Israeli academia accused of systemic apartheid against Palestinians

Adalah’s new report alleges that Israeli universities have implemented a two-track disciplinary system that treats Palestinian students differently from Jewish Israeli students. The legal centre says Palestinians are frequently funneled into an "administrative" route where standard procedural safeguards — including presumptions of innocence and fair hearing practices — are suspended, while Jewish Israeli students are processed through procedures that rely on constitutional protections and the rule of law.

The report sets out individual cases to illustrate the pattern. It describes a student at Zefat Academic College who faced permanent expulsion and a loss of academic credits after posting a video of a preacher praying for people in Gaza, and a Technion student who was suspended for sharing a verse from the Quran. Adalah says these incidents form part of a broader crackdown that produced more than 130 student inquiries across roughly 40 institutions, with a notable majority of those targeted being women.

Investigators identified a range of systemic shortcomings in how complaints against Palestinian students were handled. Universities reportedly relied on automated translation tools such as Google Translate to interpret Arabic texts and religious expression, frequently dismissed specialist linguistic evidence offered in defence, and adopted vague standards — including tests of "public sensibilities" and "unfitting conduct" — that were applied in practice to reflect majority Jewish-Israeli norms. Adalah also reports that requests by Jewish-Israeli students that called for violence against Palestinians were not subject to similar disciplinary action.

The report notes institutional legal manoeuvres used to justify stricter measures, including references to the 1965 Yardor ruling and a "militant democracy" rationale historically invoked during states of emergency. Adalah’s authors call the pattern a structural, institutionalised repression across higher education and urge international human rights bodies and foreign partners to make adherence to academic freedom and international law preconditions for collaboration. Several universities named in the report, including the Technion, have rejected the findings; the Technion described the analysis as an attempt to discredit Israeli academia and dismissed the accusations as unfounded.