Israeli academia accused of systemic apartheid against Palestinians
Mohammad Mansour reports in Al Jazeera on 8 September 2026:
One Palestinian student found herself facing permanent expulsion and the revocation of all her academic credits at Zefat Academic College in Israel, after posting a video of a religious preacher praying for the people of Gaza. Another Palestinian student, at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, was suspended for posting a Quranic verse.
The individual cases reflect a sweeping institutional crackdown documented in a report this week by Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023.
Adalah received more than 130 inquiries from Palestinian students facing disciplinary proceedings across approximately 40 institutions. More than three in four of the targeted students were women.
The report concluded that Israeli academia has established a two-track disciplinary system amounting to apartheid within higher education. Palestinians go through an “administrative track”, characterised by the suspension of standard procedural protections and the presumption of innocence. Meanwhile, Jewish Israelis have “constitutional track” protections, grounded in the rule of law.
Institutional incompetence
The report revealed a host of systemic procedural flaws in the monitoring of Palestinian students, notably the reliance on automated software like Google Translate to interpret Arabic texts, prayers, and cultural expressions.
Adi Mansour, an Adalah affiliate attorney, European University Institute PhD researcher and co-author of the report, said the reliance on automated translation tools shouldn’t be viewed as a calculated tactic.
“We view it as institutional incompetence, compounded by an unwillingness to both understand the complexity of language and discourse, and to engage with anything that departs from a majority Zionist Israeli Jewish point of view,” he told Al Jazeera.
But the proceedings against students were structured to prevent Palestinians from sharing their perspective or defence. “Even where defence linguists were brought forward, their opinions were routinely dismissed or disregarded,” Mansour said. “Students’ identity was put on trial so explicitly that one committee even noted a student’s identification with children in Gaza could be ‘interpreted as offensive’, and questioned that student on why they didn’t identify with Israeli children.