the executive, and a committee in the Senate had been appointed to look into the implementation. He said that was how the resolution had come to the Council. The issue was debated by Council, and all relevant factors were considered, including a loss or potential loss of donor funding. The resolution was adopted on the 22nd of June 2024, following a debate and a vote conducted by a secret ballot.

Ms Khakhau said she was satisfied with the response to the effect that implementation was nowhere near commencement. However, her concern was that students had raised that the university had lost funding from particular donors and that students had been disadvantaged as a result. She said where she was stuck was in understanding the relationship between the resolution, its inaction, and the loss of donor funding. She noted that she respected fully and without question the rights of individuals to associate as they wished, and that she appreciated the intellectual contribution of UCT and its academics to domestic and international discourses. Her problem, however, was with an institution making decisions that would have a negative, direct impact on students’ ability to access academic freedom and to exit an academic institution without impediment. She directed her question to the VC and asked for a full account.

Prof Musa Moshabela, VC, UCT, confirmed that there had indeed been an impact on student funding, as some donors held strong views regarding the position the university had taken. He noted that UCT was historically a place of contestation, with its donor and alumni community sometimes aligned with opposing sides of the Israel-Palestine question. As a result, funding for students had been lost, and the impact had been real. He said those were matters that, as the Chairperson of Council had indicated, had been discussed at the time the resolutions were debated, but the impact had been severe. Council had mandated management to assess the impact, which management had done and reported back to Council. The task given to management was to indicate what the impact had been on student funding. He said the university had lost approximately R200 million that was designated for an institute for neuroscience at UCT, and a further R50 million in total from various donors.

Ms Khakhau called a member of the public in the gallery to order in the absence of the Chairperson, noting that it was not the gallery’s meeting and that anyone requiring more information needed to conduct themselves in an orderly manner.

She confirmed that the figures cited were R200 million for the neuroscience institute and a further R50 million and asked the VC to continue.

Prof Moshabela confirmed that the R50 million had come from various donors, and that a large portion of that, approximately R15 million annually, had been for student bursaries. He said all of that had been lost in terms of new funding. He noted that affected donors had continued to fund students already in committed cohorts but had chosen to do so directly rather than through the institution, and had not taken on new students.

Ms Khakhau asked how many students had been affected by the loss of those funds.

Prof Moshabela said he did not have the exact number at hand but undertook to provide it. He noted that the calculation would need to account not only for those funded by the particular donor in question but for others as well.

Ms Khakhau said that was a problem for her. She said the primary responsibility of the institution was to ensure that students entered, studied, graduated, obtained employment, grew the economy, and lived their best lives, including being able to afford cars, pay lobola, and buy homes. She said that was the institution’s job and that no decision could sideline that fact. The institution had a greater responsibility to advance the academic project of South African students than to take a position on what was happening in Gaza. She acknowledged that academic reflection was part of the institutional mandate and that individuals had the right to protest but said none of that could stand between a South African child, particularly a poor South African child dependent on funding, and their ability to access education.

Mr S Lonzi (EFF) rose on a point of order. He said, with the greatest respect, that what had been presented was a total distortion of global solidarity. He pointed to the history of South Africa and noted that part of what had assisted in defeating apartheid was global solidarity, including from universities in America, Germany, and the United Kingdom. It would be unfair to the university to suggest that by demonstrating global solidarity it was reducing its mandate of serving students. He said that was incorrect and a distortion and felt he had to make that point.

The Chairperson said that to be fair to the university, it had not been management that had taken the decision but the Council. He noted that the university’s statement, for those who had read it, had been mostly about the destruction of institutions of higher learning in Gaza and the killing of teachers and lecturers. He said that was what the institution had been responding to, and the statement was publicly available. He said he did not think it was appropriate for Parliament, which had itself gone to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against genocide, to then vilify the Council’s resolution as an act of international solidarity. He said that the posture was not correct for Parliament to adopt, and while different political views could be expressed in political forums, Members should be mindful of what message was being sent to South Africans in a democratic house. He suggested the Committee refrain from entering that space, noting it was a dangerous one, and said it was not fair to imply the university had neglected its academic mandate simply because it had taken a position on international solidarity.

Ms Khakhau said she did not know where the culture of requiring all Members to agree had come from. She said Members did not generally agree, and it would not start today, that a point of order was raised simply because a Member held and presented a different view, because the same could just as easily be done in return.

She said the bottom line was that she fully respected UCT as an academic institution with the African and global intellectual standing it commanded, and she had no problem with that. She equally respected the human rights of each and every individual student and staff member. Her problem, however, was that under no circumstance could solidarity with any cause cost a South African child their ability to study. She said the primary mandate of UCT was not the production of papers or alignment with any discourse but ensuring that a South African student could present themselves at the institution, study, and that everything in the institution’s power was done to protect that student’s ability to do so. She said that where a decision threatened the funders of a student, the institution had a responsibility as the responsible adult to balance the political equation with its core mandate of funding students, and that was the area in which she believed the Chair of Council could have done more work.

She then moved to the issue of the student accommodation cap, noting that she had only two minutes remaining, and that was the reason she had asked for more time. She said she and the Deputy Minister disagreed on the matter, as did she and the ANC. She said since the previous administration had used the example of the university she had studied at, making the point that accommodation in Rondebosch, Claremont, and the CBD could never be equivalent to accommodation in Bloemfontein because of the cost of living in different metros, it made no sense for the Department to force property owners to service bonds at a rate lower than what they were being charged. She said when a property owner approached ABSA for a home loan, ABSA determined the repayment amount, and rental pricing was necessarily based on that repayment obligation. She noted that was only one factor, leaving aside municipal rates and other considerations, and said there were further points she had wished to raise, but time did not allow.

The Chairperson said the issue of the accommodation cap would enter that path. He said that even when comparing Cape Town to Cape Town, the cap did not make sense. He said that in 2023, when he was part of the Committee, they had raised the matter of the UCT student accommodation in Observatory and the student accommodation of CPUT at the time, which were in literally the same suburb. He said that the Committee had gone there and did not speak from reading things in newspapers, and noted that Mr Lonzi had made the same example two weeks prior, and hoped the university would obtain those names. He said the point was valid: if one was paying the same rate, one could not have a UCT residence charging R9 000 when the one opposite was charging R6 000.

The Chairperson referred to a slide presented by UCT and noted that less than 2.5% of the total budget was allocated to student life, amounting to R21 million out of approximately R900 million. He stated that the argument being advanced was that residences might appear similar, be located in the same area, and charge comparable rates, but that the distinguishing factor was student life. He said he had waited to hear the presentation on this issue and noted that the information presented showed that only R21 million, or 2.5% of the budget, was allocated to student life. He questioned the source of that allocation.

He stated that Members of the Committee met with students in their communities, churches, and other establishments, and that some Members even conducted observations at night as part of their research into the behaviour of young people, including patterns of behaviour following alcohol consumption. He argued that prices in those environments had become excessive because some of the university’s representatives required establishments to stock energy drinks and cold drinks in order to obtain accreditation, which in turn had financial implications.

The Chairperson expressed disappointment that the students present had not raised the issue that, according to UCT’s presentation, approximately R2 billion was received from government subsidies. He noted that the government was subsidising education at UCT to the value of more than R2 billion, yet no one had questioned why such subsidies were being provided while certain individuals within the system were simultaneously arguing that accommodation should not be subject to a cap and that rates of R16 000 per bed should be charged. He maintained that even accommodation charges of R7 000 or R9 000 per month were unacceptable because education, as a social good, was being treated as a commodity.

He stated that he could personally take the university to some of its accommodation facilities and demonstrate that the cost per square metre was lower for individuals working in nearby commercial premises than for students occupying university accommodation. He said that the rationale for student accommodation was well established, as statistics consistently showed that students residing in student accommodation completed their studies more successfully and within shorter timeframes than those who did not. He explained that a student from Gugulethu who slept in a dining room because of overcrowding at home did not have a conducive environment for studying, whereas student accommodation was intended to provide such an environment. Instead, he argued, accommodation costs had become excessively high.

He further stated that UCT-owned buildings listed under Public Works and government ownership, which he would have expected to be among the least expensive accommodation options. However, he argued that this was not the case because the institution sought to treat accommodation as a commodity. He contended that, while the prevailing argument was that the NSFAS accommodation cap was harming the sector, the reality was that accommodation was increasingly becoming accessible only to wealthier students, resulting in the effective exclusion of poor students. He noted that the government was willing to fund tuition and accommodation at a specified level while continuing to subsidise higher education, yet UCT appeared to be arguing that although the government could provide subsidies, it could not influence accommodation pricing. He questioned what exactly the government was subsidising under such circumstances. He indicated that the Committee would engage the university frankly on the matter, as it appeared that the Committee and the institution were approaching the issue from fundamentally different perspectives.

He concluded by stating that the issue of the accommodation cap remained unresolved and that he still had questions for Prof Ramugondo.

Mr M Msezane (MKP) apologised for his late arrival, attributing the delay to Cape Town traffic. He stated that he would endeavour to be concise given the limited time available.

His first question was directed to the Deputy VC: Academic and the VC. He noted that, in UCT’s presentation, the success rate of undergraduate students, particularly African students, was substantially lower than that of all other racial groups. He further observed that there had been a marked decline in 2021, followed by a slight improvement in 2022, although performance levels remained relatively low. He asked what factors accounted for the lower success rate among African students and what measures had been implemented to address the issue, particularly within the context of the university’s transformation agenda.

Prof Brandon Collier-Reed, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Teaching and Learning, responded by acknowledging the decline identified by the Member and explained that UCT had referred to it as the “post-COVID dip”. He stated that in 2021 the difference in overall undergraduate course pass rates between the combined African, Coloured and Indian student grouping and white students had been 15%, whereas by 2025 the gap had narrowed to 7%, reflecting a significant improvement. He added that pass rates within the African, Coloured and Indian grouping had increased by 12% between 2021 and 2025, reaching 89%.

Mr Msezane interjected, stating that his question had been specific and that the response had moved beyond the issue he had raised. He noted that his concern was not with broader trends but with the reasons for the lower performance of African students and the measures taken to address that challenge. He stated that the graph clearly showed African students performing below all other groups and questioned whether the university’s transformation agenda adequately addressed that reality. He requested a more direct response so that he could proceed to his remaining questions.

Prof Collier-Reed explained that, following the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall protests, UCT had established a curriculum change working group between 2017 and 2018 and developed a deliberate strategy aimed at addressing the very issues raised by the Member. As part of UCT’s Vision 2030 agenda, substantial funding had been allocated to faculties to identify and implement interventions that would improve student success, particularly among African students. He requested the Member’s indulgence to provide examples of initiatives that had proved effective.

He cited the Commerce Faculty, where one of the challenges had been students entering quantitative courses without adequate preparation. To address this, UCT had developed a self-assessment tool to assist students in determining whether they possessed the necessary foundations to succeed. He also referred to the Civil Engineering programme, where a comprehensive curriculum redesign had introduced locally relevant examples and project-based learning to improve student outcomes.

Prof Collier-Reed further highlighted two initiatives within the Humanities Faculty. The first involved the integration of pedagogically enriched and decolonial first-year courses directly into departmental curricula. These courses were designed to engage students’ diverse life experiences, foreground African contexts, strengthen academic literacies, and incorporate multilingual and digital pedagogies. He stated that such interventions were intended to improve the success rates of all students, particularly African students who had historically experienced lower success rates than their white counterparts. He nevertheless reiterated that the performance gap had narrowed significantly between 2021 and 2024, as reflected in the data presented.

Mr Msezane stated that he remained unconvinced by the explanation provided. He observed that the Deputy VC had referred to curriculum design and questioned whether this implied that African students were less able to comprehend the curriculum than their white counterparts. He reiterated that he wished to understand the root causes of the lower performance levels and the interventions implemented to address them. He maintained that the explanation had not sufficiently answered his question and stated that, given more time, he would have explored the issue further.

He further noted that while reference had been made to a post-COVID dip in 2021, the graph appeared to show an improvement in the success rate of African students in 2020. He emphasised that, despite the explanations provided, African students continued to perform below all other racial groups at the institution. He placed on record that he was not persuaded by the response and suggested that the university submit a written explanation to the Portfolio Committee outlining both the causes of the lower success rates and the measures taken to address them. He stated that he was particularly interested in understanding why African students were not progressing beyond a certain point and observed that lower success rates implied that students were either not graduating or not graduating within the expected timeframe. He added that the discussion on curriculum had diverted attention from his central concern and requested, through the Chairperson, that the university provide a written response detailing the causes of the challenge and the interventions implemented to ensure that African students successfully completed their studies.

Mr Msezane then turned to the issue of foreign nationals, which he described as a topical and significant matter. Referring to the presentation on foreign national professionals, he stated that it had been indicated that foreign nationals employed by the university were providing scarce skills in accordance with legislative requirements. He requested that the presenter, or another appropriate official, place on record that all foreign national academic staff employed by UCT were providing scarce skills. He further stated that the Committee would subsequently require a detailed breakdown of the work being performed by those individuals, confirmation that such work constituted scarce skills, and verification that the individuals concerned held valid work visas.

Prof Moshabela responded that UCT would place the requested information on record and provide the necessary details. He confirmed that his understanding of the request was that the university should formally confirm that the foreign national academics employed by UCT were providing scarce skills.

Mr Msezane confirmed that he wanted all such staff members to be accounted for.

The Chairperson observed that the issue was not only whether foreign nationals employed by UCT were providing scarce skills, but also whether all of them appeared on the critical skills list and possessed valid work visas. He noted that there were nearly 900 foreign nationals employed at the institution.

Prof Moshabela stated that he would request the Executive Director of Human Resources to address the matter, although he had initially understood the Member’s question to be a request for confirmation of what had been presented, with supporting details to follow.

Ms Juliet Mhango, Executive Director: Human Resources (EDHR), UCT, acknowledged the request for further information regarding academic staff. She explained that the majority of PASS staff were South African citizens. Concerning foreign nationals, she stated that UCT maintained its own scarce and critical skills list and confirmed that some PASS staff members fell within those categories. She acknowledged, however, that historical issues existed and that a small proportion of staff members did not appear on the scarce and critical skills list. She added that a plan was in place to address the matter.

Mr Msezane responded that he had listened carefully to the presentation and recalled that Ms Mhango had stated that foreign national academic staff were providing scarce skills. He explained that this was why he had directed his question to the VC, seeking confirmation on record that the academic staff concerned were indeed providing scarce skills. He further stated that the university should then provide the Committee with a breakdown of the number of such staff members, the nature of the work they performed, the basis upon which that work was classified as scarce skills, and confirmation of their verified work visas. He argued that the Executive Director was now presenting a different position from that contained in the original presentation and maintained that her response did not reflect what had previously been conveyed to the Committee.

The Chairperson stated that the VC had indicated that all academic staff who were foreign nationals were providing scarce skills and that he had subsequently broadened the question to encompass all foreign nationals employed by the university. He noted that the EDHR had responded to that broader question and had indicated at the outset of her response that all academic staff were on the critical skills list. He added that he had then sought clarification as to whether this also applied to PASS staff, to which the EDHR had responded that only a small proportion were not on the list and that this was a legacy or historical matter rather than a recent development. He therefore considered the question regarding academic staff to have been answered. What remained outstanding, however, was whether those individuals on the critical skills list held legitimate work visas and valid documentation. He invited either the EDHR or the VC to address that issue.

Ms Mhango responded that, with regard to the legitimacy of employment in South Africa, UCT ensured that all employees held valid documentation and work permits permitting them to work legally in the country. She explained that where a work visa expired, the matter was managed on an individual basis. She emphasised that the institution’s policy required all employees to possess valid documentation and reiterated that any expired permits were dealt with through established processes. She noted that such cases were very limited in number, currently amounting to approximately two instances, and maintained that, overall, all employees at the institution held valid work permits.

Mr Msezane thanked the EDHR for the response. He explained that the clarification he had been seeking related specifically to the information originally presented and not to the broader question raised by the Chairperson. He noted that the issue of legacy cases had not been mentioned during the presentation and stated that he was now satisfied that he had the necessary clarity. He added that the Committee would await the written report.

Mr Msezane further expressed concern that the SRC had not addressed a number of sensitive and topical issues affecting the university, particularly the success rate of African undergraduate students. He requested a response from the SRC Secretary-General regarding what he regarded as a contentious issue, namely why the SRC was advocating for university-owned residences to be exempted from the NSFAS accommodation cap.

Mr Percival Mabuza, SRC Secretary-General, explained that the position stemmed from considerations relating to residences such as St Peter’s and, possibly, Rochester. He stated that the SRC had examined these matters and noted that accommodation at St. Peter’s currently cost in excess of R70 000 despite consisting of shared rooms, unlike Observatory Square, which provided single-room accommodation. He said the SRC had taken these factors into account and had concluded that an approach was needed that would not disadvantage students. For that reason, it maintained that university-owned residences should be exempted from the cap. He added that where accommodation providers were inflating prices, the Department, the Portfolio Committee, or NSFAS should hold them accountable. He noted that NSFAS had previously threatened to refer certain providers to the Competition Commission in 2023, a stance supported by the SRC. He stated that the SRC’s objective was to ensure that students did not incur accommodation-related shortfalls, were able to register, and could proceed to postgraduate studies without financial impediments.

Mr Msezane indicated that, given the time constraints, he would confine himself to one final point. He asked the official responsible for accommodation whether the university, when leasing accommodation, determined the contractual terms and pricing conditions applicable to private providers. He questioned why the university did not require providers, through its contracts and invitations to tender, to ensure that accommodation costs remained within the NSFAS cap. He stated that the Committee should not be told that accommodation would not be available under such conditions, as there were numerous vacant buildings seeking student tenants. He argued that the university was in a position to shape the conditions of its contracts and expressions of interest to ensure compliance with the NSFAS accommodation cap.

Prof Elelwani Ramugondo, Deputy VC: People, Culture and Society, began by apologising for having shaken her head during the discussion.

The Chairperson remarked that he had noticed the gesture but had not heard the accompanying comment.

Prof Ramugondo explained that the discussion had been passionate, particularly the suggestion that UCT was responsible for manufacturing accommodation costs, which she regarded as a serious allegation. She stated that she had also heard suggestions that UCT charged students solely for a bed, whereas her presentation had sought to demonstrate that student success could not be supported if student accommodation was viewed merely as sleeping space. She stressed that UCT fully agreed with the SRC that accommodation providers who inflated prices should be held accountable.

