From The Guardian
Away from the killing grounds in the Gulf, the war has quietly claimed other victims. Palestinian undergraduates, whose education is already badly damaged by the effects of the intifada, are facing new problems. The curfew on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, imposed by the Israeli government in response to the outbreak of war, means that students are finding it almost impossible to travel to the “make-up classes” that replaced lectures after the closure of the Palestinian universities and higher education colleges by the military authorities in February 1988.
“Even if we can attend a lecture, it’s hard to concentrate,” says Hanan Abdel Rahman, a second-year English student at Birzeit University, the oldest and most prestigious Palestinian university on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. “There are always police sirens going and army jeeps roaring past. Maybe they are coming to break up the lecture. Maybe they are shooting our friends. We don’t know.”
Until the Gulf war and the Israeli crackdown, the make-up classes had gone some way to filling the gaps in students’ education. Unable to teach on campus, lecturers at Birzeit followed the example of their academic colleagues in the free universities of pre-revolutionary Eastern Europe. In community halls, mosques, churches and private apartments in the nearby towns of Ramallah and El-Bireh they hold seminars, teach classes and set examinations. “The Israelis usually turn a blind eye,” explains Abdul Latif Barghouti, a lecturer in the sociology department. “Their primary objective has been achieved: stopping the main body of the students getting together.”
But even before the Gulf war, the number of students who could be taught in the make-up classes was limited, and the university authorities at Birzeit estimate that less than a third of its undergraduates can continue with their education. Those who require the use of laboratories and other sophisticated teaching equipment are in a particularly difficult position. Dr Barghouti accuses Israelis of double standards: “In their diaspora, the Jews placed great store on the value of education: now they’re stopping Palestinian students from achieving anything.”
The Israeli authorities justify the closures on security grounds; students were meeting in the universities to plan attacks on Israeli soldiers, they alleged, and labs were being used to make petrol bombs.
While most students have been involved in the intifada, Palestinians see the closures as punitive. “It is a collective punishment,” says a recent report on Palestinian education prepared by the pro-Arab Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre. “The closure has been a response to the uprising in general. It has signalled to the Palestinians that the loss of higher education is one of the prices to pay if they persist in fighting Israeli occupation.”
Birzeit’s history has reflected the political changes in the Middle East. It was founded in 1924, during the British occupation, by a Palestinian Church of England clergyman, Reverend Naser, as a school for Christian Arabs. It became a university in 1972, the first of six such institutions in the occupied territories, in response to severe restrictions placed on Palestinians wishing to study abroad following the six-day war in 1967. Until then, Palestinian undergraduates attended universities in Cairo, Beirut, Amman and elsewhere in the Arab world. Permission to study abroad is now granted only with the approval of the military, which is difficult and time-consuming to obtain.
Those Palestinian males in the age range 16 to 35 who study in Egypt or Jordan must stay outside Israeli territory for at least nine months at a time. If they fail to come back within three years, they lose their right to return forever.
Palestinians born within the “green line” the pre-1967 borders of Israel can attend Israeli universities, and 1,400 of the 10,000 students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem are Palestinian. But discrimination exists here too. Entrance to an Israeli university is easier if the candidate has served in the armed forces, but there is no conscription for Palestinians, and few volunteer to serve in what they regard as an occupying force. Accommodation in university towns or halls of residence where the majority are Jews is often difficult to obtain.
There is little mixing for the few who finally make it. “Arabs and Jews tend to keep to themselves,” said one Palestinian final-year student at the Hebrew University. “We’re polite to each other in the class, but few ever make friends with the other side.”
The Arab states have done little to help Palestinian education. While the wealthy Saudi and Kuwaiti governments were willing to pump money into Birzeit and the other Palestinian universities, they were reluctant to accept more than a tiny number of Palestinian students at their universities.
If the PLO falls out with an Arab government, Palestinian students in that country are routinely expelled. Following the PLO’s opposition to the signing of the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1978, the Cairo government cut the number of students it took from the Gaza Strip, even though schoolchildren there are taught according to the Egyptian syllabus; since the beginning of the intifada, the Egyptians have become even less accommodating. When, in the late 1970s, the PLO suggested building a university for Palestinians anywhere in the Arab world, the idea was turned down by the Arab states.
Despite these difficulties, Palestinians are among the best-educated people in the world. In Amman, where over half the population is Palestinian, almost every doctor, lawyer or engineer you meet will be a Palestinian.
At Birzeit’s deserted campus the caretaker shows us out, shakes my hand and locks the gate. In the town, a strike is about to begin, part of the everyday struggle of the intifada, and the shutters of the shops are being noisily lowered. “Education is a basic human right, guaranteed by international law,” says Dr Barghouti: “We will not be denied forever.”