Ann Arbor News · 24 May 1979

CP-1979-005

Closed

Arab school shutdown called rights issue

By Max Gates, Higher Education Reporter

Transcribed from the clipping

“The closing of Bir Zeit University, an Arab university on the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River, is a human rights issue, not a political issue, according to the university’s exiled president. ‘Human rights is a non-controversial issue,’ said Dr. Hanna Nasir. ‘If you believe in human rights you must believe in it for all people — Arabs, Jews and Christians.’ Nasir, deported from the West Bank by Israeli military authorities in 1974 after two years as Bir Zeit’s president, addressed a group of about 100 at the Michigan Union Wednesday night. His talk was sponsored by the Palestine Human Rights Commission… The troubles began, Nasir said, when an Israeli, a professor, shot an Arab student in an unprovoked attack, leading to demonstrations by Bir Zeit students. The Israeli army closed the university indefinitely and the next day secured a search warrant which permits them to search the university at any time, he said. The closing of Bir Zeit is only one of several violations of human rights by the Israelis on the West Bank, Nasir said. Others include imprisonment of Palestinians without trial, torture of prisoners and deportation of students and faculty members and of Nasir himself. ‘It is the same story which the Israelis tell of the Nazis,’ Nasir said. ‘They came knocking at my door in the middle of the night. They take you from the area you have worked all your life building up and throw you across the Lebanese border.’ Other schools have been closed by the Israelis, he said, including the Catholic-run Bethlehem University and a United Nations-supported school… ‘Hebrew University was a cornerstone of the state of Israel, and Bir Zeit would be the same for a Palestinian state,’ he said. ‘It is a threat to the Israelis just by the truth it portrays.’… Nasir, born in Palestine and a graduate in physics from Purdue University, said a major problem in the education of Palestinians is the shortage of people with advanced degrees on the West Bank… ‘The first responsibility comes on the Arabs of the United States,’ he said… Nasir said the Israelis pledge of ‘self-autonomy’ for the West Bank is only another term for occupation. ‘The Israelis admit they have no intention of withdrawing after five years or ever,’ he said. ‘How do people expect the Palestinians to rejoice?’… ‘If the Israelis state clearly that they are ready to withdraw from the West Bank and the Gaza, we would provide the next step. Then the whole process of peace would work in the right direction.’”

Photograph caption

“Nasir: ‘How do people expect the Palestinians to rejoice?’” News photo by Cecil Lockard.

Context added by this archive

A deported Palestinian university president photographed and quoted at length in a Michigan daily in 1979, five years after they took him across the Lebanese border in the night. The paper prints his comparison to the Nazis as he made it, and prints his conditions for peace in the last paragraph.

Cite this item

"Closed," Ann Arbor News, 24 May 1979. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1979-005. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1979-005

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