She stated that comparisons between residences needed to be made on a like-for-like basis and noted that not all universities offered what UCT provided through its all-inclusive residence fee structure. She explained that students at other institutions sometimes only became aware of additional costs, such as Wi-Fi charges, after arriving at their residences. She further noted that UCT had become aware that some universities cross-subsidised their residences and that it was therefore insufficient to compare residences located solely within the same suburb. Universities with residences concentrated in a single area, she argued, could not cross-subsidise costs from residences located in more affordable areas.

Addressing the R21 million allocation for student life, Prof Ramugondo explained that this amount was managed directly by students and reflected UCT’s commitment to student leadership and budget management. She noted that UCT’s residence culture differed from institutions where social events were centred on extended entertainment activities, as students and residence committees deliberately curated activities that balanced social engagement with academic and residential objectives. She stated that the student life allocation would effectively amount to nothing without staff support and that a substantial proportion of residence expenditure was directed towards staff who assisted students with budgeting, mentorship, and related support. She added that UCT’s insourcing model also required investment in staff development and argued that proposals to reduce costs to the bare minimum would, in practice, require the removal of staff who played a critical role in supporting students and advancing the academic project.

Turning to leased accommodation, Prof Ramugondo stated that such accommodation represented only a small proportion of UCT’s overall accommodation portfolio and that, if it were possible, the university would prefer not to lease accommodation at all. She noted that UCT operated two residences under Public Works and three within leased private accommodation. Private providers, she explained, necessarily considered prevailing market conditions and the pricing structures of other providers in order to remain commercially viable. She further noted that one leased residence was currently operating below full occupancy because students retained the freedom to choose their accommodation, and UCT would not interfere with that choice. She stated that the university was required to enter into commercially viable agreements with private providers and that its primary concern during the contracting process was to ensure that minimum standards, including Wi-Fi access, were maintained.

The Chairperson responded that the Deputy VC appeared to be suggesting that other institutions did not provide the services UCT considered exceptional. He observed that student accommodation providers were generally required to provide security, Wi-Fi, and other basic services and that these were standard features across the sector. Drawing on his own experience in student residences, including at UKZN’s Pius Langa Residence, he noted that residence assistants, security personnel, and similar support structures had long been standard features. He therefore stated that he had not heard any justification for the significantly higher costs associated with UCT accommodation.

He further argued that the Deputy VC appeared to be suggesting that UCT advertised accommodation but did not determine pricing, and that accommodation costs had to remain competitive with the broader market. Referring back to Mr Msezane’s question, he asked why UCT did not specify in its accreditation advertisements and calls for accommodation providers that accommodation intended for NSFAS-funded students had to comply with the NSFAS accommodation rate. He argued that if the university genuinely cared about the financial burden faced by NSFAS students, it could have imposed such a requirement.

The Chairperson emphasised that NSFAS-funded students were individuals whom government had identified as requiring support because their families lacked the financial means to cover higher education costs. He noted that government funded their tuition, accommodation, personal care allowances, and living expenses. He stated that many such students arrived from places such as Bloemfontein, the Northern Cape, Soweto, and other parts of the country with no alternative accommodation options and therefore occupied expensive accommodation out of necessity rather than choice. He argued that it was unfair to attribute responsibility for those circumstances to the students themselves.

He reiterated that the key issue was why UCT, when advertising leased accommodation opportunities, did not stipulate that accommodation costs must remain within the NSFAS cap while the dispute between NSFAS, the Department, and the university remained unresolved. He stated that this was the central argument being advanced. Since 2023, UCT had entered into new lease agreements at rates above the cap despite knowing that NSFAS-funded students placed in those residences would be unable to cover the resulting shortfalls and would therefore incur debt.

Prof Ramugondo responded that UCT’s preference was for students to reside in university-owned accommodation and noted that NSFAS policy similarly identified on-campus accommodation as the preferred option. She stated that UCT would prefer not to rely on leased accommodation.

The Chairperson replied that the fact remained that UCT had entered into lease agreements after the accommodation cap was introduced. He noted that those leases exceeded the NSFAS cap and that NSFAS-funded students had been placed in the accommodation concerned. He argued that whether the university preferred students to live in university-owned residences was irrelevant to the issue under discussion.

Prof Ramugondo then asked what would prevent UCT from considering residences located within safe communities and accessible by shuttle services as an alternative, even if not a preferred option.

The Chairperson responded that the discussion was becoming frustrating. He reiterated that UCT had signed lease agreements after the introduction of the accommodation cap and had advertised those accommodation opportunities itself. He repeated the central question: if the institution was genuinely concerned about the welfare of students and the financial shortfalls they faced, why had it not stipulated that it would not lease accommodation above the NSFAS cap? He noted that UCT had previously argued that, without these agreements, private providers would simply accommodate privately funded students. He questioned that assumption and suggested that the market would ultimately determine whether such providers remained viable. He maintained that UCT had knowingly entered into lease agreements above the cap, placed NSFAS-funded students in those residences, and thereby contributed to the indebtedness of those students. He stated that this was the essence of Mr Msezane’s question: if UCT genuinely cared about the issue, why had it not exercised its influence over pricing? He argued that the university could have engaged with the SRC, reviewed the approximately 2 400 leased and accredited accommodation units, and stipulated that accommodation designated for NSFAS-funded students should be capped at the NSFAS rate. In his view, UCT had the capacity to do so but had chosen not to.

Prof Moshabela stated that he wished to respond to the point raised by Mr Msezane regarding the negotiation of terms with private accommodation providers. He acknowledged that the Chairperson was correct in stating that UCT selected its service providers and determined the standards they were required to meet. He explained that UCT maintained a high standard within its own residences at the cost previously presented to the Committee. While recognising that the Committee might disagree with UCT’s position that the cost of its university-owned accommodation exceeded that of institutions such as CPUT, he maintained that UCT could demonstrate that it generated no profit from its residences and that all revenue was reinvested into services provided to students. He urged that UCT not be placed in competition with other universities, emphasising that the institution’s objective was to contribute to a strong PSET sector and to ensure that students had a conducive learning environment. He argued that UCT should be allowed to determine the standard of accommodation it provided because it believed that the standard supported student success. He added that if UCT failed to maintain those standards, it would later be questioned about poor student performance and outcomes.

He stated that UCT was asking the Committee to work with the institution to determine an appropriate standard of residential living, establish the costs associated with that standard, and verify that no profit element was involved. Where leased accommodation was concerned, UCT sought to ensure that the same standards were maintained. He acknowledged that achieving those standards in privately leased accommodation inevitably resulted in costs that were somewhat higher than those associated with university-owned residences. He added that this was one of the reasons student leaders had argued that university-owned residences should receive preferential treatment, recognising that UCT did not exercise full control over privately owned residences but nevertheless required the same standards to be upheld. He stated that UCT could not allow students in university-owned residences to experience a different standard of living from those placed in privately owned accommodation.

Prof Moshabela further stated that it was easy to suggest that UCT could simply dictate accommodation prices but argued that this was not how markets operated. He urged the Committee to exercise caution in how it approached the matter and requested that no impression be created that other universities were offering lower standards. He reiterated that UCT sought to provide students with a comprehensive package of services.

Addressing the accommodation cap directly, he stated that UCT disagreed with aspects of the NSFAS accommodation cap and maintained that NSFAS owed the university approximately R540 million, a liability which NSFAS did not recognise. He remarked that, should the matter ultimately require resolution through the courts, so be it. However, he emphasised that UCT’s primary concern was that students should remain at the centre of the discussion and that attention should remain focused on the challenges students faced as a result of mounting debt. He noted that the previous engagement had concluded with an agreement to seek a collective solution and stated that UCT was attempting to act reasonably while preserving the standards of service it wished to provide.

The Chairperson indicated that the Committee did not agree with the position being advanced.

Mr Msezane requested an opportunity to make a brief final point. He stated that the Committee had raised a crucial issue and noted that some Members had themselves studied under difficult financial circumstances without family support. He said there were now students experiencing severe distress because of additional accommodation costs, with some accumulating debts so substantial that they were unable to access their academic results. Referring to the VC’s earlier remarks, he stated that Members of Parliament were indeed placing students at the centre of the discussion, particularly poor students, regardless of whether UCT generated a profit from its residences. He reiterated that UCT determined the conditions applicable to leased accommodation and that NSFAS operated within a fixed funding framework. He argued that any shortfall should not be borne by poor students who lacked the means to pay it. He stated that figures covering the period from 2023 to 2026 would likely demonstrate the extent to which accommodation debt had accumulated, increasing from approximately R3 000 to between R16 000 and R18 000. He questioned how many affected students had ultimately graduated, given that accumulated debt could prevent them from registering in subsequent years. He concluded by stating that the Committee was prioritising the interests of poor students and could not accept the argument that UCT’s accommodation services justified imposing financial burdens that those students could not afford.

The Chairperson stated that he wished to make it clear that he disagreed with the VC’s suggestion that comparisons between universities should not be made. He argued that accommodation procurement processes were broadly similar across institutions and that UCT could not claim exemption from scrutiny simply because it believed it offered superior services. He stated that he would be failing in his responsibilities as a Member of Parliament if he accepted the proposition that accommodation charges of R16 000 should not be questioned. He also clarified that he was not defending NSFAS, noting that such a perception would be incorrect. He argued that accepting UCT’s reasoning would imply that any provider could set any price without accountability. While the Committee wanted students to benefit from high-quality accommodation, it could not accept the suggestion that questions regarding pricing or comparisons with neighbouring institutions were inappropriate. He maintained that accommodation in Cape Town itself demonstrated that UCT’s charges exceeded those of comparable providers in the same area.

Deputy Minister Dube-Ncube stated that she wished to offer a different perspective to both the Committee and the university. She observed that, nationally, more money was currently being spent through NSFAS on accommodation than on academic costs. She explained that this reality had informed the President’s call for universities to construct their own accommodation because the existing situation was unsustainable. She further stated that there now appeared to be instances of “double dipping”, whereby universities constructed their own residences and still charged rates exceeding those funded by the state, even where the state had supported the development of the accommodation. She argued that this was an issue that required serious discussion.

The Deputy Minister also sought clarity regarding the presentation, noting that she had initially welcomed the reference to accommodation having been insourced. However, she said that she became concerned when she heard that insourcing had created additional administrative issues which raised questions regarding how the model was being managed.

She further urged the university to recognise the necessity of comparisons with other institutions and accommodation providers. She stated that she had previously shown examples to the Director-General, including Campus Key, Rise Student, DigsConnect, and other providers, all of which charged lower rates than those presented by UCT. She encouraged the Committee to examine the standards offered by those providers as well. She added that it was unfair to imply that Members were advocating for lower standards or lacked an understanding of the issues. In her view, the standards were broadly comparable, but the Committee’s concern was rooted in the reality that the fiscus could only stretch so far and that NSFAS funding was specifically intended for poor students.

She noted that the Committee had previously discussed the matter with USAf, during which the University of Pretoria had indicated that, where accommodation costs exceeded the NSFAS cap, the university itself absorbed the difference. She argued that the real problem arose when universities transferred those shortfalls onto students who had been funded precisely because they lacked financial means. She stated that this was a discussion from which none of the parties could retreat and which the country would ultimately have to confront. She questioned whether it was reasonable that institutional leadership could not provide clear answers to these concerns.

The Chairperson thanked the Deputy Minister and invited the VC to respond.

Prof Moshabela stated that he did not wish it to be interpreted that UCT opposed the existence of an accommodation cap. He explained that, while the university had responsibilities towards its students, it also had responsibilities regarding its own financial sustainability. He argued that if the expectation was that universities should absorb any difference between the NSFAS cap and actual accommodation costs, then such expectations should have been incorporated into the funding model from the outset. He noted that while the University of Pretoria might be able to absorb those costs, UCT could not do so.

He stated that he did not wish to begin criticising the NSFAS funding model but believed that all parties needed to acknowledge that a problem existed and required resolution. He warned that UCT faced the risk of reversing the gains made through transformation if the current situation persisted. Referring to earlier comments made by the Deputy VC, he stated that if institutions were compelled to make decisions solely on financial considerations, the consequences for transformation would be severe. He cautioned that if each institution focused only on its own interests, the outcome would ultimately be detrimental to students and the country as a whole. This, he explained, was why he had earlier described the discussion as potentially leading down a dangerous path.

Prof Moshabela also addressed the suggestion that NSFAS-funded students should simply be allocated to lower-cost residences. He explained that UCT had considered this option and that, shortly after his arrival at the university in 2024, he had participated in budget discussions where precisely that proposal had been examined. However, he noted that UCT had a highly diverse student population and that concentrating students from similar socio-economic backgrounds within particular residences raised broader concerns regarding inclusion, non-discrimination, and transformation. He stated that these considerations had to be balanced carefully.

He added that, from a purely financial perspective, it would be easier for UCT if all students were housed in residences costing approximately R60,000 per year, requiring the university to cover only a relatively small shortfall. However, he argued that such an approach would not serve students’ long-term interests or support the kind of institutional environment UCT sought to foster. He maintained that UCT wanted students to graduate having interacted with peers from a broad range of socio-economic backgrounds.

The VC further stated that UCT had conducted a survey in 2024 which revealed that many students did not wish to move into the relatively cheaper residences available within the UCT system. He noted that it was only in 2026 that students had, of their own accord, begun to choose such residences in greater numbers. He stated that the university now had to consider the implications of that trend, particularly if students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds became concentrated in specific residences. He emphasised that these were among the many factors the university had to consider and that UCT’s approach extended beyond financial considerations to encompass the holistic development of students.

He concluded by appealing for moderation in the discussion and cautioning against overly simplistic or absolute positions. He stated that balancing the competing interests involved was complex and that no aspect of the issue could be regarded as straightforward. He urged all parties to work collectively towards a reasonable solution that balanced the interests of NSFAS, universities, students, the higher education sector, and the broader public.

Mr T Louw (ANC) rose on a point of order. He stated that, while he appreciated the VC’s call for collaboration, he was concerned that he had directed significant criticism towards NSFAS and its shortcomings. He appealed to the VC to maintain consistency in his submissions. While acknowledging that NSFAS had weaknesses, he stressed that the scheme existed to support the poorest students and argued that discussions should remain focused on that central objective

.

Mr Lonzi stated that he did not intend to spend much time on the accommodation issue, noting that the Committee had previously discussed it with the VC in his capacity as a representative of USAf. He emphasised that the matter was not unique to UCT but affected the higher education sector as a whole. In his view, the DHET ultimately bore responsibility for addressing the issue because it was responsible for ensuring equitable access to education across the country. He argued that students should be treated consistently regardless of whether they attended Walter Sisulu University, UCT, the University of Pretoria, or the University of Fort Hare. He therefore urged the Department to work closely with NSFAS and USAf to develop a long-term solution. He noted that universities such as the University of Pretoria and Stellenbosch University faced similar challenges, as did many other institutions.

He further stated that all parties should agree on a fundamental principle: once a student had been identified as eligible for NSFAS funding, particularly where eligibility arose through receipt of a SASSA grant, that student’s educational journey should not be undermined by circumstances beyond their control. He argued that it was unacceptable for a student to complete their studies successfully yet be unable to graduate because of financial disputes arising between institutions and funding bodies. He noted that if a student had failed academically, the situation would be different, but where students had excelled academically and still faced barriers to graduation because of debt, responsibility lay with the Department, NSFAS, universities, Parliament, and all stakeholders collectively. He therefore urged the Department to prioritise resolving the issue.

Turning to another matter, Mr Lonzi referred to audit findings previously mentioned by the Deputy Minister. He requested that the Chief Financial Officer provide a written response, given the limited time available, indicating what steps had been taken to address the findings and how far the process had progressed. He added that, apart from the issue in question, the university’s audit outcomes had generally been positive.

Mr Vincent Motholo, CFO, UCT, explained that the audit finding in question related to a conflict of interest involving transactions entered into between the university and members of staff who were required to declare their interests. He stated that the university took comfort from the fact that those transactions had not resulted in any instances of fraud. However, from a legislative compliance perspective, the required declarations should have been made. He indicated that the university was actively working to improve staff compliance with disclosure requirements and that the matter remained an ongoing area of focus.

Mr Lonzi stated that he wished to raise the issue of student debt, noting that it was highly contentious and that the Committee had previously discussed it with USAf when the VC had appeared before the Committee in that capacity. He remarked that he frequently had this debate with chief financial officers, including the CFO of Nelson Mandela University. He observed that when debts were classified as effectively irrecoverable, institutions were implicitly acknowledging that significant efforts had been made to recover the funds without success. He questioned what benefit accrued to universities from continuing to withhold the qualifications of affected students, or whether the rationale was that withholding qualifications would place sufficient pressure on graduates to return and settle their debts. He asked whether universities could not adopt alternative debt recovery measures that were less punitive and did not centre on withholding qualifications and degrees. While acknowledging that the VC might disagree with him, he maintained that the practice was punitive in nature.

Mr Motholo responded that Mr Lonzi was correct in observing that the practice had originally been introduced as a debt collection mechanism and had served that purpose for a period of time. He acknowledged that the Member’s concerns regarding students’ ability to access the labour market raised legitimate questions about whether the approach remained sustainable. He explained that the university had processes in place that enabled students to obtain employment both within the institution and in the broader labour market where qualifications could be made available. However, he stated that the discussion had created an opportunity to reconsider the existing process and explore alternative mitigation measures, including potential collaboration with SARS as a partner in debt collection. He added that this was an area the university was actively examining.

Mr Lonzi thanked the CFO and stated that he had advanced similar arguments during previous engagements with USAf when the VC had represented the organisation. He argued that universities across South Africa should consider less punitive methods of recovering outstanding debt. He noted that all parties could agree that qualifications and degrees were the primary means through which young people gained access to employment opportunities. He questioned how a graduate was expected to secure employment and earn an income if the institution withheld the very qualification required to enter the labour market until payment had been made. He stated that the discussion was long overdue but welcomed USAf’s willingness to engage with the issue.

