With attention zeroed in on turmoil at college campuses across the United States, it’s been easy to miss the unfolding crisis on campuses in Israel, where the stakes have often been grave.
At these schools, some students have already found themselves in jeopardy, with proceedings that allege they support terrorism for posting protest messages to their social media accounts. So far, some 160 students, almost exclusively Palestinian, have been targeted for social media posts, while violent rhetoric toward Palestinians has been largely ignored. More recently, Palestinian legal scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was detained by Israeli police, apparently because of comments made on a podcast. She was quickly released, and more than 100 faculty members from Hebrew University, where she teaches, published an open letter backing her. Hebrew University had initially suspended her in March before reinstating her, and said in response to the arrest, “We strongly object to many of the things that Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian said. Nonetheless, as a democratic country, there is no place to arrest a person for such remarks, however infuriating they may be.”
Most of these cases, including Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s, have been taken up by Adalah, a Palestinian civil rights organization based in Israel. Hassan Jabareen, the founder and general director of Adalah, likened it to an NAACP for Palestinian citizens of Israel, providing legal representation and support in the face of the unusually high conviction rates for Palestinians in Israeli courts. Now, after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza, the organization is facing an unprecedented wave of legal fights. I met Jabareen while he was on a recent visit to New York, where he had traveled to highlight these new and complicated challenges in the wake of the war. We talked about his work on the emerging case against Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Israel’s campus tribunals, and the new normal in wartime Israel. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Aymann Ismail: What’s happening with Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian? What is the case against her, and why have so many people reacted so strongly to it?
Hassan Jabareen: This is the first time that the police arrested an academic or a professor and investigated them for their academic writing. The police spent most of her interrogation asking about her previously published academic articles. I am sure the police didn’t even fully understand her answers, because her work is intended for high-level academics. The police aren’t prepared for that.
This happened because she criticized Israel. She signed a petition that was signed by hundreds of other academics that warned that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Because she criticized the Israeli army, her employer, Hebrew University, asked her to resign. And then the police came to arrest her and brought her to the police station. The implication here is that every academic can find themselves in the same situation if they are critical, even if they’ve written academic work that’s published in prestigious journals. By doing this, they are not only sending a message to Palestinian academics, but any critical academic in Israel, whether you are Israeli Jewish or Israeli Palestinian. Both of them can find themselves in police custody if their speech deeply criticizes Israeli conscience.
How have things changed for Palestinian citizens of Israel since the beginning of this war?
The situation went from bad to worse, as evidenced by our rate of criminal cases going higher and higher. Before Oct. 7, Israeli universities never investigated students for something that had nothing to do with their campus or staff. Now, for the first time, Israeli universities are extending beyond the jurisdiction of the university to punish students for posting on their social media. There are even cases in which the students posted about Gaza during their vacation, when they weren’t attending classes. The universities argue that those students support terrorism.
The universities punished 160 students. Most of the cases are of students expressing solidarity with their people, the Palestinians of Gaza. Many of them criticize Israel for war crimes and genocide. The interpretation put forth by the universities is that those students are supporting the enemy at a time of war. And since the war is against terror, they are standing with the enemy and against Israel, and therefore what they posted falls under the framework of supporting terrorism, which damages the reputation of the university and insults Jewish students who are fighting Hamas on the front lines. Among the 160 cases, Adalah represents 100 students. Since our establishment in 1996, there have been about seven wars. We’ve never had higher numbers of students in cases than this.
We also have about 250 cases of Palestinian citizens, including Palestinians of East Jerusalem, who were indicted for supporting terror after Oct. 7 only for what they posted on social media. And some of them were indicted only because they posted a verse from the Quran to their Facebook or Instagram. And that was interpreted as supporting terror.
What kinds of charges are they facing? What penalties could they be facing for these social media posts?
We have cases of people who were investigated by the universities, and people who were indicted by the police as criminals. The punishment for university students varies from suspending the students to expelling them, or to sentence them to community service. And for police criminal indictments, the punishment can be between three and five years in prison.
Has there been a chilling effect? Can Palestinian citizens of Israel express their discontent in other ways?
