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Palestinian Universities: An Update
By Mary Gray
In 1990, Mary Gray wrote an article for Academe called "Phantom Universities-West Bank and Gaza." This piece updates that article.
My earlier article on Palestinian universities dealt with the difficulties of operating them under hostile military occupation. Beginning in 1995, there was a brief period in which the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza was minimal, and the universities made substantial progress. Faculty trained in the United States developed state-of-the-art programs in a number of fields. Some graduates of the universities went on to top graduate schools in the United States or Europe; others found jobs in the nascent Palestinian business sector or in the Palestine Authority structure. Travel to and among the local universities was comparatively easy, and even traveling abroad was not difficult.
Today, however, the situation is far worse than it was in 1990. Towns and villages in the West Bank are cut off from one another by numerous checkpoints. And the infamous "segregation wall," which takes up more than 14 percent of Palestinian land, not only isolates Palestinian areas from pre-1967 Israel, but it also cuts off some Palestinian towns and villages from others.
Residents of entire towns are under a form of house arrest, slightly modified to include a few hundred meters surrounding their homes. They no longer have access to Jerusalem or to other cities, nor do they have a way to reach their fields or olive groves (where they still exist—nearly a half million olive trees have been uprooted during the Israeli occupation). Many of the areas cut off by the wall have no hospital.
Checkpoints and the few gates in the wall are under Israeli control and subject to arbitrary closure. Students who do not live in the few towns that have universities (Ramallah, Abu Deis, Nablus, Hebron, Jenin, Gaza City) have to give up their chance for higher education. In some places, students cannot even reach secondary schools. Faculty are also often unable to get to their campuses. The result has been that many academics have simply left (six of the ten mathematics faculty members at BirZeit University, for example, have left the university).
Ramallah is about ten miles north of Jerusalem, and Bethlehem is about the same distance south. If a Bethlehem University faculty member wants to confer with colleagues in Ramallah, however, he or she faces a drive of up to four hours on a dangerous road (if the person can make it at all). Palestinians living in east Jerusalem (and thus holding Israeli identification cards) are not allowed in Bethlehem, and no one from Bethlehem (or elsewhere in the West Bank) is allowed in Jerusalem without a difficult-to-secure special permit. For those in Gaza, the situation is even worse.
International exchange is difficult. Palestinians, even those who have U.S. citizenship, cannot come through the Tel Aviv airport. Instead, they must spend several days traveling to Amman and cross into the West Bank over the Jordan bridge. Or they can go to Egypt and cross to Gaza, if that is their destination and the border is open, which it frequently is not. They must retrace the same path upon their return. Last winter, one of my graduate students was trapped in Gaza for more than six weeks.
In spite of the difficulties of everyday existence, some promising scholarly activities are under way. For example, the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem is doing valuable environmental work, using sophisticated global information satellite technology; Alpha, a statistical consulting group, is conducting political, medical, and social science research; and Jaffa Net is engaged in extensive software development. In addition, the Women's Institute at BirZeit University will soon move into a new building financed by funds from Kuwait. Operating as they are in the face of massive violations of international law and United Nations resolutions, the faculty and students are managing to carry on.
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