Mr Lonzi indicated that his penultimate point related to the Gaza and Israel resolution. He explained that he had not originally intended to raise the matter, but comments made earlier by Honourable Khakhau had prompted him to do so to ensure that the Committee did not inadvertently convey an incorrect message to the public. He stated that his understanding was that the resolution related specifically to the IDF and the military activities forming part of the matter before the ICJ, rather than constituting a blanket boycott of all individuals or institutions in Israel. He requested that the Chairperson of Council clarify the matter so that the meeting would not conclude with a misunderstanding of the institution’s position.

Adv Arendse responded that the resolution was entirely linked to and concerned with the activities of the IDF, the war in Gaza, and what had been described as genocide taking place there. He stated that the resolution was grounded in the values of the university. While acknowledging the importance of financial considerations, he took the opportunity to provide context regarding donor funding. He explained that the R200 million figure referred to funding spread over ten years, amounting to approximately R20 million per annum. He noted that the first tranche of R20 million had been spent in accordance with the agreement between the donor and the university, entirely on the Neuroscience Institute, and had not involved student funding. To the best of his recollection, the donation as a whole had not been directed towards student funding.

He further stated, for the record, that donor funding had increased by more than 11% since 2024, although the number of donors had declined. He noted that it could reasonably be assumed that some of those who had withdrawn support or ceased donating had done so because they disagreed with the Gaza resolution. He reiterated that this was the relevant context. He confirmed that the resolution related specifically to the activities of the IDF and did not concern academic freedom. Rather, it reflected the view that academics should not engage in or associate themselves with activities that directly or indirectly contributed to the conflict and thereby rendered them complicit.

Mr Lonzi stated that the clarification was important.

Mr Arendse then requested to be excused, noting that he had submitted a request the previous day because he needed to attend a disciplinary hearing of considerable importance, one aspect of which could potentially affect a participant in the proceedings. Turning to the issue of union representation, he indicated that he would address the matter in his capacity as Chairperson of Council. He stated that UCT had prepared a formal response which could be submitted for the record. In summary, however, the Council was scheduled to meet on Saturday. He explained that the university’s position had always been that employees, rather than unions, were represented on Council, with academic staff and two PASS staff representatives serving as Council members. He noted that Council was not a constituency-based body and that its members did not represent constituencies in the same manner as Members of Parliament. He explained that ministerial appointees to Council, including himself and four others, were required to act in the best interests of the university.

Returning briefly to the donor funding issue, Mr Arendse stated that the state remained by far the largest funder of tertiary institutions. He noted that, when the Gaza resolution had been under consideration, he had not received a single telephone call, email, or message from government, a Minister, or any representative of the state suggesting that the university should take into account South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice. He explained that the decision had been left entirely to Council members, who had been required to determine what they believed to be in the best interests of the institution. Through a process of majority decision-making, Council had resolved to adopt the resolution. He emphasised that this aspect of university governance should be respected across the higher education sector.

He added that a formal response could be submitted for the record and reiterated that, in summary, UCT complied with the Higher Education Act and its Statute regarding employee representation. He stated that any move to introduce direct union representation on Council would require amendments to both the institutional statute and the university’s own governance instruments. Such a process would necessarily involve consultation with a range of constituencies, including the Institutional Forum, Convocation, Senate, and other relevant structures.

Mr Lonzi remarked that the Chairperson had already utilised some of his allocated time but requested some leniency. He explained that he had intended to advise the unions that, in his view, their proposal was not grounded in the Higher Education Act, which referred specifically to academic and non-academic staff rather than unions. He observed that the Act did not expressly require student representative councils to deploy members to Council, as it referred only to student representatives. Consequently, he suggested that a university could theoretically hold separate elections for student representatives independent of the SRC while remaining compliant with the Act.

He stated that a more viable request would be for unions to seek forms of recognition similar to those adopted at institutions such as Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University and the University of Pretoria, where unions participated as observers or were afforded more meaningful engagement within bargaining structures. He suggested that such demands would be more realistic. He warned that requiring every union to be directly represented on university councils could prove disruptive, particularly at institutions with six or seven unions holding divergent ideological positions. While he did not disagree with the concerns raised by the unions, he maintained that their proposals should be reframed in a manner consistent with the relevant legislative framework.

Adv Arendse sought clarification as to whether the unions intended presenting their proposal at the Council meeting scheduled for Saturday.

The Chairperson responded that the matter was internal to the institution and suggested that those concerned engage directly with the Chairperson of Council outside the Committee proceedings. He stated that such internal matters were not issues in which the Committee should become involved.

Mr Arendse noted that the Registrar had already been engaging with the unions on the matter.

The Chairperson reiterated that it was an internal matter that would be dealt with through the appropriate institutional processes. He indicated that he intended to give the Director-General an opportunity to speak before the meeting concluded but first needed to release Members who had questions to pose to Ministers during the social cluster sitting, some of which already appeared on the order paper.

Prof Moshabela indicated that he had wished to make a contribution earlier on the accommodation issue, before the Deputy Minister’s intervention.

The Chairperson confirmed that he would allow the VC to speak but requested that Dr Christians proceed with her questions first, given that some Members needed to be excused to attend the social cluster session.

Dr D Christians (DA) stated that she wished briefly to return to the accommodation debate and observed that the Director-General might also wish to comment on the issue when allowed speaking. She noted that the Committee had heard that NSFAS allegedly owed UCT R540 million and that the VC had made it clear that numerous factors complicated direct comparisons between institutions. She acknowledged that the Committee understood this complexity and recognised that similar debates occurred internationally, where universities with differing rankings charged varying fees and where funding and quality considerations formed part of the broader discussion.

She expressed the view that the accommodation crisis was not unique to UCT but was recurring across the sector. Student debt continued to grow, universities were carrying increasing financial burdens, and pressures on the system were intensifying. She observed that both the SRC and the Institutional Forum had argued that the funding model required reform. In her view, the Committee was becoming distracted by secondary issues rather than addressing what she regarded as the core problem, namely the NSFAS funding model itself.

Directing a question to the university, Dr Christians asked whether UCT believed that the current funding model was suitable for a city such as Cape Town. She further asked whether the university was proposing that the model be adapted to accommodate its particular circumstances and, if so, what changes it would recommend.

Prof Moshabela responded that, in the interests of time, he would be direct. He stated that UCT currently had approximately 5 000 NSFAS-funded students and that the institution did not wish to see that number decline, particularly given existing concerns in that regard. On the contrary, UCT wished to increase the number of NSFAS-funded students as far as possible. He explained that if the university was bringing students from provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape to Cape Town, it wanted to ensure that they were housed appropriately and did not have to worry about accommodation. Consequently, UCT’s position was that funding should cover all student costs, including accommodation.

He acknowledged concerns regarding rising accommodation costs and the resulting pressure on NSFAS. However, he argued that if accommodation was accepted as an essential component of transformation and student support, then the associated costs should be fully funded. He stated that he was willing to engage on how NSFAS could pay the actual costs incurred in university-owned residences in order to ensure that students were adequately supported. He added that, from UCT’s perspective, the central issue was ensuring that the funding model covered the full cost of study and that, where possible, intermediary costs should be reduced so that a greater proportion of funding reached students directly.

Prof Moshabela further acknowledged broader structural challenges, including the fact that the R350 000 household income threshold had remained unchanged for an extended period and had not kept pace with inflation. He noted that increasing demand for higher education had placed additional pressure on families earning above both the R350 000 and R600 000 thresholds. Such families frequently approached the university questioning why the thresholds had not been adjusted. He recognised that NSFAS itself faced budgetary constraints and that any move towards a more comprehensive funding model could reduce the total number of students who could be funded. Nevertheless, he maintained that for students residing in university accommodation, the priority should be ensuring that they were fully funded.

Dr Christians responded that it had become clear throughout the engagement that the existing NSFAS funding model was no longer functioning effectively for universities. She suggested that some degree of decentralisation might allow institutions to adapt funding arrangements to their particular circumstances and needs. In her view, the model was no longer serving students adequately. She indicated that she would leave further explanation to the Director-General and noted that investment in student accommodation infrastructure represented another significant challenge facing the sector, a point that had also been raised by the Deputy Minister.

Turning to transformation, Dr Christians stated that Parliament continued to grapple with the issue of transformation throughout the academic pipeline. Referring to slide 31 of the university’s presentation, she noted that UCT had provided a detailed racial breakdown of employees by category, including African, Coloured, Indian, and White staff. However, she observed that the level of detail diminished in later sections dealing with academic progression, senior academic appointments, Profships, and senior lecturer positions. She expressed concern that aggregated figures could conceal important trends within the academic pipeline and requested that the university provide a detailed racial breakdown of senior lecturers, associate Profs, and Profs across the African, Coloured, Indian, and White categories.

Prof Collier-Reed asked whether the university should provide the information immediately or submit it in writing.

Ms Mhango thanked the Member for the question and stated that the university did possess the data. However, she suggested that it would be more useful to provide the information in writing because the figures had been aggregated and a more detailed breakdown could then be supplied.

Dr Christians indicated that this would be acceptable but asked Ms Mhango, based on the figures available to her, to identify the point within the academic pipeline at which transformation began to slow.

Ms Mhango responded that transformation began to slow at the senior academic levels, particularly at the level of associate Prof and Prof, where the most significant gaps remained. She noted that the university had introduced a number of transformation initiatives, including its Academic Transformation Programme, specifically aimed at addressing those disparities. While there had been some progress at lecturer level, she acknowledged the Member’s concern regarding the need for more detailed disaggregated data. She added that, within the broad black category, substantial work remained necessary at Prof and associate Prof level from a transformation perspective.

Dr Christians stated that her concern related to the age profile of the academic workforce and the sustainability of the university’s future academic pipeline. Given the demographic profile of current Profs across faculties, she asked whether the university believed that its existing pipeline of African, Coloured, and Indian academics was sufficiently strong to replace those academics who would be leaving the institution in the coming years.

Prof Ramugondo stated that this was a very important question which UCT was taking seriously and that a number of initiatives had been introduced to address that concern precisely. She explained that one initiative which had been particularly important in helping to close the gap identified by the Executive Director of Human Resources, was what UCT referred to as the Next Generation Profiate. These were colleagues already employed by UCT at senior lecturer and associate Prof level, and the programme focused on addressing the structural barriers that impeded promotion. She stated that it had been important for UCT to recognise that the problem did not usually lie with individuals themselves, and that if the institution was successful in attracting talented academics, it should be concerned when those individuals were not progressing as expected. She explained that the initiative worked specifically with colleagues who should be progressing and assisted them in preparing applications for promotion.

She added that UCT also participated in the New Generation of Academics Programme (nGAP), a national initiative for which the university was grateful, as it brought new academics into the sector. She explained that one structural barrier identified over the years was that entry-level lecturers often became overwhelmed by heavy undergraduate teaching loads. At universities of high standing, it was common for newly qualified doctoral graduates to be afforded time to publish from their doctoral research, something which was difficult to achieve when they were fully occupied with undergraduate teaching responsibilities. She said the nGAP had provided an important indication of the structural barriers that needed to be addressed.

Prof Ramugondo further stated that UCT also operated an Emerging Research Programme, which was available to all staff because everyone required support. She noted that signalling that only people of colour or Black staff required support conveyed the wrong message. She said there were two additional initiatives she wished to highlight. The first was the Employment Equity Fund, through which heads of department or deans could approach the executive to motivate for the appointment of exceptionally talented candidates from historically disadvantaged groups at associate Prof or Prof level. This effectively enabled targeted recruitment where necessary. The second, and particularly exciting, initiative was the Accelerated Transformation Academic Programme, which addressed concerns regarding the ageing professoriate. She explained that it was no longer sufficient to focus solely on existing academic staff and that the institution also needed to pay attention to postgraduate students, particularly Black African and Coloured students who had a passion for academia. Through this initiative, UCT sought to encourage such students to remain within the academic system and pursue academic careers.

Mr A Sauls (PA) stated that he wished to begin by emphasising that his commitment to racial transformation was not focused on a single race but rather on a balanced approach. He explained that he wanted to change the way racial transformation was conceptualised. He said that when he heard that 20% of students were Coloured, many expected him to celebrate the increase. However, what interested him was the movement towards a balanced approach in which all students were regarded as Africans and represented proportionately. He stated that this was his central concern and that he wanted it to be understood that he was equally encouraged by figures showing 20% Coloured students, 23% White students, 44% Black African students, and a slight increase to 7% among Indian South Africans. In his view, all of these groups should be regarded as Africans.

He asked whether it was correct that applications from Coloured students had increased by 5% and requested confirmation from the Deputy VC (Academic) that he had interpreted the presentation correctly.

Prof Collier-Reed confirmed, through the Chairperson, that applications from Coloured students had indeed increased for the 2026 academic year.

Mr Sauls stated that he needed matters explained in very simple terms and asked whether the figures showed that more Coloured students had applied to study at UCT compared with previous years. He further asked whether it was correct that Coloured students had accepted firm offers from the university at a higher rate than Black African and White students.

Prof Collier-Reed confirmed that, for 2026, Coloured students had the highest take-up rate, which he believed was approximately 53%.

Mr Sauls then asked whether it was true that UCT had made fewer offers to Coloured students than to White and Black students.

Prof Collier-Reed explained that the university followed a rigorous admissions process in which offers were made to eligible students who met the admission requirements. He stated that every student who met those requirements received an offer. He added that the university did not make judgements about applicants beyond assessing whether they met the established thresholds.

Mr Sauls responded that the presentation itself contained the relevant figures and asked the Deputy VC to answer directly and transparently rather than assuming he had not studied the presentation. He stated that the figures showed that the university made fewer offers to Coloured students and more offers to Black and White students.

Prof Collier-Reed confirmed that this was correct and explained that it reflected the pattern of applications received.

Mr Sauls stated that this was the fact he wished to explore and asked whether the university understood the implications. He argued that Coloured students were demonstrating increasing interest in studying at UCT, that the university was making more offers to Black and White students than to Coloured students, and that Coloured students were accepting offers at a higher rate than either Black African or White students, despite receiving fewer offers. He asked whether that situation was fair.

Prof Collier-Reed reiterated that offers were made to every student who met the admission requirements and that every eligible student received an offer. He stated that fewer offers were made to Coloured students because there were fewer Coloured applicants overall.

Prof Moshabela added that the figures reflected a pattern rather than a deliberate institutional action. He explained that one could have a large applicant pool within which relatively few individuals met the required criteria, while another group with a smaller applicant pool could have a higher proportion of applicants who met the criteria, resulting in more offers being made. He stressed that this did not necessarily indicate any systematic form of segregation but reflected the outcome of the admissions process. He characterised it as a pattern rather than an action.

Mr Sauls responded by acknowledging that the VC was a highly intelligent individual, considerably more so than himself, but stated that he wished to challenge that reasoning. He argued that the issue was indeed systematic and said he had anticipated such a response based on his previous experiences with Stellenbosch University. He explained that he had identified a case study which, in his view, illustrated the systematic nature of the problem and asked the VC to consider it carefully rather than dismissing it.

He referred to a Grade 12 learner named Cameron Reid, whom he described as a Coloured student with outstanding academic results, including distinctions in Mathematics and Physical Science. He stated that she was the country’s leading school debater and remained the national champion. He explained that she had applied to UCT, UKZN, the University of Pretoria, VUT and other institutions, selecting Medicine as her first choice and Dentistry as her second. According to Mr Sauls, all of the universities, including UCT, had declined her application for Medicine and instead offered her a place in Accounting. He described her as a brilliant learner from a disadvantaged community who had excelled academically, in leadership, and in debating, and asked whether it was fair that she was not admitted to study Medicine.

Prof Moshabela responded by recounting that UCT had rejected his own application to study Medicine approximately thirty years earlier. He explained that he had subsequently studied Medicine at UKZN, completed further qualifications at the Medical University of South Africa (Medunsa), Wits, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and had eventually been approached by UCT on several occasions when the institution was searching for its next VC. He remarked that he had long felt aggrieved by that rejection and had considered it unfair at the time, although he had since forgiven the institution. He stated that he could therefore understand why the situation described did not feel fair.

Mr Sauls replied that his respect for the VC had increased as a result of that response and that it resonated deeply with him. He stated that Cameron Reid was not an isolated case and that many similar examples existed. Given that the VC understood the concern being raised, he asked whether the institution would examine more closely the systemic limitations affecting students such as her. He argued that students who had devoted themselves entirely to academic achievement should not be pushed out of the system when their aspiration was to study professions such as Medicine. While acknowledging that the intention might not be discriminatory, he maintained that the framework nonetheless produced exclusionary outcomes. He therefore requested the VC’s commitment to investigate the matter.

Prof Moshabela confirmed that he gave the Member that commitment.

Mr Sauls then asked one final question. He stated that he accepted the undertaking from Human Resources that a detailed demographic breakdown would be provided to the Committee and sought confirmation that the category “Black” included Coloured and Indian South Africans alongside Black Africans. He then asked whether it was correct that, at UCT, foreign national Profs outnumbered Black African, Coloured, and Indian South African Profs combined.

Ms Mhango confirmed that this was correct at Prof level, as reflected on her presentation slide.

Mr Sauls then asked whether she considered that situation to be appropriate.

Ms Mhango replied that she did not. She stated that, as Prof Ramugondo had outlined, the institution remained committed to transformation and was seeking to change that picture through the various programmes that had been implemented.

Mr Sauls thanked Ms Mhango.

Responses by the DHET

The DG stated that he could not remain silent when presented with an opportunity to engage on the issue of student accommodation. He remarked that, when the Chairperson had opened the meeting, he had assumed the discussion would be guided towards a dedicated engagement on student accommodation. However, as proceedings progressed, the discussion had broadened and certain assertions had been made that could not be fully substantiated within the limited time available.

He stated that the Department’s position was that a report already existed from the Ministerial Committee on the Review of the Provisioning of Student Housing and that, on the basis of that report, the Department had also developed a policy on minimum norms and standards for student housing in public investments. He explained that the system had therefore been guided by clear policy directives, which should make it difficult for non-compliant practices to emerge. However, he argued that it was reasonable to ask institutions whether they experienced difficulties in implementing those policies and what support might be required to facilitate implementation. Given that a significant period had passed since the publication of the policy directives, new challenges may have emerged during implementation which institutions wished to raise. He noted that the guidelines were comprehensive and addressed issues such as costs and services rendered, which were central to the current discussion.

