Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian Suspended from Teaching at the Hebrew University — Repression of Dissent in Israel and the USA
On March 12 senior administrators at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suspended Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian from teaching. Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a Palestinian-Israeli and holds the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University and the Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University of London. She is an internationally renowned scholar and specializes in trauma, state crimes, criminology, surveillance, gender violence, and violence against children.
Orly Noy reviews the details of the university administration’s actions against Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian and the hypocrisy of its claims to embrace diversity, inclusivity, and equality in her article for +972 webzine’s weekly newsletter The Landline (you can subscribe at https://www.972mag.com/, highly recommended) entitled “Hebrew University’s Faculty of Repressive Science.”
Since October 7 Jewish and Palestinian Israelis who have expressed even the slightest opposition to the war on Gaza or any kind of critical thinking related to Israel/Palestine issues have been subjected to a massive campaign of silencing, what Matan Kaminer called, “an absolute deluge of repression.” Palestinian-Israelis have borne the brunt of the repression. Professors, teachers, medical professionals, journalists, filmmakers and others have been disciplined, fired, and arrested for activity on their private social media accounts or making public political statements critical of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip.
According to the prominent Israeli human rights attorney Michael Sfard:
The suppression of speech and targeting of critics of Israel’s policy toward the conflict has always had a strategic goal. It is all clearly part of the grand plan that has been systematically peeling democratic values from the Israeli system of government in recent decades: the annexation of the occupied lands and the establishment of a full, official ethnonationalist Jewish regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian became a target of incitement and pressure from Hebrew University administrators days after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. She initiated a statement that was eventually signed by over 2,000 scholars and students specializing in the study of childhood calling for the “immediate cessation of the Western-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and the egregious violation of Palestinian children’s rights.” At that time Israel had killed some 3,000 children in Gaza. The toll is now over 12,500.
The Dean of the Hebrew University School of Social Work wrote to faculty members saying that Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian was not suspended due to her political beliefs but because she refused to acknowledge Hamas’s murders and rapes on October 7. He declined to judge whether her statements crossed any criminal or disciplinary threshold. But the dean asserted his qualifications to determine the absolute truth regarding the extent and character of the rapes and murders of civilians on October 7 and to demand that Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian – and presumably every other faculty member under his jurisdiction – endorse his judgment without debate.
Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian was suspended from teaching days after she appeared on the Makdisi Street podcast hosted by University of California, Berkeley Professor of Middle East History Ussama Makdisi and his brothers. On the podcast, Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian repudiated Hamas’s atrocities of October 7 saying, “Not in my name. I will never allow anyone to touch a child, to rape a woman. This is not in my name, and I will never allow it.” She also sharply rejected Zionism: “Zionism can’t continue, it’s criminal…Only by abolishing Zionism can we continue [and make progress]” and insisted that Israeli authorities had lied about beheaded babies and rape and that their claims about the war could not be believed.
President Biden and a spokesperson for Prime Minister Netanyahu both repeated a false report that Hamas fighters decapitated 40 babies at Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7.
A New York Times article entitled “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7” has been widely circulated. While acknowledging that there were rapes on October 7, The Intercept and other outlets have raised serious questions about the veracity of this report. The spokeswoman of Kibbutz Be’eri denied that two of the instances of rape reported by the Times had occurred. The family of a third victim named in the Times story denied that she had been a victim of rape.
The Hebrew University’s decision to suspend Prof. Shalhoub Kevorkian from teaching highlights the complicity of Israeli institutions of higher education with the occupation and Israel’s military and security apparatus. Maya Wind, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, is the author of the just-released, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso Press, 2024). Wind, who was jailed for refusing induction into the Israeli army, charges Israel with “scholasticide, the intentional destruction of Palestinian education.” Amy Goodman interviewed Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Maya Wind on “Democracy Now” on March 15.
The waves of repression that have washed away many of the pretensions of democracy in Israel have reached the shores of North America. In October the Boston Jewish Community Relations Council expelled the Boston Workers Circle Center for Jewish Culture & Social Justice (BWC) because of its support for a cease fire and criticism of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip. This week the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston cut all funding to the BWC. The BWC’s Executive Director, Rabbi Rebecca Zimmerman Hornstein, has called on community members to contribute to support the work of the BWC. People in the Boston area may want to consider attending their rapid-response fundraiser this Sunday March 24th at 5pm in Jamaica Plain.