Many scholars have argued that the spirit of protest that animated student activists worldwide in the 1960s and 1970s passed over Israel's student population aside from a limited few leading radical groups on the margins of Israeli political life. However, the "spirit of 1968" manifested itself quite prominently in Israel in the 1970s in groups who chose to channel dissident political initiatives through traditional venues of student organization. One such group, the Jewish-Arab group called "Yesh", won a commanding electoral victory in the Student Union of the University of Haifa in 1972. Unlike most Israeli Student Union factions at the time, however, Yesh neither associated with outside parties or groups, nor did it restrict its agenda to matters explicitly relating to students’ interests. Instead, the group issued a vocal call for comprehensive change in Israeli society that was reminiscent of the “spirit of 1968.” Moreover, Yesh`s rhetoric and activities contrast with widely-held notions about Israeli Student Unions, organizational frameworks that both scholarly and popular observers have disregarded as ineffectual bodies that are usually subjected to the co-optation of mainstream Israeli political parties. Not only was Yesh comprised of broad coalition of Arab and Jewish Zionists, non-Zionists, and anti-Zionists, the group attained a level of electoral support in the Haifan Student Unions that was proportionally much higher than that of contemporaneous far left-wing factions in Israel’s Knesset and than that of radical extraparliamentary movements like Matspen and Siah that have received considerably more scholarly attention. Drawing on documents from the Israel State Archive and student newspapers, this paper will also illustrate two broader points. First, it shows how traditional institutions like Israeli Universities and their Student Unions can be appropriated as venues of political dissent and divergence from the behavioral conventions and partisan associations of a state's mainstream political culture. Second, based on previously classified documents, this study will use the rise of Yesh as an example of how the Israeli General Security Service`s (Shabak or GSS) attempts at political pressure and control have at times resulted in the utter opposite of their intended effect.