‘People are afraid’: Advocates warn of crackdown on Arab Israeli students
Some students, their lawyers say, have been thrown out of school for innocuous social media posts
Prospective students attend an open house at the University of Haifa in 2018. The school, which has the highest share of Arab Israeli students in the country, has taken an especially hard line on social media posts by Arab students, according to advocates. Photo by University of Haifa
By Arno Rosenfeld January 8, 2024
When one of attorney Sawsan Zaher’s clients woke up in Haifa on the morning of Oct. 7, he began scrolling through Instagram and came across an image of grinning kids piled onto a military jeep. One held a hammer.
“It doesn’t include any blood, it doesn’t include any war scene,” Zaher said. “He didn’t know exactly what was going on so he shared it in a story on Instagram.”
It was only later, Zaher said, that her client, a university student, realized the extent of the carnage from Hamas’ terrorist attack in Southern Israel. Glued to the news, the young man forgot about his post on his Instagram “story,” which automatically expires after 24 hours.
But before it disappeared, some other students reported the post to officials at the University of Haifa, who quickly opened an investigation and banned Zaher’s client from campus for the rest of the semester.
The client, who is studying law — and who Zaher declined to name for fear of retribution against the student — is among at least eight other Arab Israeli students at the University of Haifa, and more than 150 at 34 colleges and universities throughout the country, who are under investigation and facing discipline for what legal advocates say were innocuous social media posts made on personal accounts.
Many of those students won’t be able to join their classmates as Israeli universities resume classes this month, following an extended break after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.
Tensions between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens, who compose about 20% of the population, spiked after the attack, which killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis, the most during a single attack in the country’s history. Jewish Israelis have rallied together as the country’s military mobilized for a ground invasion of Gaza. Tolerance for political dissent has shrunk, with police shutting down some anti-war protests and many Israelis expressing anger toward students who allegedly posted statements on Oct. 7 including “they deserve it.”
Hebrew University, the country’s most prominent university, issued guidelines in November stating that “expressing support for the Oct. 7 massacre undermines the foundations on which human society is based,” although it said it was permissible to “express empathy” for Palestinians.
Amid this anxiety, Israeli university officials have denied free speech rights and due process to scores of Arab students, their advocates charge.
Adalah, a legal advocacy group, is representing 90 students and said that nearly half of their clients were suspended before any disciplinary proceedings had taken place. Out of the 71 cases that have been resolved, 48% ended in a complete acquittal, while 37% resulted in suspension of expulsion, according to Adalah’s data.
Adi Mansour, an attorney with Adalah, said that in most cases the universities have sought the expulsion of students under investigation.
“The universities have taken a stand against the students,” Mansour said. “A lot of people are afraid.”
Mansour added that some of these students are considering dropping out of school as a result.
University officials have denied that the discipline cases opened against Arab Israeli students are intended to silence legitimate speech, although several have said their priority is supporting Israeli victims of Oct. 7 and the war effort in Gaza.
‘No distinction’ between support for Palestinians and Hamas
Zaher said that some of the posts that landed students in trouble did not involve any scenes from Oct. 7. She described one client who faced investigation after posting a photo of a Palestinian child in Gaza looking at his dead cat in a bombed out neighborhood.
“There is no distinction between supporting innocent people who are dying in Gaza due to the Israeli bombing and supporting Hamas,” said Zaher, a legal adviser for the Emergency Coalition in Arab Society. “For a lot of these universities, if you were supporting Palestine — like posting a Palestinian flag — this means you support Hamas.”
Other universities have opened more cases than the University of Haifa, including Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, which launched 15 investigations, although many of those were quickly closed. Tel Aviv University looked into posts by 10 students, although Zaher said many of those were requests for more information rather than disciplinary proceedings.
The University of Haifa has the most Arab students of any institution in Israel, at around 40%, and prides itself as a center of peaceful coexistence within the country. But lawyers working with students at the the school say that its rector, Gur Alroey, has taken an especially hard line.
Alroey requested that Zaher’s client and eight other students with open disciplinary cases be barred from attending classes this semester until their cases are resolved, arguing without specifics that their presence on campus could cause “extreme situations” with “disastrous results.”
Alroey told Haaretz that some of the suspensions were related to posts in which students celebrated the Oct. 7 attack, with comments like “great morning” and “they deserve it.”
Mansour, who is representing eight students at the university, said that none of the posts called for violence and that most were made on the morning of Oct. 7, when he said that military censorship had prohibited Israeli media from covering the details of the violence and students were responding to scraps of information on social media.
“None of the cases violate any law and therefore fall within the limits of freedom of expression,” Mansour said. He added that all the students had condemned the attack during their hearings with the university.
The University of Haifa did not respond to a request for comment, but said in a previous statement that the disciplinary committee’s decision “speaks for itself, and we honor it.”
Some students won’t return
Mansour said that some of the students who had been cleared of any wrongdoing are worried about returning to class this semester because they feel unwelcome at their school, and some know which classmates reported their posts for alleged incitement.
A survey by the Arab Student Movements Union in December found that 61% of Arab Israeli students, some of whom identify as Palestinian citizens of Israel, said they had considered leaving school because of the “security situation” following Oct. 7.
Zaher said that following the Hamas attack, Arab students began experiencing threats from some Jewish students at their schools but have seen little action. “We started to say, ‘This is racial profiling,’” Zaher recalled. The schools then encouraged Arab students to start filing reports but “no one did anything.”
At the University of Haifa, for example, Mansour said that the only open disciplinary cases related to incitement are against Arab students, despite what he described as a number of menacing posts made by Jewish students.
In the survey, 97% of Arab students said they felt that their universities were hostile environments, while 87% said they felt that their activities were being monitored.
While there is no hard data on how many Arab students may quit their studies, either temporarily or permanently, Mansour said he believes the data suggests that around 7% of the students may not return to class.
He blamed the willingness of colleges and universities in Israel to accept reports from right-wing Jewish students, who he said have sought to punish Arab Israelis for expressing any political dissent.
“You’re telling them, ‘It’s ok that you’re monitoring your Arab student counterparts,’” Mansour said. “This green light only deepens the social inequality between Arab students and Jewish students.”
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