The DG expressed support for the Chairperson’s earlier remarks and request, noting that Honourable Lonzi had also raised the matter and had implicated the Department in efforts to find solutions. He observed that Dr Christians had highlighted the importance of infrastructure and stated that the Department continued to experience slow progress in the rollout of infrastructure projects across universities. Given the imperative of expanding access to higher education, infrastructure resources needed to be utilised strategically to support system growth.

He further noted that the Department had begun engaging on a range of policy matters, including the overall structure of the system. He explained that a key challenge was ensuring that infrastructure investments were supported by robust feasibility studies. Without such studies, there was a risk of repeating mistakes observed in the basic education sector, where schools had been built in response to perceived demand but later stood empty because proper feasibility assessments had not been conducted. He suggested that any future approach would need to involve entities such as the construction sector, Infrastructure South Africa, and relevant housing departments, and should not be limited solely to the post-school education sector. He remarked that one only had to travel around South Africa to observe large quantities of underutilised infrastructure in industrial and other areas to appreciate that the country was not necessarily short of infrastructure resources, despite the accommodation difficulties faced by young people.

He stated that the Department wished to make it clear that student accommodation was a priority. The Department intended to work with USAf and the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector to determine what infrastructure interventions could be pursued. He noted that discussions had already taken place with the Department of Public Works, although those engagements had not progressed as constructively as hoped due to misunderstandings regarding the Department’s objectives. Nevertheless, he believed those engagements had been valuable and stated that the Department was prepared to take responsibility for facilitating cooperation and engagement among all stakeholders. He emphasised that addressing student accommodation remained the Department’s foremost priority and that it fully appreciated the hardships students were experiencing as a result of unresolved accommodation challenges.

Further discussion

Mr Lonzi stated that he wished to place several matters on record. He reminded the Chairperson of his commitment to circulate a report to the Committee and requested that the university also provide written responses to questions which had not been fully addressed during the meeting due to time constraints. He further requested that the VC and CFO provide details supporting the university’s claim that no profit was generated from university-owned accommodation, including a breakdown of costs and income.

He added that he had refrained from interrupting Mr Sauls’ earlier engagement but wished to note that, in his understanding, where ten places were available and twenty applicants met the minimum requirements, admission decisions would ultimately be determined by the competitiveness of the applicants’ results. Thus, a student could satisfy the minimum criteria but still not secure admission. He stressed that the shortage of spaces within post-school education was not solely a university problem. While he was not suggesting that Cameron Reid’s academic results lacked competitiveness and indeed believed they were likely to be highly competitive, he wished to afford the university the benefit of the doubt and suggested that this was the point Prof Collier-Reed had been attempting to make.

Mr Sauls responded that the issue raised by Mr Lonzi was not the matter under discussion. He explained that this had initially been the university’s response, but that he and the VC had subsequently reached a shared understanding regarding the systemic limitation he had sought to highlight. He noted that the VC had himself acknowledged having been disadvantaged by UCT in the past and had since forgiven the institution.

The Chairperson indicated that he had intended to ask the Chief Financial Officer who audited the institution.

Mr Motholo responded that the university had recently concluded a five-year audit term with PricewaterhouseCoopers and that Ernst & Young had now been appointed as the new external auditor.

The Chairperson stated that the Committee had an arrangement with the Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA) whereby, when detailed information was required, the Committee could engage with the Auditor-General, who would in turn engage with the institution’s auditors. He indicated that he was particularly interested in obtaining a detailed breakdown of student accommodation figures. He explained that he had reviewed the university’s annual report but had not found the level of detail he sought within the financial statements. Consequently, he intended to write to the Auditor-General, as suggested by Mr Lonzi, to request that the relevant information be obtained from the auditors. He stated that he required an independent assessment of the accommodation figures, which appeared to involve expenditure approaching R900 million and potentially more.

The Chairperson further stated that the Committee would write to the institution with a number of specific questions requiring responses from the VC. He recalled having previously discussed with the DG a proposal that had also been shared with the VC when he appeared before the Committee as a representative of USAf. The proposal envisaged the release of approximately 13,000 withheld certificates following the conclusion of memoranda of understanding between the Departments of Higher Education and National Treasury. Under such an arrangement, if a graduate subsequently secured employment, the system would identify that employment, and the graduate would be reminded to repay the outstanding debt owed to the institution.

He noted that USAf had responded that, in the case of financially distressed universities, National Treasury might need to provide upfront financial support before certificates could be released. Nevertheless, the Committee remained of the view that there was a direct relationship between the number of unemployed graduates and the number of graduates whose certificates were being withheld, as many individuals had completed their studies but lacked documentary proof of their qualifications.

The Chairperson stated that the Committee possessed correspondence showing that Parliament, together with the Department of Higher Education and Training, advertised positions on the basis that applications would be considered incomplete if they did not include all required certificates. He argued that this created a significant obstacle for graduates whose certificates had been withheld. The Committee therefore wished to see those certificates released. He acknowledged that the proposal would require further development, consultation with USAf, engagement with the Department, and subsequent consideration by National Treasury. In the interim, he argued that greater recognition should be afforded to letters of completion and that the DHET, together with the National Treasury, should engage with the South African business sector to ensure that such letters were recognised as carrying the same weight as formal degree certificates. Academic transcripts and records remained available should employers require additional verification. He concluded that poor students who lacked the means to settle outstanding debts should not be punished but should instead be afforded an opportunity to participate fully in the labour market.

He said the second part of the proposal was that the public service, all government departments, municipalities, state-owned entities, and Parliament itself had to accept letters of completion as equivalent to degrees, because a number of graduates had been punished because of the format requirement.

The DG said he supported what the Chairperson had said, noting that even within the department itself, the recruitment and selection policies indicated that a certificate was required.

Remarks by the Chairperson

The Chairperson stated that the Committee would hold a second dedicated engagement on the issue of student accommodation, which he anticipated would also include students, student housing stakeholders, and relevant state agencies. He said he held a different view from the position that institutions could determine accommodation fees without scrutiny, and indicated that the Committee would revisit the matter during the next parliamentary term once Parliament reconvened, as the current term was due to end at the close of the month. He explained that the Committee intended to bring together the ministerial report, USAf, NSFAS, the Competition Commission, relevant Chapter 9 institutions, Infrastructure South Africa, and other stakeholders for a comprehensive discussion on the matter. He noted that the Deputy Minister had indicated that the country was spending more through NSFAS on accommodation than on academic costs and warned that, if left unchecked, NSFAS risked becoming primarily a student accommodation funding entity rather than a student funding institution. He said this was the direction in which matters were heading in the absence of proper regulation of accommodation costs.

He stated that he did not believe education, as a social good, should be commodified, and argued that student accommodation had become a significant commercial commodity sold at the highest possible price. He said all parties present had a responsibility to address the issue because the ultimate victims would be students, not necessarily the current generation, but those currently in lower grades who might be unable to access higher education if the matter was not regulated. He remarked that he could demonstrate the difference between accommodation expenditure in 2022 and current expenditure for a similar number of beneficiaries and argued that the trend was moving in the wrong direction. He warned that this trajectory would undermine the transformation objectives consistently advocated by stakeholders. He noted that NSFAS was currently funding approximately 800 000 students with a budget of R53 billion and suggested that, even with an increase to R55 billion, the number of funded students could decline to 500 000 if the issue remained unresolved. He argued that, within three to four years, the number of funded students could be reduced by half despite a substantial increase in funding. He further cautioned that NSFAS could eventually have a budget of R60 billion while supporting only half the number of students it funded at present. He emphasised that this required a collective response and should not be dismissed as solely a government responsibility.

He further stated that, should the situation remain unresolved, the government might eventually be compelled to divert funding from university subsidies to NSFAS. In that context, he noted that the approximately R2 billion in government subsidies currently received by UCT could ultimately be placed at risk.

The Chairperson explained that his questions regarding foreign nationals would have taken a different form and that he would therefore submit them in writing. He said his interest related specifically to compliance with the Employment Services Act, the Immigration Act, and the policy framework on internationalisation, which the Committee fully supported. He acknowledged that the institution relied on international investment and needed to attract international talent but stressed that the applicable legislative framework had to be followed. He indicated that his questions would focus on whether the institution had complied with those legal requirements and policy frameworks. He further advised that he would write to the institution with additional questions on behalf of Members who had not had an opportunity to raise them during the meeting and that the institution would be afforded more than fourteen days to provide comprehensive responses.

He noted that a number of proposals had emerged during the engagement and observed that the students had approached the matter strategically by ensuring that the SRC’s presentation and recommendations had also been channelled through the Institutional Forum via the Deputy President, effectively resulting in two presentations from the same structure. He indicated that he would also direct further questions to the institution to assist the Committee in gaining a clearer understanding of certain matters.

The Chairperson stated that UCT was an extremely important academic institution and that while the Committee would not always agree with the university, such agreement was not necessary. He said the Committee nevertheless had a responsibility to acknowledge areas in which the institution was performing well, noting that UCT had demonstrated strong performance in a number of respects despite disagreements on certain issues. He reiterated his personal view that the accommodation pricing model was inappropriate, while acknowledging that the university believed its pricing was justified. He noted that this remained a point of disagreement. He added that the Committee had agreed with the VC that the proposal under consideration would at least help unlock opportunities for graduates whose qualifications had been withheld.

He suggested that, going forward, the Committee’s correspondence to Council might request consideration of a proposal whereby students who had completed their studies but still owed money would be permitted to participate in graduation ceremonies, even if their certificates remained temporarily withheld. He observed that if certificates were only released several years later, affected graduates might lose the opportunity to participate in a formal graduation ceremony altogether. He said the Committee would ask Council to consider holding graduation ceremonies on Saturdays and allowing such students to graduate while retaining the certificates pending the finalisation of the legislative proposal. He argued that, for many students, particularly first-generation graduates, being denied the opportunity to graduate formally could cause lasting harm.

The Chairperson thanked the students for exercising restraint and refraining from further interventions and apologised for the limitations imposed by time constraints. He remarked that, in recognition of their cooperation, when the institution invited Members to attend elections or campaigns, the Committee would participate collectively as supportive partners rather than as individuals. He thanked all participants for attending and for contributing to a robust engagement, including worker representatives, student leaders, members of the Institutional Forum and its advisers, and NSFAS representatives. He noted that NSFAS had been required to attend the meeting but would not form part of the next engagement the Committee intended to convene, despite being central to many of the issues under discussion. He added that he did not understand why UCT had not referred accommodation providers to the Competition Commission and remarked that he would have done so himself.

He stated that the Committee would now need to conclude proceedings and proceed to the social cluster sitting, where Members had questions directed to Ministers, including questions from Honourable Lonzi and himself. He wished students well in their examinations and in the upcoming SRC elections during the second semester. In a light-hearted remark, he observed that online elections occasionally appeared to produce results influenced by algorithmic interference and commented that, although the preferred candidates had been successful the previous year, he was aware of a rotation practice. He jokingly suggested that if anyone intended programming the algorithm, they should programme it to maintain the same outcome for the next five years.

The meeting was adjourned.

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https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2024-06-24-uct-council-adopts-two-senate-resolutions-on-gaza-conflictUCT Council adopts two Senate resolutions on Gaza conflict

24 June 2024

Dear colleagues and students

The University of Cape Town (UCT) Council held an ordinary plenary meeting on Saturday, 22 June 2024.

Among the items on the agenda were two resolutions regarding the Gaza conflict, which were passed by Senate at a meeting held on Friday, 19 April 2024 and then tabled for consideration by Council.

Council debated the two resolutions and following this debate, adopted each by majority decision.

In terms of the first resolution, on the destruction of scholarship and education in Gaza, Senate resolved to:

call, again, for an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid and the return of all captives as contained in the Senate’s resolution of 17 November 2023
condemn the destruction of the education sector in Gaza and the massive scale of killing of teachers and university staff in the current war
urge the international community to ensure that the provision of humanitarian aid includes the restoration of the education sector in Gaza
express concern and opposition to any attempts to curtail academic freedom by labelling criticism of Israel or Zionist policies as antisemitism
reject the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s conflation of critique of Zionism and Israel’s policies as antisemitism in favour of the Jerusalem Declaration’s dynamic understanding of what constitutes antisemitism
express support for academic colleagues in Gaza who are surviving under appalling conditions and our intention to assist in the rebuilding of the academic sector after the war
express solidarity with academic colleagues victimised for their willingness to speak out against the educaracide in Gaza.

The second resolution was in regard to research collaborations with members of the Israeli Defence Force and the wider Israeli military establishment. In terms of this resolution, no UCT academic may enter into relations, or continue relations with, any research group and/or network whose author affiliations are with the Israeli Defence Force, and/or the broader Israeli military establishment.

Council will in due course provide further updates through the usual communication channels on some of the other key items discussed at the June 2024 meeting.

Communication and Marketing Department

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https://www.jpost.com/bds-threat/university-of-cape-town-debates-academic-and-cultural-boycotts-of-israel-506305University of Cape Town debates academic and cultural boycotts of IsraelActivists say action would lead to cut in funding, underprivileged students suffering the consequences.

By ILANIT CHERNICK

SEPTEMBER 29, 2017 11:06Updated: OCTOBER 1, 2017 16:12

Africa’s top university, the University of Cape Town, is debating a proposed academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The proposal was put forward by the Palestine Solidarity Forum, which has called on UCT to implement an academic boycott of Israeli universities. “This academic boycott would require that UCT reject forming any institutional ties with Israeli universities,” the PSF wrote.“The rationale for this call is clear – Palestinian human rights are violated by Israel on a daily basis with the direct and indirect support from Israeli universities… By implementing an academic boycott, UCT takes a principled position in the defense of human rights and academic freedom,” The group claimed.

The matter has been raised for discussion at the UCT Academic Freedom Committee. The committee, however, is only able to make recommendations to the university for consideration by the UCT senate and council, it does not have the authority to make binding decisions on behalf of the school.Klaas Mokgomole, a member of Africans for Peace, said the idea of boycott is taking the focus away from real issues.“First of all, we have very important issues in South Africa that are burning and need urgent attention,” he told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.“For example, we are busy fighting for free, quality and decolonized education. That is why we had the ‘#FeesMustFall’ movement in the past two years. We need the government to work together with institutions of higher learning. The boycott is trying to sway the black students’ focus from real issues that affect them in South Africa.

“This will lead to a cut in funding, and more and more black and underprivileged students will suffer the consequence. It is actually very selfish to suggest such a boycott. This kind of a suggested motion is very anti-black and it cannot be allowed to carry on,” Mokgomole said.“Africans for Peace is about bring two parties to the table and have a dialogue. We need to be promoting peace in the Middle East, not boycotts. Boycotts have not helped so far, however, promoting dialogue will help,” he stressed.Asked how a boycott might affect relations between Israel and South Africa, Mokgomole said ties between the two countries “are very strong.”

“However, a boycott like these would lead to unnecessary consequences, and as a result, the South African black community will suffer at the end,” he said. 

Concerned UCT students, parents and alumni have banded together to create an online petition that, once it reaches 2500 signatures, will be handed over to UCT management, which includes the university’s senate and council. “We believe that the implementation of a wholesale academic boycott against Israel violates the principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech, guaranteed in Section 16 of the South African Constitution and which are fundamental to the undertaking of education and research,” said the group, which calls itself Concerned Citizens for Academic Freedom at UCT. “Research, teaching and scholarship flourish through robust exchange of ideas across borders and among institutions in different parts of the world, including the Middle East. The true essence of a university is to foster dialogue and develop solutions to problems without regard to political, racial and cultural differences. UCT has always shown these qualities, leading us to celebrate our association with UCT,” it said. “Student groups are well-known for their efforts to isolate the Jewish state’s universities, students and academics. And all too often, student groups like the Palestine Solidarity Forum at UCT do not make the profound distinction between antisemitism, anti-Zionism and criticism of the policies of a particular Israeli government.“It is these blurred lines and misunderstandings that create a negative impact on campus for Jewish students, making them one of the most targeted minority groups at university,” the group added.In an interview with South African Jewish Report, UCT vice-chancellor Max Price, who himself is Jewish, said his “personal position is that there should never be an academic boycott anywhere, and this coincides with the position of UCT up till now.”“Things can change depending on the debate. We should be concerned about academic freedom globally. This year we have been called upon to re-think our position as a university,” he said. He made it clear that the debate was an institutional issue, not a personal one. 

Earlier this month, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) said they were working closely with the South African Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS). Representatives of SAUJS will make a presentation this week to the AFC and have been in communication with university management, and other concerned organizations. “We are concerned both about the nature of this campaign by anti-Israel groups on Campus, as well as the antisemitic rhetoric that may evolve from this debate and its implications for Jewish students who support the values of academic freedom.“The SAJBD and SAZF unequivocally reject academic boycotts, whether aimed at Israeli institutions or those of any other country. Such initiatives are discriminatory and inconsistent with universal academic standards,” the organizations said in a statement.

Both the SAUJS and the Palestine Solidarity Forum have made lengthy presentations to the Academic Freedom Committee, which the body is still considering.

