Pressure on Israel's Hebrew University after lecturer arrested for attack on Palestinian
Pressure on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is growing after one of its lecturers, criminologist Michael Wolfowicz, was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and violently assaulting a Palestinian alongside eight Israeli police officers and soldiers.
Leading the outcry are Palestinian students at universities across Israel, who wrote an open letter condemning the Hebrew University's lack of action.
Wolfowicz, a senior lecturer at the faculty of law’s criminology institute, was arrested on Tuesday by the Department of Internal Police Investigations (DIPI), which handles all criminal offences committed by police officers.
The lecturer, who denies being at the scene of the incident, which took place in August, is suspected of causing aggravated injury, while other suspects are accused of kidnapping the Palestinian, Laith Awaine, who lives near Bethlehem.
In August, Wolfowicz gave a presentation to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, in which he downplayed settler violence and said that United Nations data on it was based on “false reports”.
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The Palestinian students' letter demanded Wolfowicz's suspension until proven innocent, saying that “someone who assaults a person just for being Arab and Palestinian cannot teach students in general, let alone teach human rights courses to Arab students, especially while being accused of committing a terrorist act against his own people”.
“Only in Israeli society can you see an academic commit a terrorist act against a person simply because they are Arab and Palestinian, and the academic instutition where they teach remain silent,” they said.
According to details released by DIPI, Awaine was attacked in the Wadi Auja area of the occupied West Bank, north of the Kochav Hashahar settlement, while he was sitting with friends.
Witnesses said Awaine was beaten with tree branches and a rifle, thrown into a stream and then forced into a car. He was driven tens of kilometres away and then dumped on the road.
Awaine told Haaretz that he still suffers from back pain after the attack. “I feel that I live in a lawful country,” he said in response to the arrests. He added that before the attack, he had often visited the valley with his friends but that he hasn’t come near since.
The attackers claimed he was affiliated with Hamas, according to an unnamed Israeli official who spoke to Channel 12, but no evidence has been found to support that.
Two witnesses identified the attackers as masked policemen and soldiers, noting that some of them had turned up at the scene in a vehicle with “Border Guard” written on it, Haaretz reported.
The witnesses said that the attackers shouted “You are Hamas” at the group of friends, before handcuffing one of them, beating him, throwing him in the stream and abandoning him on the road.
According to Haaretz, he lost consciousness and was taken to the West Bank's Turkish hospital. The Israeli newspaper reported the incident in August but the Israeli military and police denied that soldiers or policemen were involved.
One of the other reported suspects is Saar Ofir, an Israeli settler previously arrested in July on suspicion of summarily executing a Hamas fighter captured by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Settler scholar
An Israeli legal scholar, who did not want to be identified because academics in Israel are targeted professionally for voicing sympathy or support for Palestinians, condemned Wolfowitz and told Middle East Eye his case was indicative of the violent, entwined nature of Israeli society.
“This case strongly exemplifies how supposedly discrete institutions within Israeli society - the academy, the military, the police - and supposedly extra-legal settler-vigilante violence are not only aligned but effectively operate in tandem as part of a single regime,” the academic said.
'I feel afraid when I am in the presence of a lecturer of this type'
- Abdul Hamid Abu Ghosh, Hebrew University student
“Having longstanding relations with the Israeli army and the Israeli police, holding a coveted position as a faculty member in the criminology institute at the Hebrew University, and now being suspected of horrid and formally ‘illegal’ violence against a Palestinian man, Wolfowicz personifies all three institutions in one.”
In his August address to the Knesset, Wolfowicz argued that violence committed by Israeli settlers was massively exaggerated because it was miscategorised.
“In my profession I investigate terrorism, violence of Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria, and the imposing of sanctions by other countries,” he said, using the Israeli names for the West Bank.
“You can see the United Nations statistics and the Palestinian Authority statistics, which are used as a source of information for the United Nations. The UN figures on 'settler violence' are based on false reports.”
Wolfowicz said Israel’s response to “ideologically motivated crime” was “better than many countries', including the UK, which has applied sanctions on settlers for settler violence”.
After news of the lecturer’s alleged involvement in the brutal attack was reported, the dean of the Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law and Criminology messaged the faculty WhatsApp group.
“Good evening,” the message read. “In the last few hours, information regarding a faculty member has been circulating in the media. The matter is under investigation, and I would like to cooperate in reducing the intensity until we have reliable information. Thank you.”
This response stands in stark contrast to the approach taken by the university in the case of prominent Palestinian academic Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who was suspended in March 2024 after she said that it was time to “abolish Zionism”.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who like Wolfowicz was part of the faculty of law’s criminology institute, was then arrested in April by Israeli authorities for “incitement”.
Abdul Hamid Abu Ghosh, a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the Jafta Movement - Democratic Student Gathering, told MEE that as a Palestinian student his experience was one of "alienation and fear".
"You study at an institution that has all the military officers and the people who make the laws and look at the texts that legitimise the occupation, apartheid and daily practices against your people," he said.
"I feel afraid when I am in the presence of a lecturer of this type."
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