Anti-Israel Hebrew University professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian retires
Arab Israeli senior lecturer was briefly arrested in April on suspicion of incitement, has called for the end of the Jewish state
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
Anti-Israel Hebrew University professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who was briefly arrested in April on suspicion of incitement related to her comments on the Israel-Hamas war, has left her post at the university and won’t be teaching during the upcoming academic year, it was widely reported on Wednesday.
The university administration, which has supported Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s right to free speech in the past while simultaneously condemning her anti-Zionist public statements, has not put out a press release on the matter, but a Hebrew University official confirmed to The Times of Israel on Wednesday that Shalhoub-Kevorkian had “decided to retire” and dismissed reports in the Hebrew media that she had been terminated.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University’s School of Social Work and Social Welfare, had been arrested in April on suspicion of incitement but was released a day later, after the court rejected a police request to extend the professor’s remand, according to Hebrew media reports, saying that the police’s own findings did not justify the arrest.
“There are some expressions that may have crossed the line from free expression to incitement,” wrote Judge Dov Pollock in the ruling. “And yet, the question before the court is whether it is necessary to prolong her arrest on the suspicion that she poses a danger.”
“I am unconvinced there is a need to continue her incarceration,” concluded the judge.
The university had condemned the arrest, saying that although the administration was “sharply opposed” to many of Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s public statements, “we are extremely concerned about her arrest, if it is indeed based on the things she had said publicly.”
Shalhoub-Kevorkian had been suspended in March after an interview in which she said Zionism should be abolished and called into question the rapes and other atrocities committed by Hamas.
“It’s time to abolish Zionism. It can’t continue, it’s criminal. Only by abolishing Zionism can we continue… They will use any lie. They started with babies, they continued with rape, and they will continue with a million other lies. We stopped believing them, I hope the world stops believing them,” said Shalhoub-Kevorkian.
She said Israelis act afraid when they walk by and hear her speaking in Arabic, “and they should be afraid because criminals are always afraid. They cannot dispossess my land, they cannot displace my people. They cannot kill and not be afraid, so they better be afraid.”
Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s statements denying Hamas atrocities led to her brief suspension by the university, which said the professor had taken advantage of her academic freedom of expression “for incitement and to create division,” and that her suspension was necessary to “ensure a safe and conducive environment for our students on campus.”
In late March, however, the university reinstated her, citing a meeting Shalhoub-Kevorkian had with its rector Prof. Tamir Sheafer where she “clarified that as a feminist researcher, she believes the victims and doesn’t doubt their claims and she did not deny that there were incidents of rape on October 7.”
She was not requested to walk back a previous claim that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, the Haaretz daily reported.
In October, several weeks after the Hamas assault of October 7 and shortly after Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza began, she was signatory number one to an open letter accusing Israel of genocide.
The letter, which was signed by more than 1,000 academics around the world, called for “the immediate cessation of the Western-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and the egregious violation of Palestinian children’s rights,” among other things
At the time, the university sent a formal letter that “expressed strong condemnation over Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s alignment with a petition characterizing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal and labeling it an occupying force since 1948. The university management suggested that she consider resigning from her position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.”
Before her retirement, Shalhoub-Kevorkian was 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 of Jerusalem, according to her faculty page, which notes that she is a resident of Jerusalem’s Old City and a “prominent local activist.”
She is an expert on “trauma, state crimes and criminology, surveillance, gender violence, law and society. She studies the crime of femicide and other forms of gendered-based violence, violence against children in conflict-ridden areas, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization and social control,” according to her page.
In June, a legislative proposal requiring institutions of higher education to terminate lecturers who express anti-Zionist sentiments drew strong condemnations from Arab lawmakers and academics amidst what critics see as a wartime crackdown on freedom of expression.
If passed into law, the bill, which was brought to the Knesset by coalition whip Ofir Katz (Likud), would require universities to fire without compensation any instructors who deny Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign Jewish nation, incite terrorism, or express support for a terrorist organization or an armed struggle against the State of Israel.
Sam Sokol and Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