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14 October 2014

https://www.news.uct.ac.za/downloads/email/UCTManagementStatementOnGazaConflict.pdf

UCT response to calls to support anti-Israel measures 

The Palestinian Solidarity Forum (PSF) and the Student Representative Council (SRC) at the University of Cape Town have called upon the University’s management to make a statement on behalf of UCT in solidarity with the Palestinians around the Gaza conflict. In particular there has been a demand for the university to:  declare unconditionally that Israel is an apartheid state;  support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign;  not renew UCT’s contract with the security company G4S; and  call for the South African government to cut diplomatic ties with Israel. The University community is distressed by the loss of life as a result of the conflict and we offer our deepest condolences to all the families affected. However, after extensive discussion, UCT management has concluded that we cannot support the statement and demands of the PSF and SRC. The reasons are as follows. Firstly, while as individuals in the management team we all have views on the conflict between Palestine and Israel, and there is significant overlap in our views, when UCT management speaks, it is necessarily a position that it takes on behalf of the institution; it is read by the members of staff, students and the public as an institutional position. So the call to management to support the above is therefore a call to the institution to take a position. UCT is not reluctant to take such a position when there is sufficient clarity on the essential issues, and especially when there is a clear moral imperative. But given how controversial and highly contested the interpretation of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is, including disputes over the facts and interpretations of motives, we do not think at this stage that there is a shared or even dominant view on these issues. Does this mean we can do no more than maintain silence? The answer is no. The evidence, from on-campus marches, to Israel Apartheid Week, to the stream of speakers visiting UCT to address related topics, is that a large number of our students and staff feel involved in or affected by the Israel-Palestine issue and would like their UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN iYunivesithi YaseKapa Universiteit van Kaapstad Dr Max Price: Vice-Chancellor Private Bag X3, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa Room 101, Bremner Building, Lower Campus, Lovers’ Walk, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7700 Tel: +27 (0) 21 650-2105/6 Fax: +27 (0) 21 650-5100 E-mail: vc@uct.ac.za Website: www.uct.ac.za “Our Mission is to be an outstanding teaching and research university, educating for life and addressing the challenges facing our society.” university to show some moral and intellectual leadership on the issue. That, it seems to us, is good enough reason to engage. The University’s role is to create and protect safe spaces for controversial and competing views, and to nurture rational debate on difficult issues in accordance with the principle of academic freedom. We also have a duty to provide thought leadership. We will initiate a project inviting essays from members of the university offering analyses of, arguments about and possible solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Gaza war. In producing an anthology of position papers from across the university, we hope to re-emphasise the point that on the one hand the university as an institution does not have a single view, and on the other, that the university is a place where ideas, argument and reason matter. Implicit in creating the space for debate is a position on the academic boycott. While there are many in our community who may support divestment, sanctions and other boycotts, UCT (through its Academic Freedom Committee) takes the view that academic boycotts are in a category of their own and should almost never be supported by universities. The day we ban people from speaking on our campus because we do not agree with their politics is the day we sacrifice our commitment to academic freedom and the ability to protect different, unpopular, and dissident views, and set ourselves up to repeat the errors of the Galileo affair. Finally, the PSF and SRC specifically called on UCT management not to renew its contract with G4S. The information about G4S activities and an alleged record of abuses, both in Israel and elsewhere, is disputed, but UCT will conduct its own assessment prior to making a decision on renewing the contract. As is the case with all contracts, when this one becomes due for renewal it will be put out to tender and many factors will be considered, including the findings of this assessment. In summary, while UCT as an institution is unable to support the call to take a stand on the specific issues condemning Israel, we uphold the rights of individual academics and students to do so and will facilitate the promotion of all views and serious debate. 

Dr Max Price Vice-Chancellor University of Cape Town  

“Our Mission is to be an outstanding teaching and research university, educating for life and addressing the challenges facing our society.” 

22.07.26

Editorial Note

The American Political Science Association (APSA) selected Profs. Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir to receive the 2026 Heinz I. Eulau Award for their co-authored article titled “Torture’s Bureaucracy and the ‘Legitimacy Effect’,” as it was announced on July 15, 2026. 

The Heinz I. Eulau Award is presented annually to honor the best article published in the APSA journal Perspectives on Politics.

The Award Committee explained their decision by stating that “Israel’s Ministry of Justice has a small department in Tel Aviv called ‘The Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service Interrogators’ that handles complaints against the Israeli General Security Service regarding the use of torture and other extreme methods of interrogation. Although it has reviewed more than 1,450 complaints, there have been no criminal charges. Despite this, the authors of this paper argue that this unit serves an extremely legitimate purpose.” 

The committee added it was “impressed with the paper’s breadth, scope and multi-method approach, including archival research, ethnography, and interviews on the ground. The authors offer both new empirical insights and deep theoretical engagement on a topic that is widely relevant not only to the discipline, but also to society at large. Not only is the topic of wide interest to a range of readers in (and beyond) the discipline, it is also incredibly well-written and deeply engaging. From a methodological perspective, this paper was also a breath of fresh air. As survey experiments and ‘big data’ studies dominate (the mainstream of) the discipline, it was refreshing to see researchers go into the field and do human-facing research, particularly in a very difficult and often dangerous context.”

Kotef and Amir begin their article by citing Lisa Hajjar, a pro-Palestinian scholar from UC Santa Barbara, who wrote, “What distinguishes torture by liberal regimes from illiberal regimes is the energy devoted to frame government policies as ‘legal’.”

The article discusses MAVTAN (the Hebrew acronym for the department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice, the Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service (GSS) Interrogators). MAVTAN is tasked with examining complaints of torture in the GSS interrogations and determining whether they merit launching a criminal investigation. However, Kotef and Amir claim that since “Mavtan has reviewed more than 1,450 complaints to date. None of these, however, had ever led to criminal charges. By analyzing this failure, we tell a segment of the story of torture in Israel.”

Kotef and Amir claim the Israeli state provides legitimacy to torture “on two levels: internationally, to cordon off external interventions, and domestically, to defuse the internal tension between torture and democracy. It hence allows torture to emerge as a problem that may be addressed procedurally, without ever contending with the violence and the violations of international law.”

The co-authors states, “Our analysis draws on exclusive access to the archive of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), granted to us as part of a three-year collaborative research project conducted between 2021 and 2024. The archive houses more than 6,000 cases documenting the legal support PCATI had provided to torture victims since 1991.”

PCATI is an Israeli non-governmental organization that monitors the use of torture and ill-treatment by Israeli security services against those under detention.

NGO Monitor, which scrutinizes political NGOs, reviewed PCATI and stated: “PCATI regularly circulates unverifiable allegations of Israeli torture, using them as the basis for campaigns of demonization in international forums.” Looking at the figures provided by NGO Monitor, Israel Academia Monitor notes that PCATI is a business with turnover of millions a year. 

Kotef and Amir conclude their paper “by arguing that these apparatuses rest on, and are positioned to produce, a specific concept of justice. By obstinately exonerating the GSS of wrongdoing, and by completely disregarding the harms inflicted on the Palestinian plaintiffs, Mavtan presents allegations of torture as falsehoods. Consequently, plaintiffs are presented as fabricators and exaggerators—if not outright malicious—in their search for justice. It is hence a system that does not only deflect allegations pertaining to Israel’s violations of human rights, but also equates justice with invalidating such allegations.”

Kotef and Amir have been profiled by Israel Academia Monitor before. In 2019, IAM reported on BDS activists working at Israeli universities, and Merav Amir was among them. IAM noted she is a long-time supporter of BDS. She was a contributor to the 2012 book The Case for Sanctions Against Israel. In 2015, Amir was described by a Dutch-Palestinian initiative as “an activist in the BDS movement.” She is also one of the initiators of a 2016 petition “Jews Across Northern Ireland Support Sanctions Against Israel,” stating clearly, “We support boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, as called for by Palestinian civil society.” The petition also claims that “The State of Israel does not represent the Jewish people” and protests against those who “conflated Jews with Zionists, which is frankly offensive.” 

In 2021, in an IAM post titled “Radical Left-Wing Polemics: Hagar Kotef as a Case in Point,” IAM stated we often report on radical scholars who have recruited political-activist students, nurtured them, and provided them with academic positions, either in their own departments or helped them to move abroad. As IAM made clear, there is a flourishing market for Israeli pro-Palestinian academics in the West who provide a cover for BDS and other forms of delegitimization of Israel. IAM noted that Kotef, a former student of Profs. Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki at Tel Aviv University, was recruited by SOAS. As well known, SOAS is a hotbed of anti-Israel activity. At the time, Kotef was the subject of an article that Haaretz published about Israeli left-wing academics who moved abroad because of alleged difficulties of working in Israel. Haaretz wrote that Kotef “was active in Machsom Watch and other left-wing movements.” IAM also discussed Kotef’s book, titled The Colonizing Self Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel, stating that the book was full of left-wing polemics. The acknowledgment in her book reads like a who’s who of anti-Israel radicals. She wrote, “At Soas, my new home, Laleh Khalili, Ruba Salih, Rahul Rao, Charles Tripp, Rafeef Ziadah, and Carlo Bonura have read the manuscript or significant parts of it. The insights and thoughts they provided, their critique and their questions, have been essential to the process of writing it and thinking through its many predicaments.”

To be clear, Israel Academia Monitor doesn’t have the tools to determine whether MAVTAN made the right decision not to press charges against its interrogators. But one thing is certain: Kotef and Amir are not neutral examiners, not least because of their long-time anti-Israel political activism. 

More to the point, the APSA Award should ring bells among all those who are concerned about the delegitimization of Israel in the international arena.  

By highlighting Hajjar’s statement on liberal regimes using torture as a legal means, Kotef and Amir signal their support for the illiberal regimes.

REFERENCES:

Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir Receive the 2026 Heinz I. Eulau Award for Perspectives on Politics for “Torture’s Bureaucracy and the ‘Legitimacy Effect’”

Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir Receive the 2026 Heinz I. Eulau Award for Perspectives on Politics for “Torture’s Bureaucracy and the ‘Legitimacy Effect’”

July 15, 2026

The Heinz I. Eulau Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best article published in the APSA journal Perspectives on Politics.

Citation from the Award Committee:

Israel’s Ministry of Justice has a small department in Tel Aviv called “The Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service Interrogators” that handles complaints against the Israeli General Security Service regarding the use of torture and other extreme methods of interrogation. Although it has reviewed more than 1,450 complaints, there have been no criminal charges. Despite this, the authors of this paper argue that this unit serves an extremely legitimate purpose. The committee was impressed with the paper’s breadth, scope and multi-method approach, including archival research, ethnography, and interviews on the ground. The authors offer both new empirical insights and deep theoretical engagement on a topic that is widely relevant not only to the discipline, but also to society at large. Not only is the topic of wide interest to a range of readers in (and beyond) the discipline, it is also incredibly well-written and deeply engaging. From a methodological perspective, this paper was also a breath of fresh air. As survey experiments and “big data” studies dominate (the mainstream of) the discipline, it was refreshing to see researchers go into the field and do human-facing research, particularly in a very difficult and often dangerous context.

Hagar Kotef is a Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London. She is the author of Movement and the Ordering of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2015) and The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the Spitz Prize, the C.B. Macpherson Award, and the Yale H. Ferguson Award. Her next book, The Civil Infrastructure of Torture: Administrating Violence in Israel/Palestine, is forthcoming with Oxford UP.  Kotef is the co-editor of Theory&Event.

Merav Amir is a Reader of Human Geography at the School of Natural and Built Environment and a Fellow of the Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. She is the 2021 recipient of the Emma Goldman Award of the FLAX Foundation for her contributions to feminist research and knowledge in Europe, the 2023 Emma Goldman Fellow of the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences, and a member of the Geography and Geosciences Committee of the Royal Irish Academy. Her research has been published in Perspectives on Politics, Environment and Planning D, International Political Sociology, and Antipode.

APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Sharon Austin (Chair) of the University of Florida, Rebecca Thorpe of the University of Washington, and Samantha Majic of John Jay College of Criminal Justice

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https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/670037201/Torture_s_bureaucracy.pdf

https://soas-repository.worktribe.com/OutputFile/353733

Torture’s Bureaucracy and the “Legitimacy Effect”

Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir

Corresponding author: Hagar Kotef is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London (hk11@soas.ac.uk, UK), and serves as the co-editor of Theory & Event. She is the author of Movement and the Ordering of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2015) and The Colonizing Self: Home and Homelessness in Israel Palestine (Duke University Press, 2020; winner of the 2022 Spitz Prize, C.B. Macpherson Award, and the Yale H. Ferguson Award).

Merav Amir  is a Reader of Human Geography in Queen’s University Belfast (m.amir@qub.ac.uk, UK). She is the 2021 recipient of the Emma Goldman Award for outstanding feminist scholarship and a member of the Committee for Geographical Sciences of the Royal Irish Academy. Her research has been published in Environment and Planning D, Antipode, International Political Sociology, Environment and Planning F, and Geografiska Annaler.

This article tells the story of one small department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice: “The Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service (GSS) Interrogators” (in Hebrew: Mavtan). Tasked with examining complaints of torture in GSS interrogations, and determining whether they merit launching a criminal investigation, Mavtan has reviewed more than 1,450 complaints to date. None of these, however, had ever led to criminal charges. By analysing this failure, we tell a segment of the story of torture in Israel and, more broadly, of the legal bureaucracy that makes state and colonial violence possible. Despite the failure to produce concrete outcomes, Mavtan is a very industrious unit. We argue that this extensive bureaucratic labor creates a semblance of the rule of law by performing an adherence to hallmarks of good governance, such as transparency and accountability. Paraphrasing Mitchell (1999), we call this semblance the “legitimacy effect,” as it works to produce state legitimacy on two levels: internationally, to cordon off external interventions, and domestically, to defuse the internal tension between torture and democracy. It hence allows torture to emerge as a problem that may be addressed procedurally, without ever contending with the violence and the violations of international law it necessarily entails.

Torture needs a bureaucracy. 

^—Henry Shue 2006, 236 

What distinguishes torture by liberal regimes from illiberal regimes is the energy devoted to frame government policies as “legal.” 

^—Lissa Hajjar 2011, 202

In a plain office building in Tel Aviv, home to Israel’s Ministry of Justice (MoJ), sits a small department called “The Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service (GSS) Interrogators (in Hebrew, Mavtan ). So small a department indeed, that in its first twenty years it only had a single member of staff (Turkel 2010). The department is tasked with handling complaints against the Israeli General Security Service (GSS) regarding the use of torture and other illicit interrogation methods. That is, it is tasked with rendering GSS interrogators accountable for any violations of the categorical prohibition of torture dictated by the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, of which Israel is a signatory. This is by no means a trivial task. It is estimated that many of the hundreds of Palestinians arrested by the Israeli security forces every year are subjected to interrogation methods that constitute torture and other inhuman or degrading treatment (TIDT) according to International Law (Addameer 2022; Al Haq 2011). This scale alone, which has been documented before October 7th, 2023 and since then has only mounted, renders such internal examinations crucial. And yet despite the extensive evidence of the systematic use of TIDT against Palestinian interrogees and despite receiving more than 1,450 complaints of torture from its establishment in 1992 to date, Mavtan has recommended opening a criminal investigation in only three cases, and even those failed to yield indictments.

doi:10.1017/S1537592724001105

1

© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

Other scholars have called us to account for the violence embedded in what Akhil Gupta (2012, 23) identifies as “the very procedures of bureaucracy”; violence that is embedded into rigid procedures, into bureaucracy’s facelessness, its routinized practices and structures, and which often remains hidden or at any rate is rarely thematized as violence. Our task here, however, extends beyond exploring how Mavtan, as an example of bureaucratic structures that are designed to mitigate or address forms of violence, fails due to the nature of bureaucracy itself, or due to what Nick Cheesman (2019, 179) identifies in the case of Myanmar as the brutality concealed behind “the banality of paperwork.” Mavtan’s failure to deliver justice to torture victims is evident to the extent that it need not be our conclusion (Kretzmer and Ronen 2021; PCATI 2022; Weill and Ballas 2013). This failure rather serves as our point of departure. Examining the establishment of this unit and its mode of operation reveals that Mavtan has little to do with preventing torture or securing human rights, and more with shielding Israel from interventions by external judiciaries.

The structural and procedural robustness of the Israeli judicial system has long been instrumental in fending Israel against international interventions concerning its treatment of Palestinians (due to the complementarity principle, which limits the jurisdiction of international courts over cases which are adjudicated domestically). This became most evident in January 2024, when Israel stood in front of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague to defend itself against the accusation of genocide brought by South Africa. Alongside the claim that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza, the merits of Israel’s legal system played a key role in the arguments presented by Israel’s legal representatives. Addressing the court, Gilad Noam, Israel’s Deputy Attorney General for International Law, urged the ICJ to dismiss South Africa’s case by claiming that the Israeli judiciary is “effective, independent and impartial.” He argued that as it enjoys “full institutional independence” and “ensures accountability,” the court can rely on Israel’s legal system to prosecute any breaches of international law (ICJ CR 2024/2, 72-3).¹ Mavtan is one example of such an “effective, independent and impartial” judicial unit that presumably “ensures accountability.” In this sense, it serves as an emblem for the entire Israeli judicio-bureaucracy on which Israel relies to cordon off international interventions.

As we will argue, Mavtan plays this role through extensive bureaucratic work that performatively abides by the principles of transparency, accountability, and proper relations of governance and oversight, which, in turn, adheres to a particular language of procedural democracy. Our stakes here therefore go beyond the operation of Mavtan as a specific unit, and also beyond the cases of both torture (as a particular form of state violence) and Israel (as a specific context). The story of Mavtan shows how bureaucratic apparatuses can mitigate the tensions between the rule of law and the practices and structures of state violence.

Our analysis draws on exclusive access to the archive of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), granted to us as part of a three-year collaborative research project conducted between 2021 and 2024. The archive houses more than 6,000 cases documenting the legal support PCATI had provided to torture victims since 1991. For this analysis, we focused on cases filed between 2012 and 2022 (125 cases in total). Available documents included the plaintiffs’ depositions, the formal complaints submitted to Mavtan on their behalf by PCATI, transcripts of Mavtan’s examinations (the questionings of GSS interrogators),² dismissal decisions by the Mavtan Comptroller, and appeals against these decisions.³

The analysis is also based on 24 responses to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests PCATI received between 2006 and 2023, and on transcripts of other communications between the organization and officials in the MoJ during this period.

Our findings were further informed by our ethnographic research with the PCATI team, carried out between 2021 and 2024, and on countless conversations with the organization’s current and former staff, who shared with us their vast experience, insights, and observations. Additional data were gathered through interviews with human rights experts who have decades of experience representing torture victims: Sahar Fransis, Lea Tzemel and Avigdor Feldman; with three former GSS interrogators, with the Mavtan Comptroller, Shlomo Abramzon, and with Mavtan’s prior and current directors, Jana Mudzgurishvilly and Guy Asher.⁴

Developing the wider argument by focusing on Mavtan’s work and through these specific resources continues a tradition of thinking about bureaucracies shaped under and after colonial rule by way of their materiality: the circulation of documents, correspondences, affidavits, appeals, requests for information, opaque procedural mazes, delayed responses, lengthy waits, evaluating official and informal communications. As such research has shown, these are the praxes of the everyday that configure political relations, structures, and values (cf. Auyero 2012; Gupta 2012; Hull 2012).

