Israel university bill part of Gaza narrative clampdown, lawyer says

A bill in the Israeli parliament is part of an attempt to clamp down on those opposing the country's Gaza war narrative, a lawyer at a human rights group said on Thursday.

The bill in the Knesset would mean higher education institutions would have to sack teaching staff expressing "support for terror".

It would empower the Council for Higher Education in Israel to instruct a university or college to dismiss a teacher for political comments, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

"This bill is, of course, a small part of a wider effort to exploit the atmosphere of war in order to repress anyone who dares oppose the Israeli narrative about the war on Gaza and to further curtail their freedom of expression," Adalah lawyer Adi Mansour told The New Arab.

"Israel has already enacted legislation in which vague definitions of criminal offences serve as the basis for the imprisonment of a growing number of Palestinians every day.

"This bill employs even more imprecise, deliberately ambiguous definitions to allow for penalties within an extrajudicial framework, by allowing academic institutions full discretion to define speech as incitement."

Mansour said Adalah, a legal centre advocating for Palestinian rights, has repeatedly seen disciplinary bodies at these institutions "abuse" their "overly broad authorities" in the cases of more than 100 students the rights group has represented since 7 October, the date Israel's war on Gaza began.

"These cases indicate that universities and colleges have prohibited a wide spectrum of legitimate critical expressions, including displays of sympathy with the victims in Gaza and even verses from the Quran," he added.

Mansour called the bill "unconstitutional".

It passed one Knesset vote on Wednesday, but there are three more to go.

The Association of University Heads on Wednesday asked the Knesset legal adviser to stop the bill being progressed.

Members of the association called the proposed law "draconian and McCarthyist".

A trade union coordinating committee said it intended to proclaim a labour dispute, which could pave the way for strike action against the bill.

Israel's war on Gaza has killed 38,345 people, the Palestinian territory's health ministry said on Thursday.