Ma'an
As she awaits a final verdict, Bethlehem University student Berlanty Azzam (who was sent blindfolded and handcuffed back to Gaza last month) can at least take some consolation from the global campaign on her behalf. Human rights NGOs and the media have pushed her case enough to put genuine pressure on the Israeli government and their policy toward Gazan students.
Most Palestinian students will not share the world's shock at Azzam’s case. To them there is nothing strange about suffering for their degree. Israeli restrictions seem designed to thwart academic potential, arresting lecturers, embargoing equipment and shutting down whole universities.
Birzeit University, situated on the main road from Ramallah to Nablus, attracts the cream of Palestinian students. Entrance demands are comparable to Oxford and Cambridge. Its reputation is founded on liberal values that treat women as equals and leaves no intellectual stone unturned, including thorny political issues. This partly explains why 85 of its students are currently locked up in Israeli prisons, bringing the total detained to over 400 in the last six years.
Ala Masalmeh, a final year English student, believes the reason for their treatment is both practical and symbolic. "Education is the main reason for the development of any society. They don't want Palestinian people to be literate and intelligent.
"Very few of my friends take higher education because of the problems we face. If you tell a soldier at a checkpoint you are a student they will keep you for hours, searching and interrogating you."
..."In the last few years these movements have not been popular, because people are scared to be arrested," he said. In one recent case an engineering student, who wished to remain anonymous, was held for almost six years after being filmed at a campus demonstration. He was told his degree course was "dangerous" and switched for fear of further punishment.
... As recently as 2003 [Hebron University] was shut down for eight months by the Israeli military, who explained their decision by claiming it was a "wing of a Hamas terror cell," a decision condemned by the UN as an "utterly unjustified and illegal act of collective punishment." This was not the first instance of education being effectively banned in the city. A three year closure in 1987 was followed by a six month ban in 1996.
Iyad Barghouti, head of the Ramallah Cultural Centre for Human Rights Studies, says it is "an old argument to connect all student activities with security. We have had tanks on our campuses and attacks on our schools for generations. They try to say that students and terrorists are the same."
...The frequency and unpredictability of these attacks makes it difficult to arrange courses with any confidence that they can be completed. "We cannot draw a yearly calendar and we never know when to schedule courses because there are so many obstacles,"...
These obstacles are higher still for students from Gaza. Despite movement restrictions, the trauma of constant violence and an embargo that has made even paper difficult to come by, students there have maintained an excellent academic record. Almost 2,000 Gazan students were offered scholarships to international universities in the past year. As recently as 2005 there were 370 students from Gaza enrolled at Birzeit, before Israel made it illegal for them to cross the divide "Israel continues to regard the West Bank and Gaza as separate entities and Gazans are being punished for their government. They cannot pass through Rafah (into Egypt), so most of them have lost their places at foreign institutions," said Barghouthi.
Of the 2,000 with scholarships, 985 have lost their places, leaving them in limbo, awaiting a change of mood from the Israeli authorities who block their travel. "The siege is destroying every part of human life in Gaza, every part of society. They [Israel] want people to be isolated and living only from foreign aid,” says Barghouthi.
“Schools and factories are especially targeted. Resources are not allowed through the borders so they have to be smuggled in through tunnels from Egypt. Because of this even basic resources like paper cost four times more than in the West Bank."
Students in Gaza who wish to study abroad rely on an inconsistent system of permits, which have no reliable timescale and can be withdrawn at any time. There are many cases of students waiting so long for permission that their place is cancelled by the time it arrives. Full story
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