On Israeli campuses, the state marks another enemy within
Police watch on as Palestinian and left-wing Israeli students hold a Nakba Day rally at Tel Aviv University, 15 May 2022
Yael Berda writes in Haaretz on 21 November 2025:
In the Israel of 2025, the boundaries between the regime’s arenas of power are becoming blurred. The mechanisms of domination over Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza — military law alongside civil law, unrestrained power beside formal institutions — seep inward to affect Palestinian citizens of Israel and, increasingly, Jewish-Israeli dissidents who refuse to fall in line with state policy.
This is no sudden shift, but rather a cumulative process. Over decades, the occupation regime developed technologies of control, surveillance, and classification to subjugate Palestinians, which have gradually turned into instruments of governance within Israel’s civilian sphere.
A central part of this is the mechanism of marking enemies. This is not just a practice of military control but a broad political tool that redefines the limits of legitimacy. In this regard, two recent attacks on freedom of expression at Israeli university campuses are therefore not exceptions; they are the natural continuation of long-constructed patterns.
On Nov. 6, Alec Yefremov, who teaches civics at a Tel Aviv high school, attended his sister’s graduation ceremony at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Also in attendance, celebrating his wife’s degree, was National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. Upon spotting the leader of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) Party, Yefremov shouted that he is a racist, a Kahanist, and that he idolizes Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Palestinians in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994.