As part of an organised move by the right-wing to disqualify left‑wing candidates from running in today’s (Thursday) elections for the student union institutions at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Dror student faction, identified with Finance Minister Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, demanded that the union’s election committee disqualify the candidacy of Valeria Borovoy, a member of SSM.
The official grounds for the disqualification request: classifying the opposition to ‘bringing Ben‑Gvir’s police onto campus’ as ‘incitement’. Only recently, the police violently arrested a teacher who protested against Ben‑Gvir on university grounds. The quote in the disqualification request came from a leaflet distributed in outreach activities and online during the week, calling to build a struggle against the cuts to higher education, against the cost of living, against the war of annihilation, and against the political persecution and silencing of Palestinian and generally anti-war students.
The committee initially accepted, without any hearing, the cowardly disqualification request that was submitted secretly and after the deadline — the night before the elections — until, under pressure following students’ appeals, it finally agreed formally in a Zoom meeting to accept the appeal (it should be noted that although Valeria’s name eventually appeared in the online voting system, it was absent from a list circulated this morning by the election committee). After the cancellation of the disqualification, the faction of the finance minister opened an incitement campaign through news websites identified with the far right.
Even earlier, left‑wing candidates supporting Hadash/al-Jabha and Standing Together were disqualified on the Mount Scopus campus, supposedly on procedural grounds. It is worth recalling that a similar event occurred at the University of Haifa in September ’24, which led to protest, legal proceedings and the postponement of elections that were eventually held in January this year and brought reports of irregularities.
At the Hebrew University, the right to vote, to be elected and to promote election campaigning was denied to anti‑war activists with the blessing of the election committee headed by Adv. Ḥani Roznak. The elections held today by the union are tainted not only by nationalist demagogic incitement, but also by an organised bias against voices identified with opposition to the catastrophes caused by Netanyahu’s government and the far right. Therefore, in view of the harm to a proper democratic procedure at a basic level, we will appeal the results and demand that new elections be held without the disqualification or silencing of candidates because of their political position.
The delegitimisation campaign against Valeria’s socialist campaign — which promotes a platform opposing Netanyahu’s endless war — began with inciteful posts on the anonymous Facebook page ‘HUJI Confessions’, and continued with an official appeal to the election committee.
After the cancellation of the cowardly disqualification, the response of the Dror faction — supporters of the cuts, the attacks on organised labour, the war, the occupation and the rule of capital — was, as noted, a dangerous escalation in the anti‑social incitement campaign against opponents of the government and the war, and specifically against Valeria, through inciteful articles on the sites Channel 7 and 0404 News, which also quoted the statement of the Dror faction calling supporters of the socialist campaign a ‘fifth column’ (ironically, a term originally referring to Franco’s fascist supporters in Madrid). They also typically smeared the opposition to the war and to the crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli government in Gaza as ‘support for terrorism’: ‘There is no place for support for terrorism, nor for representatives of terrorist organisations on campuses, and certainly not in positions within them. We demand that the student union prevent the anti‑Zionist candidate from running in the elections, and prevent such cases in the future’.
Despite the incitement, students from the Jerusalem branch of SSM led an election campaign with a presence on the ground on the Givat Ram campus, transparently, with an open organisational profile, and the campaign received sympathetic responses from dozens of students from different voting areas on the separate campuses. By contrast, the Dror faction operated in the shadows, through bureaucratic channels.
We will not bow our heads before the incitement and threats of supporters of the government of bloodbath and before the witch‑hunt at the Hebrew University, which continues to silence and persecute anti‑war voices — in particular Palestinian students and lecturers, whose voices are silenced through direct and indirect threats of violence. We call on students to join and strengthen our activity against the political persecution on campuses of anti‑war and Palestinian students, against the attack on democratic rights of students, against the cuts to higher‑education and welfare budgets, and for a union that will fight to defend the rights and study and working conditions of us all.
