Israel Arrest of feminist scholar is ‘threat to civil liberties’
The arrest and interrogation of a leading Palestinian legal scholar based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem marks a new threat to civil liberties in Israel, her legal team and employer have said.
Prof Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was detained by police on the afternoon of 17 April over comments made on a podcast more than a month earlier and held overnight in conditions her lawyers described as “terrible” and designed to humiliate. “This is not only about one professor, it could be a [precedent] for any academic who goes against the consensus in wartime,” said Hassan Jabareen, her lawyer and the director of the human rights organisation Adalah.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian was released on bail the next day, when a magistrate and a district court judge both ruled she did not pose a threat, but has been called for further questioning tomorrow.
Although there have been widespread detentions of Palestinian citizens of Israel who publicly criticised the war in Gaza, this is the first time an academic has been targeted over speech related to their work.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a leading feminist scholar whose work focuses on trauma, state crimes, genocide, gender violence and surveillance. She is the Lawrence D Biele chair in law at Hebrew University and the global chair in law at Queen Mary University of London.
All prosecutions relating to freedom of speech have to be approved by the attorney general’s office, so her detention was signed off at the heart of government. Police said they were investigating Shalhoub-Kevorkian on suspicion of incitement to terrorism, violence and racism over comments on a podcast published in early March. Jabareen said: “To carry out the arrest like that, as if she was a dangerous person, shows the main purpose was to humiliate her.”
condemned Hebrew University for fuelling months of political attacks on one of their faculty. The rector called on her to resign in late 2023 after she signed a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and describing Israel’s campaign as genocide.
Despite that history, her arrest set such a damaging precedent that it drew public condemnation from the university. “We strongly object to many of the things Prof ShalhoubKevorkian said. Nonetheless, as a democratic country, there is no place to arrest a person for such remarks, however infuriating they may be,” it stated, according to Haaretz. The university did not respond to questions from the Guardian.