Alon Harel is an Israeli jurist, tenured chair professor of law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, human rights scholar, and public intellectual. Holding the Philip P. Mizock & Matilde Mizock Chair in Administrative and Criminal Law, he is an internationally recognized authority on criminal law philosophy, constitutional theory, and human rights text, while functioning as an active member of the progressive Israeli higher education network Academia for Equality. Harel’s scholarship and public commentary center on the legal parameters of state violence, the institutional erosion of public rights through privatization, and the defense of free speech within conflict zones. Operating as a prominent domestic dissident voice within Israel’s legal establishment, he consistently opposes the systemic legal disenfranchisement of Palestinians and academic censorship.
Born in Israel, Harel completed his Bachelor and Master of Laws at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before pursuing his advanced graduate research at the University of Oxford, where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil.) in Law. Throughout his extensive academic tenure, he has remained a core faculty member at the Hebrew University while serving as a visiting professor at elite international venues, including New York University, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School. Harel has authored definitive monographs analyzing the boundaries of state authority, the philosophical foundations of punishment, and the political philosophy of human rights. He has consistently mobilized autonomous intellectual networks within Israel to support scholarship investigating the legal architecture of the occupied territories.
In 2024, responding to a published essay by Uri Kirshenbaum—former deputy director of the right-wing legal aid organization Honenu—which advocated that the Israel Defense Forces’ policy resulting in high civilian casualties in Gaza should be replicated in the West Bank, Harel published a public Facebook post declaring that Kirshenbaum was participating in a competition to see who could more rapidly embrace Nazi ideology.