In what follows we first situate our analysis within a brief history of the relationship between the GSS and the Israeli judiciary (in the first section), and then explicate our theoretical argument more systematically (in the second section). We propose seeing Mavtan as part of a system geared to establish state legitimacy, which is oriented both “outwards” (to shield Israel from international interventions) and “inwards” (to produce its selfimage as a democracy). We continue by reviewing Mavtan’s history and structure and presenting the idea of bureaucratic laboriousness which emerged through the institutional transformations the unit has undergone (third and fourth sections; “Mavtan: Structure and History” and “Bureaucratic Industriousness”). The notion of bureaucratic laboriousness is empirically explored in the next two sections where we show how a system that has been assigned to deliver justice and is predicated on transparency and accountability, is in fact constituted to fail: the fifth section (“Accountability: Meticulous Examinations”) focuses on accountability by analyzing how Mavtan examines complaints of torture and ill-treatment. We show that these examinations are not merely ineffective, but are weaponized to counteract allegations of torture. Turning to transparency, the following section (“Transparency: The Non-Recording Cameras”) examines a system of close-circuit cameras introduced into GSS interrogation rooms and shows how, despite bringing an unprecedented level of transparency, this system was configured to conceal, rather than reveal, the fact of torture. Both sections thus complete a similar trajectory: both examine the principles of good governance underpinning the establishment of Mavtan, expound on how they were implemented to ensure they fail, and analyse the effects of this continuous failure and the impunity it effectively grants GSS interrogators. As Moyukh Chatterjee (2019, 22) identifies, such impunity is not the result of democracies’ “breakdown, a state of exception, corruption, and illegality,” but also what ultimately constitutes legality itself. We conclude by arguing that these apparatuses rest on, and are positioned to produce, a specific concept of justice. By obstinately exonerating the GSS of wrongdoing, and by completely disregarding the harms inflicted on the Palestinian plaintiffs, Mavtan presents allegations of torture as falsehoods. Consequently, plaintiffs are presented as fabricators and exaggerators^—if not outright malicious^—in their search for justice. It is hence a system that does not only deflect allegations pertaining to Israel’s violations of human rights, but also equates justice with invalidating such allegations.

A Brief History of Torture in Israel

The working of Mavtan we review in this paper is to be situated within a longer history of the use of torture in Israel (or more accurately, a history of the relations between GSS’s torture practices and the Israeli judiciary) for which we cannot do justice here. The first chapter in this history would begin in the early state years and end roughly in 1987. During this period, the executive and judiciary branches preferred to turn a blind eye to how the GSS conducted itself, allowing the GSS to effectively operate with full impunity (Al Haq 1990; Cohen and Golan 1992; Langer and Bishara 1984).⁵

In 1987, following a series of high-profile scandals which exposed the GSS’s unruliness, the Landau Commission was established and marked the beginning of a new era. Formally, this was the era in which Israel introduced judicial oversight over the GSS interrogation methods, also in light of the coming into force of the UN Convention Against Torture in that same year ( marking the potential problematics torture would pose for Israel in the international arena henceforth). Effectively, however, this era marked the introduction of torture into the Israeli legal system; torture became an ordered and sanctioned form of state violence (Hajjar 2004). Indeed, the Landau Commission justified the resort to what it euphemistically called “moderate measures of physical pressure” during interrogations as long as these measures were not too “excessive”, and most famously introduced a classified list of authorized torture methods (Landau Commission 1987, 72).⁶ In so doing, it constituted a seminal change in the relationship between torture and the law that would later be adopted by the United States (Hajjar 2006; Khalili 2013; Yoo 2012). For the sake of our argument here, it should be noted that this commission was mainly troubled by the fact that the GSS evaded judicial oversight, that whenever allegations of torture were raised in court, the interrogators involved would simply lie under oath,⁷ and that these jeopardized “the image of the State as a lawabiding polity” (Landau Commission 1987, 49, emphasis added). The Commission therefore took upon itself the task of mending the relationship between the GSS and the Israeli judicial system, including, among other measures, recommending the establishment of Mavtan ( Kremnitzer 1989).

The next significant milestone in that history was the 1999 landmark ruling of the Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) in Public Committee Against Torture in Israel vs. State of Israel. The ruling, which was interpreted at the time as “a bold prohibition” of the use of TIDT, introduced, in effect, “a torture policy” (Mann and Shatz 2010, 60-62). What has been “truly new” following this decision, Mann and Shatz argue, “is the administrative structure in which torture is managed” (63). While it outlawed torture and made way for holding interrogators criminally responsible for using TIDT, the ruling also introduced the “necessity defense.” Adopted from the French-Algerian context (Macmaster 2004), the “necessity defense” could shield interrogators from criminal liability, post-factum, if during an interrogation they believe that they had to use illegal interrogation methods to thwart an imminent threat. Shafir (2007) thus claims that rather than forbidding torture altogether, this was a doctrine of restraint. The assumption was that if interrogators knew that they might be indited for using TIDT after the fact, they would be deterred from resorting to such methods in all but the very rare exceptions. And yet, as Smadar Ben Natan (2019) demonstrates, the ruling allowed the creation of a mechanism^—that was soon thereafter formalized and widened by the Attorney General^—for a-priori authorization, enabling a de-facto procedural licensing of torture (see also Mann and Shatz 2010). The doctrine of restraint nevertheless remained the system’s implicit rationale. Mavtan, which is tasked with determining whether a criminal investigation should be conducted against GSS agents who allegedly used illicit interrogation methods, is hence a key node in this doctrine. Our intervention belongs here, in what can be seen as the latter days of the second chapter of the longer history of torture in Israel.

At the time of writing this article, in the winter of 2023^– 2024, there are strong indications that following Hamas’s attack on October 7, torture by the GSS has entered a new era. In response to what was the deadliest attack on Israeli civilians in the history of the conflict, Israel significantly relaxed, if not completely abandoned, its rules of engagement in the war it conducts on Gaza and, differently so, against Palestinians more generally. In many respects, its adherence to International Law has all but disappeared in both practice and rhetoric (Abraham 2023). At the same time, Palestinians in Israeli prisons and in a newly established IDF detention camp for detainees from Gaza, have been subjected to torture, with little to no restraint. Testimonies tell of unprecedented levels of wardens’ and soldiers’ violence, including sexual violence (Abraham 2024). These were met by a clear unwillingness of the Israeli authorities to intervene, let alone investigate and hold responsible those involved (PCATI 2024). While testimonies from people interrogated by the GSS during that period have yet to emerge, it would come as little surprise if such interrogations have also intensified, and that after October 7, new levels of violence have been practiced also by the GSS.

Nevertheless, as the Israeli defense in the ICJ clearly shows, the rationalities which brought Mavtan into being, and which are at the heart of our analysis here, are still at play even in this post-October 7 era.

Democracy, Legitimacy, Violence: The Argument

In her analysis of torture in India and the United States, Jinee Lokaneeta (2011, 5) shows that torture makes “a particularly paradoxical proposition” for liberal states. This is because “the standard narratives on the history of torture have created a discourse of impermissibility of torture in modernliberaldemocracies”(8;seealsoLuban2005).Thus, to sustain its image as a liberal democracy, Israel needs to contend with its systematic deployment of torture. This, we argue,iswhatMavtandoes.Mavtan(asanemblemformany other judicio-bureucratic systems) bestows democratic semblance on Israel as it continues to torture Palestinians. Our argument, then, joins a large body of work that has shown how various mechanisms and discourses designed to restrain state violence have not merely failed to protect disenfranchised individuals and groups, but, further, often serve to enable the propagation of violence (Gordon and Perugini 2020; Kolsky 2019; Sanders 2018). Within such mechanisms, we focus on the routine practices of judicial bureaucracy, thus contributing also to the analysis of violence and bureaucracy, particularly in (post-)colonial settings (Berda 2017 2022; Gupta 2012; Mathur 2016).

In the case at hand, the mechanics of legal bureaucracy produce what we call, as a shorthand and as a paraphrase of Timothy Mitchell (1999), “the legitimacy effect”. “Legitimacy” operates here both internationally and internally (as an investment in a certain self-image) and corresponds to the notion of a liberal democracy. In this context it is enacted through a cluster of principles, including the rule of law, legal accountability, and a specific concept of good governance, to legitimize a state of affairs that is essentially non-democratic. If for Mitchell “the State arises from techniques that enable mundane material practices to take on the appearance of an abstract, nonmaterial form,” (77; see also Gupta 1995, 378) here we argue such practices can sometimes make way not just for the state as such to emerge, but further allow the state to assume a particular form or identity. Drawing on Butler’s (1993) notion of performativity, Cynthia Weber (1998) has already argued that much like individuals, states should be seen as subjects-in-process whose identities are shaped through reiterated material practices (see also Edensor 2020; Visoka 2018).

At play here is what Elif Babül (2017, 14) identifies in her research on Turkey as an “identity crisis,” in which “the desire to belong” (to the EU, and to a certain notion of Europe or the family of liberal democracies more generally) drives introducing principles of good governance and a language committed to human rights, while other national interests and dynamics undermine the actualization of these principles. Eventually, bureaucratic attentiveness to the protection of individual rights and liberties (demonstrated through increasing “markers of accountability and openness to scrutiny,” “improving bureaucratic performance,” a language of professionalism) works in tandem with (and even facilitates) the violation of those very principles (Babül 2017, 63, 9).⁸

Much like Turkey, Israel has both internal and external motivations to identify itself as a democracy ( emerging both from a similar “desire to belong” to the category of liberal democracies and from its susceptibility to international pressure), yet its ongoing control over the occupied Palestinian territory and over the occupied Palestinian population means it cannot align itself with the dictations of international laws and norms in full. And similarly to Babül’s findings, attempts to bridge this unbridgeable gap often take place through “democratic performativity” that emphasizes what Vivien Schmidt (2013) termed

“throughputs”: processes pertaining to procedural competence which allow states to gain their legitimacy.

What we show in our analysis of Mavtan should accordingly be seen as a dual act. First, much like Mitchell, Bigo (2012) and others, we claim that abstract and normative concepts must be understood as emerging from the tangible, from the operations of concrete institutions, agencies and organizations, their structures, procedures and regulations, and from the workings of bureaucracy. Interlinking the abstract and the empirical, we can see how specific conceptual clusters emerge through the work of Mavtan and other judicial bureaus. Second, this cluster amounts to an act of substitution in which procedural competence come to stand for that which they presumably deliver, such as, most evidently in this case, the rule of law. That is, by going through the motions of proper governance, professionalism, efficacy, accountability, or transparency^—which, in turn, underwrite a more abstract language: “the rule of law,” “democracy,” and potentially even “justice”^—Mavtan puts into operation an apparatus of legitimacy, whilst allowing torture to persist. In this process, what we identify below as “lapses” (Grinberg 2018; Stein 2021), performative failures (Butler 1990, Kotef and Amir 2007) or “glitches” (Lisle 2021), have a structural role: they mitigate, if not fuse, a notion of democracy (constricted to its procedural meaning) with Israel’s nondemocratic rule.

The e^ffort to bridge this gap^—between a language of democracy and a prolonged military occupation^—appears in many of the discussions pertaining to Mavtan. While it is never articulated as such, and is always coded through talking about Israel’s “security challenges” or “unique circumstances”, these “circumstances” are, for the most part, Israel’s colonial control over the Palestinians. For instance, when asked to rule on the legality of Mavtan following an appeal by PCATI and others who argued Mavtan’s very existence obstructs justice, Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein quoted himself declaring that “Israel is an abnormal normal country.” He continues by explaining:

it is normal, because it is a vibrant democracy in which fundamental rights, including free choice, freedom of expression, and the independence of the judiciary and the Attorney General, are upheld …. It is abnormal, because the threats to its existence have yet to be removed … . The challenge is to shape a legal system, on this subject as well, which faces both the normal and the abnormal at the same time. In these circumstances, I am of the opinion that the mechanism for reviewing complaints filed by ISA [GSS] interrogatees [i.e., Mavtan] meets legal standards and that it is reasonable on its merits”. (HCJ 1265/11 2012, para.35, emphasis added).

Responding to the June 2024 ICJ ruling in the SA vs Israel case, Dina Zilber (2024), a former Deputy to the Attorney General, explicitly articulates what is at stake, and why it is so crucial to insist on presenting Israel as a democratic state, “abnormal” as it may be. According to her, the hearing has shown that “the professionalism, independence and autonomy of the public legal counsel and of the judiciary system,” which attest to Israel’s “democratic character,” protect Israel from extensive international intervention. As such, she argues, this system is “part of the national security of the state,” (emphasis added) and is even “necessary to secure its survival”. Note how Israel’s “democratic character,” which amounts to the “legal standards” Rubinstein required, appears as protecting the state rather than protecting human rights. By producing what we termed above “the legitimacy effect,” it works to shield Israel from interventions, interventions which are perceived as a threat to its security.⁹

The role of this democracy, or the image thereof, became most evident as the sixth Netanyahu government attempted to curb the independence of the Israeli judicial system as of the winter of 2023. Many of the Israelis who objected to the government’s plans explicitly vocalized what has long been a latent perception: the independence of the judiciary^—which was explicitly identi^fied as the core of Israel’s democracy^—serves as a “body armour” that protects the state’s security interests (Kotef and Amir 2023). The former Attorney General, Avichai Mendelblit, for instance, warned that “the moment that the justice system in Israel isn’t perceived as [independent], Israel will lose international legitimacy for its military operations and will no longer be shielded from accusations of war crimes.” (again, note the importance of “perceptions”) ( Weitz 2023; see also AGI 2023). Many in the streets and on countless written interventions vocalized a similar understanding: that democracy is equitable to the independence of the judiciary system, and that this independence is key to cordoning off persecutions in international courts or other courts internationally.

Our analysis of the link between “democracy” and torture is thus tangential to Darius Rejali’s (2007) work on the particularities of torture techniques in democratic contexts. Both projects show how a particular adherence to some form of democratic principles or language allows torture to persist, even if it requires some adjustments. As Rejali shows, in the case of Israel, as in many other contexts, adhering to the principles of democracy had not ended torture, but had rather led to the modification of torture techniques ( Ben-Natan 2019). We, however, focus on how the problem that torture poses for the perception of Israel as a democracy (in and of itself, but also as an example of colonial violence more generally) is allegedly resolved by introducing bureaucratic solutions. It should go without saying that such solutions are conditioned on, and reproduce, the complete side-lining of the question of torture itself and the rights of its victims. In this sense too, we look here at torture not only as one element within the problematics at the core of Israel’s concept of democracy, but also as an emblem of this problematics as a whole: it is only by discounting its human rights violations, by completely disregarding the rights of Palestinians, and only by utterly side-lining the political question of Palestine, that Israel can call itself a democracy at all.

Mavtan: Structure and History

Individuals who wish to take legal action for being subjected to torture or ill-treatment by the GSS are required to first file a complaint with Mavtan. Mavtan then conducts a preliminary examination of their complaint and submits its findings and recommendations to the Mavtan Comptroller.¹⁰ The Mavtan Comptroller, who is a deputy of Israel’s Attorney General, decides whether or not to refer the case to the police for a criminal investigation. The first conclusion can be stated already here: Mavtan is predicated on a contradiction. It is simultaneously the conduit for providing legal remedy for victims of torture, and an obstacle to their ability to see justice. The requirement that complaints must first go through Mavtan, and that victims do not have direct access to criminal proceedings, is what constitutes it as an obstacle (HCJ 1265/11 2012).

The very existence of Mavtan can be seen as an example of what Nasser Hussain (2007) referred to as “hyperlegality” which, he argued, characterizes the aftermath of British colonial rule^—a mode of governance that creates complex, fragmented bureaucratic units and authorities. The fragmentation of the bureaucratic system then “fractures the process of action” into semi-judicial bodies, that accomplish the role of doing very little while reassuring the public that a responsible course of action has taken place (523; see also Raman 2017). Yael Berda (2017) similarly shows that far from the Weberian principle of rationality, (post)colonial bureaucracies are convoluted, self-contradictory, and often nonsensical systems, which ultimately perpetuate the racially differential logic of colonial rule, forming a system the colonized can never successfully navigate.

Yet Mavtan does more than mounting additional hurdles and delays or fragmenting the complaint process. The preliminary examination necessarily impairs the integrity of the future investigations by delaying them, tampering with evidence and allowing the accused to better prepare, if not coordinate their testimonies. The institutional requirement for conducting a preliminary examination therefore means that any criminal investigation would already be compromised well before it is launched (if ever). It should therefore come as little surprise that Mavtan has proven to be an insurmountable institutional obstacle for torture victims.

Mavtan was established in 1992 as an internal unit within the GSS. As to be expected, and as highlighted repeatedly in both internal and external reviews, during this period Mavtan’s ability to effectively examine GSS’s conduct was curtailed by its positioning within GSS, and the unit was largely ineffectual (HCJ 5722/12 2017; Turkel 2010; UNCAT 2009). Moreover, the employee assigned to run Mavtan did not have the competence to fulfil this role. A 2007 MoJ review found that he “is very limited in his skills as an investigator” and “does not know how to confront GSS interrogators with diverse findings and conflicting testimonies” (quoted in Turkel 2010, 415). Mudzgurishvilly (who would later head Mavtan), insisted that the unit was completely useless at that time, if it could be said that it existed at all.¹¹ Indeed, despite reviewing close to 800 complaints between 2001 and the end of 2013 Mavtan failed to find even a single case warranting a criminal investigation (PCATI and FIDH 2022).

This impotence, however, served a purpose: it resolved the inherent tension between the requirement to fully investigate torture and the need to prevent the exposure of GSS’s interrogation methods to judicial review. Mavtan allowed Israel to exhibit that its judiciary has the capacity to scrutinize the security agency, while shielding the bench from contending with GSS interrogators who were evidently violating not only international law, but also Israel’s own legislation.

While Mavtan’s ineptitude allowed Israel to cover up its use of torture for many years, this solution did not withstand increasing external pressures. With Israel facing growing criticism for its (mis-)handling of allegations of torture,¹² Mavtan’s evident inactivity and, more critically, its lack of independence, became more difficult to justify, and in 2014 the unit was transferred to the MoJ.

Bureaucratic Industriousness

^—Just look at the numbers; the numbers speak for themselves.

