An amendment to the Students’ Rights Bill is due to appear in the near future before the Ministerial Committee for Legislation. The amendment would require academic institutions to suspend or even permanently expel students and not recognize their degrees obtained overseas if they are found to have expressed themselves in a way that could be perceived as supporting terrorism. The amendment further proposes a ban on raising the Palestinian Authority flag (according to the wording of the bill) on academic campuses and punishing those who wave them, even though waving a Palestinian flag (for the moment at least) is not illegal.
The issue of displaying the Palestinian flag in public is one that has of late been of concern to the Israeli legislator, enforcement system and, to some extent, the Israeli Jewish public. About a year ago, in a cruel and degrading act, Israeli authorities nearly toppled the coffin of the Al Jazeera Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed covering an IDF raid in Jenin, during her funeral procession. The police were trying to prevent the raising of the Palestinian flag in Jerusalem.
At around that time, a resident of the settlement of Yitzhar also decided to remove a Palestinian flag that was hanging on a pylon in the Palestinian village of Hawara, an act that led to clashes between Jews and Palestinians. In another incident, following an outcry on social media a Palestinian flag raised next to an Israeli flag on a building in the Diamond Exchange in Ramat Gan was taken down. In January, Public Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir instructed the police commissioner to remove PLO flags from the public realm, stating that the display of the PLO flag constitutes support for a terrorist organization.
It is worth noting that the Palestinian flag and the PLO flag are not one and the same. The Palestinian flag does not belong to any particular organization but represents the Palestinian people, part of whom are under occupation, while another part resides in the diaspora, and approximately 20 percent of whom are Israeli citizens. This article does not address the legality of the proposed law, or its severe impact on the freedom of expression and right to protest of Palestinian citizens in Israel (and of anyone else who wishes to raise the flag as a symbol of the struggle for the liberation of millions from the yoke of occupation, or as a cultural expression of the Palestinian people). Neither does it discuss the autonomy of institutions of higher education. Its purpose is to reflect on the essence of the protest that has been taking place for more than 20 weeks throughout the country and on its future, against the backdrop of this problematic bill and other proposals likely to follow under this government, and that will first and foremost affect the rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel.
The protest began as resistance to Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s aggressive declaration regarding what he and his camp referred to as “judicial reform,” which very soon turned out to be nothing less than a judicial coup. This protest, which initially had an Ashkenazi Jewish character, opened up space for a discussion on questions that Israeli society had been unwilling to address for many years: questions of gender discrimination, national and ethnic discrimination, and also the ongoing nature of the occupation which casts a shadow on Israel’s character as a democratic state.
We began to see more and more protesters and speakers from Mizrahi communities, the LGBTQ+ community, feminists and Palestinian citizens who had been silenced for years, and now their voices are being heard from the most important protest platforms. The discourse, which initially focused on changing the composition of the committee for selecting judges, the status of legal advisory opinions, the judicial override clause and the revocation of the reasonability requirement, has expanded to encompass questions of discrimination, exclusion, citizenship, belonging and the social contract.
In other words, the protest began to deal with broader questions about the nature of the Israeli regime, which is inseparable from the occupation and its impact on the country. It seemed for a moment that there might be an opening here for changing the Israeli regime and transforming it from a Jewish democratic regime – what in academic literature is termed an ethnic democracy – into a liberal democratic state with equal rights for all its citizens.
Is that really the case? In my opinion, the amendment to the Student Rights Bill is a significant test case. If this amendment is approved, it will primarily affect the Palestinian minority (but again, not only them), and the question is whether those who shout “dem-o-cratia!” every Saturday night will realize that infringing on the rights of the minority means infringing on democracy itself, and that defending human rights and minority rights is defending democracy. We can only hope that the leaders of the protest and masses of demonstrators will indeed choose democracy.
Dr. Totry Jubran teaches at the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University and is a member of the Professors’ Forum for Democracy.
The Palestinian Flag Litmus Test for Israel's Democratic Protesters
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02.06.2023
An amendment to the Students’ Rights Bill is due to appear in the near future before the Ministerial Committee for Legislation. The amendment would require academic institutions to suspend or even permanently expel students and not recognize their degrees obtained overseas if they are found to have expressed themselves in a way that could be perceived as supporting terrorism. The amendment further proposes a ban on raising the Palestinian Authority flag (according to the wording of the bill) on academic campuses and punishing those who wave them, even though waving a Palestinian flag (for the moment at least) is not illegal.
The issue of displaying the Palestinian flag in public is one that has of late been of concern to the Israeli legislator, enforcement system and, to some extent, the Israeli Jewish public. About a year ago, in a cruel and degrading act, Israeli authorities nearly toppled the coffin of the Al Jazeera Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed covering an IDF raid in Jenin, during her funeral procession. The police were trying to prevent the raising of the Palestinian flag in Jerusalem.
At around that time, a resident of the settlement of Yitzhar also decided to remove a Palestinian flag that was hanging on a pylon in the Palestinian village of........
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