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Education
as a Security Risk
The Israeli military raid of al-Quds University in Jerusalem and the closure of its moderate president's office are only the latest reasons to fear that education itself could be the next victim in the Occupied Territories. I am a Palestinian in my third year at Brown University. I have the luxury of avoiding the kind of daily obstacle course that my peers back home face every day. Students in the Occupied Territories are overcoming increasingly elaborate and often dangerous hurdles of curfews and checkpoints, armed settlers and jumpy teenage soldiers, arbitrary detainment and random ID checks -- only to arrive at the dead end of a campus that is either closed, raided or without professors. Even when given permission to move around, students face uncertainty. In Hebron recently, the Israeli army lifted its curfew for a few hours to allow college students to go to campus. When students showed up at their assigned classrooms, however, Israeli troops surrounded the university and detained almost 300 of them. In another incident reported by the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, high school students were pulled out of their classes in the middle of final exams and forbidden to finish. A common joke in the West Bank is that Palestinians have no rights except one: the right to be late. But these days, there is only the right to stay put. My father, a medical professor at al-Quds University, lives in Ramallah, which is currently under curfew. He has not been able to reach his classroom for three weeks. Like 700,000 other average Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, he sits under house arrest for no particular reason, having committed no crime. Many Palestinians will not be able to apply to university, because restrictions on freedom of movement have prevented them from taking the requisite national high school matriculation exams, the Palestinian equivalent of the SATs. Imagine the frustration. After years of preparation, you miss the chance to go to college because a soldier, probably still young enough to be wearing braces, decides to pull you out of line at a checkpoint. The repression of education is even getting high-tech. Birzeit University students, prohibited from reaching their campus, have resorted to taking classes in alternative locations as well as online, relying heavily on the Internet for announcements and course assignments. Israeli forces' recent attack on the Ramallah offices of Palnet, the main provider of internet service in the West Bank, has rendered the university's website inaccessible, causing yet more delays for the university's seemingly never-ending spring semester. The attacks, obstacles and the closing of the al-Quds University are particularly ironic in light of the recent claim by the Israeli military that Palestinian textbooks incite students against the Israeli government. Not only has this claim been repeatedly debunked by US academics, most recently in an independent study conducted by George Washington University Professor Nathan Brown, but it also misses the point. The Israeli occupation itself, not to mention the ongoing attack on primary schools and universities, provides a far more provocative education than anything that a textbook could convey. The policy of targeting educational institutions is not new. During the first intifada, Palestinian schools and universities were closed for over a year. Last December, the Quaker high school that I attended was added to the list of more than 90 schools that have been shelled by the Israeli military. Earlier this year, troops ransacked the Palestinian Ministry of Education, destroying computers and confiscating records. Schools are not a security risk. Israel's current repression of civil society -- and particularly its war against students and educational institutions -- is a counterproductive policy that will only squelch moderation while widening dissent. [Lara Harb, a third-year comparative literature student at Brown University, is based at the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), an independent think tank in Washington, DC.] |
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