^—Guy Asher

The transfer of Mavtan to the MoJ was accompanied by several operational changes. Most visibly, the unit has expanded significantly: between 2014 and 2022, it grew from a single person to a staff of ten, including four investigators.¹³ Its volume of activity similarly increased: slowly but surely, it started to conduct lengthier examinations and to issue more detailed reports. It also digitized its data collection and filing systems, and began to operate with a greater level of transparency: information is now shared more freely with human rights organizations, and Mavtan’s examination reports (albeit redacted) are made available to plaintiffs and their lawyers. Yet the final outcome changed very little: the absolute majority of all complaints are still dismissed. Out of close to 600 complaints filed from 2014 to 2023, Mavtan Comptroller recommended launching a criminal investigation in three cases alone, and these, too, were eventually closed.

In its present incarnation Mavtan hence became a highly industrious unit; an industrious unit whose work still amounts to nothing. Mavtan’s industriousness manifests through elaborate examinations that come up empty handed; modes of narration that evade blunt deception but do not reveal the truth; ways for producing accountability that lead away from disclosure; and institutional mechanisms for sustaining the object of knowledge in an indeterminate realm^—not fully concealed, yet never out in the open. Despite ample evidence that illegal interrogation measures are prevalent, Mavtan’s examinations repeatedly fail to lead to criminal investigations in all but the extremely rare occasions. Yet even though it does not produce the outcomes it is formally tasked with delivering, Mavtan’s work does have a significant effect: It is precisely through Mavtan’s heightened activity, its diligence, its productiveness, that Israel can demonstrate that allegations are examined, thus deflecting accusations of collusion. The unit’s operational intensity thus lends itself to the claim that Israel’s juridical system offers justice to GSS interrogees, despite all evidence to the contrary.

In our interview, Asher, the current head of Mavtan, kept referring to himself as “a man of numbers” and returning to “the numbers” which^—he insisted ^—“speak for themselves.” The sheer weight of numbers, he seemed to imply, proved that Mavtan was performing its work efficiently. While he predominantly referred to the volume of processed complaints, he also referred to other numbers: of investigators employed, the number of days it took to launch an examination, months spent processing each complaint. But when we tried to ask about one number, the number of criminal investigations that had been opened thus far, and whether this number^—three^—was too low, he got agitated and reprimanded us for insisting on asking the wrong questions (Asher 9/22). Mudzgurishvilly, the first head of Mavtan following its move to the MoJ, similarly stated that judging Mavtan through this figure is simply wrong. When it comes to legal cases, she said, statistics are irrelevant, and one has to look at each case individually (Mudzgurishvilly 10/22; see also Grinberg 2016). This number, arguably the most important number since it could have proven that Mavtan secures access to justice for torture victims, is the one number they both discounted. Those other numbers, that “speak for themselves,” that testify for nothing but Mavtan’s vigorousness, have thus come to stand for the meaningful indicators of Mavtan’s effectiveness. Devoid of content, these numbers are what Mavtan is there to produce: a mode of enumeration that is used, according to Ken MacLean, as a practice establishing credibility and authority by creating “evidentiary weight through the repetition of numbered sources” (2022, 198). Indeed numbers, Diane Nelson noted, can do “magical things”, such as creating something “out of, quite literally, nothing” (2015, 27).

Mavtan’s effectiveness, we should note, is not simply produced through vigorousness. As Asher stressed, it is also demonstrated by Mavtan’s compliance with the principles of good governance and a well-operating bureaucracy, which, he said, are key to any democratic society, such as accountability, transparency, and maintaining the appropriate relations between state institutions. In the next two sections we look more closely at how accountability and transparency are manufactured.

Accountability: Meticulous Examinations

As noted earlier, Mavtan’s transfer to the MoJ in 2014 revamped its operation^—and above all, its examinations. Since then, the examination team has been expanded to include more staff; more examinations are opened each year; the examinations are more extensive; more of the involved parties are interviewed in each examination; these interviews are more detailed; and the protocols of these examinations are much more elaborate.

To better understand how this dynamism fails to translate into meaningful results, let us look briefly at one example. In a recent complaint, a Palestinian woman stated that on the thirty-fifth day of her interrogation, exhausted from incessant sleep deprivation and in a deteriorated physical state,she was taken to a room which the interrogators called the “VIP room” and the wardens called “Room 220”. The room was pitch dark. One may begin to imagine what it means to be placed in a dark room amid a violent interrogation, particularly when a woman is interrogated by men; not being able to tell who was in the room or where they were; being shouted at by people one cannot see, not knowing how close the interrogators are; suddenly feeling someone up close; constantly being scared of being attacked. Being in that room was so intimidating that the female soldier who was there to accompany the interrogation¹⁴ felt too distressed herself, and very quickly left the room.

The decision letter notifying that her complaint had been dismissed revealed that as part of the preliminary examination, an investigator was sent to find whether the interrogation facility indeed had such a room. After verifying that Room 220 exists, the investigator reported that “The examination I conducted revealed that the room has two lighting options: dimmed lights and full lights.” “When using the dimmed light option,” the report continued, “I was still able to see all objects in the room. In fact, from each position within the room I was able to see the entire room … without any difficulties.”¹⁵ He then called his supervisor on a video call, placed the phone in several areas of the room, and made sure the supervisor could clearly see him. These “findings” then served to disqualify the complaint.

The absurdity of this “finding” is obvious. Light switches can be used to switch the light off. One may further question why a “dim light” option is installed in an interrogation room. But what is significant for us here is the lengths to which Mavtan went in order to repudiate the complaint: an investigator travelled to a remote interrogation facility (roughly a 90-minute drive in each direction); searched for the room; checked the different options of the light switches; examined the room from different angles; repeated this examination on a video call with his supervisor, and then composed a report detailing these findings. It is through this kind of exuberant activity that Mavtan can argue that its examinations are thorough and demonstrate the seriousness with which it treats complaints. Yet such an examination can only be understood as a parody; a mimicry of an “exhaustive” enquiry, a show of industriousness tactically deployed to fabricate “accountability.” And much like Butler’s (1990) understanding of parody, through this mimicking of an “examination,” or perhaps a “rigorous examination” (alongside other procedures, some of which we reviewed earlier and some we identify later), clusters of bureaucratic principles emerge: “oversight”, “due process” and, by extension, also “the rule of law” or even “justice-making”, while rendering them all void of substance^—a façade. Yet since this parody of an examination supplants an earnest one, it undermines the very possibility of the latter, and hence has a very material effect: it shields torture from justice-making.

The issue of the examination’s content (or lack thereof) becomes particularly pertinent in Mavtan’s questioning of GSS agents. Mavtan takes great care in these questionings, making sure that all the interrogators involved are summoned and that every single detail of the complaint is addressed. This seriousness, however, only serves to obscure the fact that nothing of any significance ever emerges in these conversations.

In many respects, Mavtan’s questioning of GSS interrogators adheres to a well-rehearsed structure. Drawing on Foucault (1978, 18), it can be seen as an “institutional incitement to discourse”, in which the subject is probed and solicited to provide the minutest of details. But it is not the truth that GSS agents are prompted to disclose; neither^—technically speaking^—are they asked to lie. Imitating the confessional act, what we have here is the art of profession that says nothing; the institutionalization, in a way, of the mechanism of a meaningless disclosure when silence is no longer an option.

Still, these questionings provide an abundance of irrelevant information. Asked about a particular interrogation, interrogators can recall the finest details. One remembered bringing a particular type of chocolate to an interrogee or recalled that the latter asked for a newspaper in Arabic, which the interrogator was able to find at a nearby corner shop. Another remembered that his fellow interrogator brought to an interrogee fresh clothes and falafel.¹⁶ Interrogators seemed to have accurate recollection of the exact chair on which the interrogee sat (of a normal height, in a comfortable position), or that the interrogee was always allowed to go to the toilet whenever they needed. They could recall the number of times the interrogee had asked to pray and that they were always allowed to do so, or how many hours of sleep they got (again, always enough hours). This level of detail serves both GSS and Mavtan. It allows the GSS interrogators to demonstrate that they are fully cooperative while substantiating their account as both accurate and full. Concurrently, by extracting a wealth of information (albeit completely irrelevant), Mavtan’s investigators can show that an exhaustive examination had taken place and that due process had been followed. No less importantly, this wealth of detail is geared to divert attention from the fact of torture. Both Mavtan and GSS thus seem to share the same desire: that Mavtan incites the GSS interrogator to talk and yet say very little, together performatively producing a mirage of accountability.

Importantly, while some (irrelevant) information is provided in detail, questions which pertain to criminal conduct are evaded. When asked about the use of physical or verbal violence, or about other acts which could implicate them in torture or illicit interrogation methods, interrogators respond laconically and often claim that they remember nothing.

The intensive work that goes into the lengthy questioning, and then to the composition of lengthy reports (demonstrating the lengthy questioning), is accompanied by a third layer of bureaucratic labor: censorship. Significant sections of the reports are redacted by the GSS before complainants’ lawyers get to see them. Importantly, the laborious censorship is no less integral to the performativity of bureaucratic industriousness. The long black lines serve to substantiate Mavtan’s competence, testifying to its diligence, implying that investigators did not shy away from asking difficult questions and were exposed to highly classified information (sensitive enough to merit censorship), while conferring an air of esteem on Mavtan for being privy to state secrets (Bigo 2006; Weber 1958). The censored information, we must presume, still failed to reach a criminal threshold (otherwise^—theoretically^—it would have warranted a criminal investigation). Moreover, the practice of redaction works to counteract accusations that the GSS covers-up illicit acts since all information, including highly sensitive details, was ostensibly shared with Mavtan. This semiotics of classified revelation is, in a sense, saying: trust us, we have left no stone unturned, and still, we did not find a shred of evidence that torture took place. By the time it reaches the complainants’ lawyers, Mavtan’s examination reports often entail formulations such as:

I do not remember that the subject complained to me or in my presence concerning [a medical problem, often as a result of a violent interrogation]. Had he, as he claims, complained to me, I would have documented this in [redacted]. According to the [redacted], it is evident that when the subject complained about [a named medical problem], he was sent to a medical examination [redacted] … . Had the subject raised a medical complaint [redacted], I would have sent him to see a physician

immediately.”¹⁷ (emphasis added)

Note the somewhat dazzling dance around the fact of torture in this formula. It starts with a lapse of memory (“I do not remember”); then a turn to the hypothetical form (“had it happened, I would have…”) that turns a fact into a hypothesis; then an admission that something indeed took place (“when…”), which is almost fully redacted; concluding with a return to the hypothetical, to undermine the status of the previous statements.

The legalistic conditionality which appears in the responses of GSS interrogators may come as no surprise and adheres to the structure of incitement into meaningless discourse with which we started this discussion. However, these evasions are never contested by Mavtan’s investigators. The inexplicable and all too convenient memory gaps, the evident implausibility in which violence is explained away, the obvious inconsistencies in interrogators’ recollection, and any discrepancies, no matter how glaring, between versions of the events including in a single testimonial: none are ever challenged.

Indeed, as explained to us by A.R., a former GSS interrogator, even though having to answer to Mavtan may be unpleasant for GSS agents, these exchanges should not really be seen as “questionings” but as “interviews”. Going in, he further stated, it is clear to the Mavtan investigator who is trustworthy and who is not: “the Mavtan investigator knows that they need to take the Palestinian’s accusations with a grain of salt.” And whereas Mavtan has indeed become more thorough in its examinations, “when I enter the room, I start with a score of one hundred and the Palestinian has a score of zero.”¹⁸ This score may shift a little, but A.R. insisted that the likelihood of Mavtan investigators completely changing their mind is close to nil. The dynamic of the examination thus serves to justify the presupposition that GSS interrogators are in the right and that the Palestinian victims are in the wrong. And yet, even though^—or, more accurately, precisely because^—the outcome is preordained from the onset, the act of simulation is crucial.

In the setting of an interrogation, Elaine Scarry (1987) argues, the dynamic between causing pain and generating information is essential. Whereas pain is not necessarily inflicted to reveal the truth (Barela et al. 2020), the interrogation serves to both structure and justify torture. The information the tortured discloses is less important in this context, Scarry suggests; what is crucial is that an answer is provided. Extracting an answer from the tortured converts pain into power: the mere fact of an answer not only reflects the torturers’ ascendency, it is also the very form of a political betrayal, a disavowing of resistance. It is hence the victory of the torturer and the breaking point of the tortured (Scarry 1987, 28-9). What we see in Mavtan’s questionings is an inversion of this dynamic: at stake is the mere existence of an examination, the questioning and the answering, and not the content of the answer. Yet instead of a forced betrayal, these reciprocal dynamics are structured to reaffirm existing political relations. This laboured incitement into (meaningless) speech harbors the coverup of torture in an intermediate discursive realm, which is neither a blatant lie nor the truth, thus protecting the integrity of the Israeli legal-security system, as an apparatus in which torture and legality coexist.

Transparency: The Non-Recording Cameras

In 2011, a petition challenging the existence of Mavtan was filed on behalf of ten Palestinian plaintiffs by six human rights organizations. The HCJ ruling, delivered by Justice Elyakim Rubinstein, dismissed the petition, expressing full confidence in Mavtan despite all evidence to the contrary. Rubinstein’s professed confidence in Mavtan notwithstanding, his ruling deemed the moving of Mavtan to the MoJ essential. Mavtan’s “new institutional position,” he reasoned, would allow “such monitoring [of GSS to] be as transparent as possible,” ( HCJ 5722/12 2017, para.21) reflecting Israel’s security agencies’ exposure to “the sunlight and judicial review in a new era of transparency” (para.19). Transparency, from then on, becomes the leitmotif of the ruling, echoing the prevailing supposition that increased visibility serves to eradicate political violence (cf. Linfield 2012, 151-62).¹⁹ This emphasis on transparency was carried into the ethos of the reformed Mavtan: when we met with Asher ( the head of Mavtan), he took great pride in the increased transparency introduced under his management, and repeatedly equated it with the very essence of democracy and justice-making.

The story of Mavtan and the changes it has undergone is accordingly also a story of this enhanced transparency. And much like in the story concerning accountability, transparency was from the onset very much a question of “appearances.” Indeed, as long as Israel appears to seriously treat allegations of illicit interrogation techniques, it can fend off international pressure. In a way at least, the story of the ICC and ICJ decisions and preliminary decisions is a story of these systems’ inability or lack of interest to continue even playing this performative role. Rubinstein accordingly argued, somewhat frankly, that Mavtan’s relocation to the MoJ was necessary not only for good governance, but also “for the sake of appearances” (HCJ 5722/12 2017, para.21). The cameras installed in GSS interrogation rooms best illustrate the unique form this transparency has taken. We turn to them now.

GSS’s refusal to allow recordings of its interrogations has been a consistent issue of contention. Israel’s State Comptroller determined that GSS interrogations should be recorded already in 1995 (State Comptroller 2000) , and the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) has raised the lack of such recordings as a grave concern in all

its reports since 2009 (UNCAT 2009). In 2010, this necessity was reiterated by the Turkel Commission which was tasked with determining whether Israel’s investigation mechanism complied with international law (Turkel 2010). The implementation of the Turkel Report was then relegated to the Ciechanover Team. The latter concurred with the Turkel Commission’s findings, yet raised several objections to the full recording of interrogation. Echoing what has long been GSS’s justification for protecting its interrogations from external scrutiny,²⁰ the Turkel Report claimed that exposing GSS interrogation techniques might impede their efficacy, deter suspects from cooperating with the authorities, and “substantially [impair] the ability to frustrate terrorist threats” (Ciechanover Report 2015, para.135). It hence devised an “alternative” solution: installing cameras in all interrogation rooms^—but insisting that what they capture would not be recorded. Instead, the cameras would broadcast in real-time to a separate location which would “be accessible and available to a supervising entity on behalf of the Ministry of Justice at any time without giving prior notice”, thus ensuring that “the interrogators will have no indication of when the supervising entity is watching them.” The supervising entity will be tasked with composing “a concise memorandum on what he [sic] saw”; and if he “believes that illegal means have been used during the interrogation, an immediate obligation to report the matter to the Mavtan will arise” (para.139).

Installed in 2018, the CCTV cameras have subjected GSS interrogations to an unprecedented level of transparency. And yet, much like the lengthy examinations which fail to deliver any meaningful information^—and part of the same structure^—what we have here is a mechanism for producing transparency that does not allow for torture to be seen. Since what the cameras capture is never recorded and stored, and is only transmitted in real-time to the control room, this system replaces solid evidence (the audio-visual recordings) with selective and subjective reports. Moreover, these CCTV cameras also constitute, quite literally, an institutionally closed-circuit system which is hermetically sealed: the inspectors, selected and assigned by Mavtan, report only to Mavtan, and only on what Mavtan instructs them to report. And all of this is assuming that anyone is watching at all: according to Israel’s own admission, only a small fraction of the interrogation hours is monitored.²¹

Analyzing the efforts of human rights organizations to visually document human rights violations, Rebecca Stein (2021) identifies the material conditions leading to partial, unclear, and sometimes unusable visual products. Whereas Stein talks about different circumstances altogether (dropping one’s phone camera while running away from soldiers or settlers, for example), similar “glitches and lapses” (16) occur here: blind zones in interrogation rooms, or, more evidently, a video stream broadcasting to an empty monitoring room. In this respect, if Stein shows how visions of transparency and accountability in cases of human rights violations were met with “broken camera hopes and dreams” (4), in our case, the system’s breakdown is, in some sense at least, embedded into its design. Our analysis thus draws closer to Omri Grinberg’s (2018, 267) suggestion that we should not assume that such lapses “are (micro) failures.” Rather, “we can also view them as an instigated, or at least uninterrupted” lacunas, that are “constitutive elements in colonial domination” (see also Kotef and Amir 2007). At any rate, as Stein shows, and as Hedi Viterbo (2014) warns us following the cases of Abu Ghraib and the Syrian civil war, even when cameras provide clear visual evidence, it often makes little difference, retaining, in the words of Chatterjee (2023, 8), “violence visible yet unaccountable”.

Perhaps trying to prove the cameras’ efficacy, and contra their official purpose of capturing violations as they occur, Asher emphasized the power of the cameras to prevent future violations, regardless of the actual number of monitoring hours. In a proto-Panoptical fashion (Foucault 1979), he argued that the knowledge that someone may be watching deters GSS agents from resorting to illegal interrogation methods. However, in our interview, one interrogator disclosed that it is not only that GSS interrogators know that the inspectors are rarely there; crucially, and despite Ciechanover’s recommendations, cameras are not installed in all interrogation rooms. Interrogators hence know how to evade this presumed panoptical effect.