This war also marks the first time Israeli police have put a total ban on the right of Palestinians to organize protests. Just on Palestinian citizens. We are the only group in the world that is not allowed to protest against the war. You need a license if protesters number more than 50 and won’t stand in one place. If there are 49 protesters who want to stand against a wall, for the first time, that is prohibited for Palestinians. Before the war, there were limitations on the Palestinians’ right to protest, but it wasn’t totally banned. Now, the Israeli police are legally prohibiting the legal thing.
There is a deep chilling effect. People have all but stopped posting to their social media entirely. Even Palestinian professors, who teach history or politics in Israeli universities, call me to ask whether their syllabus is going to be criminalized or not. This is why I say people feel they live under armed occupation inside of Israel. The civilians are armed. And everyone is afraid.
What role do you see Adalah playing in all of this?
We went to the court to dispute this. For the first time in 25 years, the Israeli Supreme Court dismissed petitions for the right of protest. Usually, the court will confirm the right to protest but add conditions as a way of reaching a compromise. This time, the court took the side of the police and ruled against any protesting for Palestinians. The court reasoned that the police do not have enough manpower to deal with demonstrations, and thus prohibited it only for the Palestinians.
What about before the war? Were things this bad?
Before the war, there were severe limitations on freedom of speech, but there wasn’t a total ban. The situation has become much more difficult since the start of the war. Many of the judges, when I argue, they themselves say that I should know that the law after Oct. 7 is not the same law as it was before, even though the law itself hasn’t changed. The implementation of the law is what changed. The interpretation has changed.
What impact has Adalah had so far?
We have a major impact in the student cases. We’ve succeeded in 40 percent of the cases, which is a high level of success. I can say it’s due to many different factors. One is the lawyers took it seriously and brought expert opinions to offer various interpretations for the text in Arabic that was shared online. Second, we recruited many professors and administrators at universities abroad to send letters to Israeli universities to say their policy is a racist policy against the Palestinians. And third, we even addressed some of the donors of the universities. We told them they support a university that oppresses the rights of minorities, and oppress freedom of expression. And the power of the donors has a strong effect. And all of those factors helped us to succeed. And still, 60 percent of the cases failed. And 95 percent of those cases were not justified. I can admit maybe 5 percent were different. But the 95 percent had no basis. It is not right to indict someone just for posting a verse of the Quran.
Israel’s Palestinian citizen minority is often invoked in America as a counterargument against international allegations of apartheid from organizations like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. What do you make of those arguments?
Immediately after Oct. 7, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made a speech in which he said Israel is facing four fronts with the enemy: the Gaza front, the West Bank front, the north with Hezbollah and Iran, and the internals, which are Palestinian citizens. So, he puts us within the framework of the enemy. And when you are lumped in with the enemy, indeed, it is a strong incitement. Many people were fired from their workplaces, including doctors. If you express any sympathy with the poverty of the people of Gaza during the war, if you express sympathy with the suffering of the people of Gaza during the war, you might find yourself out of work.
This war has put fear into the lives of Palestinian citizens. For the first time, Israeli police are encouraging the Jewish community to be armed. Not soldiers, but civilians, to defend themselves from Palestinian citizens. The government is creating potential for a civil war. This is why living under the Israeli regime during a war, a time when it’s easy to incite, Palestinian citizens live in fear of racism and incitement. This is the situation. An official survey of Palestinian students in Israel found more than 50 percent of them say they don’t feel safe to study in Israeli universities. Those universities have started to allow students to come with guns on campus. With arms to class. Palestinian students in this environment are being indicted for freedom of expression. And with the arming of Israeli society, they feel that their university is inciting against them.
Do you see things ever going back to the way things were before the war? Or is this the new normal for Israel?
It is very difficult to predict. All we know now is that the interpretation of the law and the flexibility is so high to the degree that it is now easy to frame any political text that is sympathetic to Palestinian suffering as supporting terror. This flexibility is the problem. In the past, you cannot charge someone of supporting terror unless they mentioned directly the name of the organization. For example, Hamas under Israeli law is defined as a terrorist organization. You cannot charge me with supporting Hamas unless you show that I expressed directly and clearly my support for Hamas as an organization. Now, the prosecutor doesn’t need to show that. It’s enough that I support the people of Gaza, my people, or express sympathy with their suffering. During the war itself, they’ve brought new interpretation that this support is akin to support of terror against Israel, because you are supporting the enemy during wartime. And our war is with Hamas. And thus, if you support the people of Gaza, you support Hamas, and therefore you support a terror organization.
