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HOW HAIFA UNIVERSITY’S STUDENTS’ UNION CONSPIRED AGAINST
PALESTINIANS  
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Baker Zoubi
September 13, 2024
972 Magazine
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_ Palestinian students arrived at the union’s office to submit
their candidacy for elections. The administration slammed the door in
their faces. _

University of Haifa , Wikimedia Commons

 

On Monday morning, students from various political factions arrived at
the University of Haifa’s Students’ Union office.

They were there to submit their candidacy for the upcoming campus
election, but they hadn’t had long to get themselves organized:
usually held in December, this year’s was quietly brought forward by
the current administration, which had buried the announcement deep in
the union’s website.

After lists of candidates were hastily put together, the in-person
registration process itself should have been a quick errand and mere
formality. Yet instead, only a handful of students were allowed to
register — all of them
[[link removed]] current union
members seeking reelection — after they each spent around 40 to 50
minutes in the office filling out forms. “Shame! Shame!” shouted
the crowd of students who were still waiting outside the office to
submit their candidacy, after the union’s administration declared
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registration window closed three hours later, and slammed the door in
their faces. 

This is not, however, only the story of a corrupt student election. It
also appears to have been a concerted plan to keep Palestinians out 
— who, despite making up around 50 percent of the University of
Haifa’s student body, are not represented in the current union
administration at all. Lists aligned with the Palestinian parties
Balad and Hadash and the Jewish-Arab socialist movement Standing
Together, as well as several independent candidates, were all denied
the chance to contest a fair election.

“The announcement that the window was open for submitting lists was
published at the bottom of the union’s website — we learned about
it only five days before the deadline,” Udi Ghanayem, head of the
Hadash student group at the university, told Local Call and +972.
“We managed to assemble a list of candidates from all departments
and on Monday morning we arrived at the office to register. They were
surprised to see us and wouldn’t let us in. 

“There were three other students in front of us, each of whom spent
around an hour registering inside, even though registration
shouldn’t take more than a few minutes,” he continued. “Then
they told us registration was closed, despite the fact that we were
already there. In every election in the world, if you arrive before
the deadline, you have the right to vote or participate. Here, they
refused to let us register, and brought security personnel to remove
us from the building.

Students wait outside the registration office, University of Haifa,
September 9, 2024. (Hadash at University of Haifa)

“The issue didn’t start today,” Ghanayem went on. “They know
that Arab students are around half of the student body — and more
than half of the eligible voters, because most Arab students pay
membership fees to the union.”

Sawsan Zaher, a Palestinian civil and human rights lawyer, wrote to
the dean of the university and the union’s election committee,
requesting that they reopen the registration process and conduct the
election in accordance with the law, and under external supervision.
The university responded that the union is an independent organization
that doesn’t answer to them; the union’s election committee, for
its part, initially ignored Zaher’s messages before eventually
stating only that it was looking into the matter. Zaher decided to
escalate matters and filed an appeal with the Haifa District Court,
which is scheduled for Monday.

“This is an attempt to rob students of the legal, constitutional,
and fundamental right of running for office, with complete
non-transparency and refusal to give the students any details about
the elections,” Zaher explained. “No one knows who the members of
the election committee are, even though this matter in particular
should be very transparent.”

‘THE UNION IS A CLOSED CLUB’

Palestinian students who spoke to Local Call and +972 said this was
far from the first instance of discrimination that they’ve faced at
the university. “Since the beginning of the war, the union has
been persecuting Arab students
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inciting against [us] and trying to prevent any of our activities, all
while we have no voice in the union,” Moataz Odeh, who belongs to
the Balad student group, explained. “This time the conspiracy was
very clear.”

Israeli police officers arrest a Palestinian student ahead of a Nakba
Day event at Tel Aviv University, May 15, 2022. (Tomer
Neuberg/Flash90)

Following the incident, Academia for Equality, a group of left-wing
faculty members at Israeli universities, sent a letter to the
University of Haifa’s administration. “We are aware that the
Students’ Union is an independent organization,” the letter read,
which was signed by 130 lecturers. “But if there are substantial
flaws in the union’s conduct to the point where there is a real
concern that the elected representatives will not be able to
adequately represent the interests of the students in the institution,
then the university administration must intervene.” 

It went on: “The Students’ Union [must] extend the registration
period immediately, and allow open registration to any interested
student,” while “the university administration must make it clear
to the Students’ Union that if it does not immediately correct its
ways, the upcoming elections will not be considered legitimate.”

Eliah Levin, a Jewish student who belongs to the university’s
Standing Together group, told Local Call and +972 that the election
process was fishy from the very start. “The very decision to hold
elections now, before the start of the school year, is suspicious,
since a large number of the students are not at the university —
some are even outside the country,” she explained. 

“Since April, we’ve been sending emails to the union asking for an
election date, and they didn’t answer,” Levin continued. “Then
suddenly we found out that they’d allocated 10 days to register, and
the deadline was Sept. 9. They also added new guidelines, including
denying eligibility to anyone who was not a member of the union last
year, while simultaneously closing the possibility of registering for
membership — in other words, a first-year student does not have the
right to submit their candidacy. It’s a strange law, proving that
the union is a closed club.”

Levin also believes the union is trying to ingratiate itself with the
National Union of Israeli Students, which has been leading the charge
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recent months to restrict academics’ freedom
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criticize Israel and Zionism. “The union in Haifa has good relations
with the National Union, which is trying to impose an extreme
right-wing agenda,” Levin said. “They cooperate closely, and the
union in Haifa does not want to lose that.”

Local Call and +972 contacted the Students’ Union at the University
of Haifa for comment; their response will be added here as and when it
is received. 

_A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local
Call. Read it __here_
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_BAKER ZOUBI is a journalist from Kufr Misr currently living in
Nazareth. Baker has been working in the field of journalism since
2010, initially as a reporter for local Arab media outlets, and later
as an editor of the Bokra website. Today, he also works as a
researcher and editor for television programs on the Makan and Musawa
channels. He writes and posts on his Facebook page various opinion
pieces on politics and social issues related to Palestinian society.
Recently, he also started writing for Local Call._

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* Israel
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* Palestinians
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* students
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* Inequality
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* democracy
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