Moreover, the very activity of watching is veiled under additional layers of opacity since Mavtan releases very little information regarding the inspectors and what they do. Even more so, the little that it provides is diluted to the extent that nothing of significance can be concluded from it. For instance, when asked for the number of inspectors’ reports submitted in a given year (that is, how many “abnormal events” the inspectors witnessed), Mavtan offers a number, but immediately adds a disclaimer: “abnormal events” that merit a report, Mavtan’s standard reply states, are based on “a wide definition. Reports may pertain to a wide range of instances, including instances wherein very minimal deviations from interrogation procedures are suspected of having taken place.” Mavtan responses further stressed that “there may be cases wherein after an examination it is found that there was no inappropriate conduct or any deviation from interrogation procedures.” Thus, whereas Mavtan provides a number indicating what seems to be an objective measure of the fact some violations have taken place, the meaning of the number and what may be concluded from it is immediately undermined. Curiously, as if to further diminish any conclusion that could be drawn from the figures provided, and in a stark deviation from the MoJ policy concerning what may count as an “abnormal event”, Mavtan also states that in some instances, reports indicate not a violation by interrogators, but rather of an “unusual behavior of an interrogatee towards his interrogators” (SoI 2019). In our conversation, Asher gave another example of an “abnormal event”: Palestinians who hurt themselves in order to complain against the GSS. We will return to this example in the last section, but for now, we can note that this disclaimer pulls the grounds from under what would have been an indicative number: the number of times the inspectors observed the use of unlawful methods. Thus, the transparency Asher highlighted as an indicator of adherence to democratic principles, as evidencing Mavtan’s accountability to the public, reveals itself as a mimicry of compliance. Accordingly, the cameras, the very devices of transparency, do little to expose the interrogations, and themselves remain completely opaque. In this sense, the CCTV system is both an example and an emblem of a much wider tendency: a constant increase in transparency that in fact reveals very little, if anything at all.

Partly, what is crucial here is that this system flounders on its own terms, a point that becomes clear if one considers the logic guiding these terms. As we show later, the rationale for the necessity of Mavtan is predicated on the presupposition that violations by GSS agents rarely occur and that when they do occur, they are the aberration. As described on the MoJ website: “The purpose of the Department is to examine exceptional incidents or complaints of misconduct by members of the Israel Security Agency [GSS]” (MoJ 2024, emphasis added). By this logic, the CCTV monitoring is not fit for purpose: Since the inspectors only sample a small percentage of the interrogations, they are statistically unlikely to capture such (presumably) rare transgressions. But in its failure to provide actual transparency, this mechanism nevertheless produces at least three important effects. First, despite it being inadequate to expose the interrogations to external scrutiny, the CCTV system is the very institutionalization of transparency: cameras are installed, inspectors are hired, training is conducted, monitoring hours are logged, reports are issued and reviewed. All this amounts to an apparatus of transparency: an idea that is so often linked to the ethos of due process and even justice-making, that is aligned with their form, or, as we saw in Rubinstein’s quote above, their image. The mere existence of this system can then serve to demonstrate that Israel properly monitors its own security forces, that international bodies should therefore not intervene, that the entire legal apparatus is independent and well-functioning, and the sovereignty attached to it should therefore be respected. “Transparency”, then, shifts from being a means to secure good governance, to what “good governance” means; accordingly, it no longer matters what such transparency reveals, or whether it reveals anything at all.

Second, the failure to expose transgressions is itself deployed to undermine the possibility of delivering justice: the failure to see serves to prove that there is nothing to see. Indeed, since 2018, Mavtan’s justifications for rejecting complaints increasingly refer to inspectors’ reports that allegedly do not support the complainant’s version of events. A complaint filed by a Palestinian man who was arrested in 2019 for suspected involvement in terror attacks illustrates this point. His interrogation by the GSS was conducted over more than 600 hours in total, with many sessions lasting up to 48 consecutive hours. In his complaint, he described that he was shackled to a chair the entire time and that the inability to move for so many hours caused him severe pain. He further complained of being subjected to threats, curses, severe sleep deprivation, humiliation, and psychological torture. Mavtan Comptroller dismissed the complaint and turned to the inspectors’ reports to justify his decision. He acknowledges that “the inspection did not cover the complainant’s entire interrogation, and some [elements of] his complaint may have occurred at times which were not monitored”. Indeed, the dismissal letter states that the inspectors only watched two of the 14 interrogation sessions, and that they only monitored a few hours of each. The Comptroller nevertheless drew on the monitoring of this fraction of the interrogation to conclude that the complaint was unreliable. “The inspectors’ reports,” the letter states, “do not appear to support the complainant’s claims,” since “the inspectors did not report any abnormal events.” He adds that according to one inspector’s account, the interrogation was “conducted in an amiable atmosphere.” These few hours of monitoring hence sufficed for the Comptroller to conclude that the reports “confirm that the GSS interrogators operated legally” (ibid). Demands for increased transparency can thus prove to be double-edged. In a state-controlled “representational economy” of torture (Viterbo 2014), the assumed superiority of visual evidence means that such evidence is often used by state authorities to refute the reliability of victim testimony. We return to this point in the next section.

Third and finally, the CCTV system serves another purpose beyond demonstrating transparency and justifying the dismissal of complaints (even if it does so inadvertently): it helps Israel substantiate its position that torture, if it happens at all, is an aberration rather than the rule. For had torture been systematically used against Palestinian detainees, one could argue, even a selective sampling of interrogations would have detected it. Buying into this argument, however, requires considerable leaps of faith: we would need to assume that the inspectors monitor a sufficient sample of interrogations, that this sample is representative of all interrogations, that the inspectors perform their duties diligently, that they are proficient with the letter of the law, that they would know to identify an infringement when seeing it, that had they witnessed such incidents, they would have reported them to Mavtan, that Mavtan would then recommend a criminal investigation, and that the Mavtan Comptroller will indeed follow up on this recommendation in his decision. The fact that this system fails to identify torture is hence what renders it e^ffective^—not in combatting torture, but in contradicting allegations that torture is prevalent in GSS interrogations.

Final Analysis: What Is Justice?

Thus far we proposed that Mavtan’s heightened activity should be understood primarily as addressing the international legal system. Since appeals to international courts are conditioned on the inability to attain legal remedy domestically (“the complementary principle”), this performativity of justice-making works to protect Israel from appeals to external judiciaries. The unit’s mechanisms and practices can thus be seen as merely meant to create a mirage, empty gestures of justice-making. Indeed, some of the HCJ reviews we quote earlier allude to such an interpretation (cf. HCJ 5722/12 2017, HCJ 9018/17 2018).

While this is, no doubt, part of the story, we proposed that there is more at stake. Performativity, as Butler (1993) shows, is never simply an empty gesture, and always does something or produces something in the world, even when it merely affirms power structures. Shielding Israel from international interventions^—what we termed “the legitimacy e^ffect”^—is a crucial aspect of this performativity that must be understood as emerging through the bureaucratic performativity of accountability, transparency, and due process we reviewed here. Through its thorough examinations, the expansive reports, the detailed decisions issued by the Mavtan Comptroller, its elaborate responses to FOI requests, Mavtan creates a material reality that, as Mitchell (1999, 77) identified in relation to the state, is indistinguishable from the appearance of “the abstract or ideal.” The work of governmental departments, the activities of bureaucrats, the paperwork, the tactics of management, and above all, the appropriate relations between state institutions or different organs of government (institutional independence, appropriate subordinance, oversight mechanisms, legal compliance, and demonstrable transparency and accountability), all these end up producing, we argued, the shielding effect of legitimacy.

Thus, documents are composed, data are generated and accumulated, reports are extracted, new positions are created, expertise are established, training is provided, data-protection mechanisms are introduced, and so on. This bureaucratic laboriousness builds a world, and a way of seeing the world^—or, at least, a material image of the world. And this material image comes to stand for “transparency”, “accountability”, or “good governance” more generally, which then become the ground through which Israel substantiates itself as a legitimate player when facing international jurisprudence. But this performativity of justice-making has another effect: it is geared to reshape the discourse of justice.

As we briefly showed earlier, this apparatus serves to provide “proof” that Israel does not torture, and that Palestinian complaints are groundless. In our interviews with MoJ officials and several former GSS interrogators, we were repeatedly reminded that despite having a dedicated unit which laboriously scrutinizes the many thousands of complaints filed by Palestinians, no evidence of torture had ever been found. For our interviewees, this fact did not attest to Mavtan’s failures; rather, they argued, it persuasively showed that the allegations are all false, or wild exaggerations at best. Having such an industrious system conducting lengthy examinations, monitoring interrogations in real-time through a CCTV system, compiling detailed reports and rationalizing data, while being fully transparent and sharing this information with human rights lawyers and advocates, seems to give credence to the claim that Mavtan finds nothing because there is nothing to be found.

But it is not merely the complaints that are deemed fraudulent here; the Palestinian plainti^ffs^—and even more so, the Palestinians as a collective^—are similarly portrayed as deceitful. One GSS interrogator even went as far as pinning the volume of discarded complaints on Palestinian “culture”, prone^—so he said^—to fabrication and hyperbole. The presumption that Palestinians are untrustworthy, or, at the very least, have ulterior motives for claiming that they have been tortured is so thoroughly embedded in Mavtan’s structure that it can be found already in the documents that led to its establishment. The very reasoning for conducting preliminary examinations was premised, inter alia, on the notion of Palestinian deceptiveness. The guiding thread from the onset presupposed that Palestinians would wrongfully accuse Israel of torturing, not only as individuals but as a collective; as part of an organized campaign against Israel. In the words of the 1987 Landau Report:

False complaints of interrogees that they have been supposedly subjected to harsh torture during their interrogations by the GSS … are common as part of a systematic campaign by terrorist organizations against the GSS with the explicit aim of weakening it in its war against terror, and to discredit it. (Landau Commission 1987, para.4.18, authors’ translation, emphasis added)

The assumption that almost all such allegations are fictitious has led Landau to conclude that it is paramount that prior to launching a criminal investigation, “the examination of complaints should first distinguish between those which are false, and those which are genuine” (para.4.18). And it is this mission with which Mavtan was tasked.

Rubinstein’s 2012 HCJ ruling similarly explained Mavtan’s “necessity” by the need to protect GSS from idle complaints: “Let us not feign innocence”, he argued; there are valid “concerns regarding politically and ideologically motivated false complaints given the nature of the subject at hand” (HCJ 5722/12 2017, para.21). In their justification of Mavtan’s structure, Landau and Rubinstein therefore propose that the prevalence of complaints of torture does not reflect the pervasiveness of illicit interrogation methods by GSS, but rather the dubious motivations of complainants. Such a presumption adheres to, and indeed is part of the production of a wider logic we find in colonial and post-colonial settings: the classification of racialized groups along what Berda (2022) terms “the axis of suspicion.” This classification is “founded on the colonial assumption that native witnesses and their statements were not to be believed” since natives, generally so, “could not distinguish fact from fiction” (Kolsky 2019, 24). As Chatterjee (2023, 21) argues in his work on antiMuslim violence in India, in such settings, the law has a role in creating particular subjects “whose very existence … precludes them from witnessing,” and whose testimonies thus can never provide creditable legal evidence.

In reality, however, the volume of complaints underrepresents the actual number of torture cases: most Palestinians do not trust the Israeli legal system enough to file complaints, do not want to validate the system by filing complaints, or drop their complaints due to the hurdles that this system mounts. This is, of course, a selfreinforcing feedback loop: because plaintiffs are presumed to be liars, the elaborated mechanism of examinations which dismisses complaints ends up “proving” that Palestinians are indeed deceitful. Mavtan’s diligent production of what seems to be nothing therefore works to change the meaning of justice itself: justice stands for protecting Israel from Palestinian deceitfulness.

The effects of this heightened performativity range beyond obstructing torture victims’ access to justice. By articulating Palestinians’ search for justice as fraudulence, Mavtan’s work feeds Israel’s broader narration of the Palestinian search for justice as “warfare”: a politically motivated attack by legal means on the Israeli state (cf. Gilboa 2021). In other words, it is not merely that the system both presupposes and then “proves” that each Palestinian complaint is fraudulent; using the power of state institutions, it can further argue that collectively, these complaints are part of an orchestrated Palestinian campaign to undermine Israel’s very existence, and is hence terror by other means.

And once the Palestinian search for justice is re-defined as terror, the concept of justice itself shifts its meaning. As one reads through the documents involving Mavtan’s establishment and operation, what is striking is the degree to which justice has come to note the vindication of the GSS. The Ciechanover Report, for instance, deemed the introduction of the CCTV cameras necessary since ultimately it would “assist in combating false claims regarding the use of improper measures during interrogations” (Ciechanover Report 2015, para.138, emphasis added). In our interview, Asher made a similar claim, which was illustrated by providing the conjectural example we mentioned earlier^—of an inspector seeing Palestinians injuring themselves and then complaining that they were beaten up by an interrogator. Such a scenario, not only serves to draw a picture^—speculative as it may be^—of Palestinians as unreliable and of violence in the interrogations as a complete fabrication, it further has the power of taking the most tangible proof that violence had occurred ( injury ) and rendering it meaningless.²² In this inverted system, the transparency Mavtan assumes to provide is geared towards demonstrating the absence of torture.

The current Mavtan’s Comptroller, Shlomo ( Shlomi ) Abramzon, summarized this attitude best: in some of the cases, he told the PCATI legal team, Mavtan dismisses complaints after finding what he referred to as indications that help expose the truth, or at least, he added, expose that the version provided by the complainant is unreliable.²³ By equating the truth with disqualifying the complaint, Abramzon once again reveals, perhaps inadvertently, that ultimately, disproving torture allegations is the justice that Mavtan is striving to produce. Mavtan then does not merely fail to provide justice to torture victims; rather, it labors to rearticulate what justice stands for: the vindication of Israel from Palestinian “conspiracies”.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful first and foremost to the four anonymous reviewers and to the editorial team of Perspectives on Politics. We received invaluable insights and helpful suggestions from all four reviewers, and we are extremely thankful for their careful, generous, and attentive reading. Sarah El Kazaz, the cohort of the Radical Critical Theory Circle (Nisyros, Greece in June 2023), the attendees of the launch event of the London Political Theory Network, Sahar Francis and Yael Berda all provided us with vital feedback. Finally, our special thanks goes to Tal Steinar, Rachel Stroumsa, Alona Korman, and the rest of the team of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) past and present, who were extremely generous with their time and thoughts, and gave attentive comments on several drafts.

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number: ES/V012622/1).

Notes

1       Such rhetoric is to be found in Israel’s few responses to international bodies (cf. SoI 2020).

2       Access to transcripts of Mavtan investigations was confined to 2012^–2018 due to legal restrictions. References to the content of these transcripts from later years is based on our interviews with PCATI’s legal team. Moreover, to protect the identities of complainants we paraphrased the transcripts’ wordings.

3       We do not provide precise references to individual cases, except where explicit consent from the interrogee was granted.

4       Mudzgurishvilly was the head of Mavtan between 2014 and 2018, and oversaw its re-establishment in the Ministry of Justice. At the time of writing in 2024, Abramzon is the Mavtan Comptroller and Asher is the head of Mavtan. They both have been in these roles since 2019.

5       Lack of regard to violence carried out by security forces has typified colonial regimes, particularly British colonialism (Duffy 2015; Kolsky 2019).

6       The full report is only available in Hebrew. Translation of some sections is available in Amnesty International (1991). For a discussion of the calibration of the permissible amount of pain by the Landau Commission, see Asad (1996, 1095).

7       In our interview, A.F. insisted that, contra to the Landau Commission’s findings, this practice was an open secret known by everyone, including all Prime Ministers and judges (AF 06/22).

8       For a similar claim concerning India and the United

States see Lokaneeta (2011), and in relation to Northern Ireland prior to 1998 see Lowry (1973).

9       The request for arrest warrants submitted by the ICC prosecutor on May 20, 2024, demonstrate that the Israeli judiciary no longer provides such a shielding effect. Arguably this is because, in the weeks and months after October 7, it stopped going through the motions we discuss here. As these events take place at the very final stages of publishing this article, we will not be able to address them here.

10    Ministerial Committee for General Security Service Affairs (1992); last revised on February 1, 2006 (Turkel 2010, n150).

11    Interview conducted with Jana Mudzgurishvilly, October 2022, herein Mudzgurishvilly 10/22.

12    Most significantly, in its 2009 Annual Report, the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT)

unequivocally concluded that Israel had failed to investigate GSS’s violations of the Torture Convention, and that it should establish “a fully independent and impartial mechanism outside the GSS” for investigating allegations of ill treatment and torture (UNCAT 2009, para.21). 13 Interview conducted with Guy Asher, September 2022, herein Asher 09/22.

14    Interrogations of women must be accompanied by a female agent or soldier.

15    Response from Mavtan Comptroller, taken from the PCATI archive; all identifying details have been removed to preserve confidentiality.

16    Examples compiled from decisions issued by the Mavtan Comptroller and from protocols of the investigations as conveyed to us in our interviews with the PCATI legal team.

17    As noted, this is a paraphrase.

18    Interview with A.R., a GSS interrogator, June 2022. Herein AR 06/22. On the structural deeming of

Palestinian plaintiffs as unreliable see Shammas 2017. 19 For critiques of this supposition see, for instance,

Kotef (2020) and Chatterjee (2023). See also Timothy Pachirat’s (2011, 14) critique of “the fantasy of total transparency”.

20    Rubinstein’s pronounced commitment to transparency, for example, quickly emerges as diluted by other “weighty considerations”, specifically security ones, which require thatit be curtailedandlimited. Despite his aforementioned praise of transparency as the best route to justice, he reassured the appellants that the limitations set on transparency in the name of security are “not, God forbid, in order to allow ISA [GSS] interrogators to break the law” (HCJ 5722/12 2017, para.34).

21    According to Israel’s response to CAT, an average of 80-100 supervision hours were conducted in 2019^– 2020 (SOI 2020).

22    It should be noted that similar arguments were used by the British government to counter accusations of torture in Northern Ireland during the Troubles (White 2017).

23    As recorded in the minutes of a meeting held on August 4, 2020.

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