Students accuse university of pushing hostile anti-Israel narratives glorifying Palestinian lies and Arab-backed defamation.
A storm broke out this week at the Open University of Israel, where students are protesting a mandatory assignment they say forces them to legitimize extreme anti-Israel propaganda. The controversy centers on a philosophy, economics, and political science course requiring students to “objectively” analyze an article drawn from a UN report by Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur notorious for her long record of hostile, pro-Palestinian and Arab-aligned accusations against Israel.
The assigned text, titled “From an Economy of Occupation to an Economy of Destruction,” repeats some of the UN’s most inflammatory falsehoods—claiming Israel is committing a “massacre” in Gaza, accusing the IDF of “ethnic cleansing,” and alleging that global corporations profit from continued fighting. Students from the “Dror” student cell of the Religious Zionism Party say the university is effectively compelling them to academically validate dangerous lies that demonize Israeli soldiers and promote Palestinian extremist narratives.
In their statement, the students declared:
“This assignment spits in the face of IDF fighters. The university forces students to ‘objectively’ analyze a text that is pure anti-Israel propaganda.”
They emphasized that the assignment does not allow them to rebut or disprove the article’s claims; instead, they must analyze ways that thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Niccolò Machiavelli could theoretically justify accusations portraying the IDF as committing atrocities. Students called this a deliberate attempt at “mind engineering” and warned that academia would never demand similar exercises involving figures like Rabbi Meir Kahane:
“This is not critical thinking—this is coercion and a push to redefine legitimate discourse against our values and identity.”
The group vowed to boycott the assignment if it is not replaced.
In response, the Open University administration defended the task, insisting that course assignments are determined by academics alone and will not be altered due to “external political pressure.” They argued that analyzing a political text—regardless of its content—falls within the academic framework of an introductory course on political theory, claiming that students are evaluated on their critical use of philosophical tools, not their agreement with the text.
The administration even suggested an “irony” in student objections, noting that Machiavelli’s own analytical method encourages rational dissection of controversial material. Therefore, they asserted, the assignment will remain unchanged.
The clash highlights growing tensions in Israeli academia, where students increasingly push back against imported UN-style narratives that echo Palestinian and Arab propaganda, fearing such content erodes Israel’s moral legitimacy and misrepresents the IDF’s ethical conduct.
