The Daily Comet · 2 July 1979

CP-1979-006

Radical Bir Zeit Unversity ‘Berkeley of the West Bank’

By Paul Hofmann, 1979 N.Y. Times News Service, Bir Zeit, Israeli-Occupied West Bank

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Transcribed from the clipping

“BIR ZEIT, Israeli-Occupied West Bank — Bir Zeit University, a cluster of old school buildings and private houses in this Arab hilltop town 15 miles north of Jerusalem, is sometimes called the ‘Berkeley of the West Bank.’ Like the Berkeley campus in the 1960s, Bir Zeit is in a state of agitation and turmoil.

When the Berkeley label was mentioned, the dean of Bir Zeit’s arts department, Dr. Mohammed Hallaj, quickly replied: ‘Berkeley — which one?’

Hallaj said Bir Zeit would like to have the reputation for academic excellence of the University of California at Berkeley, but did not care for the image of radicalism that the California school developed during the Vietnam war… Bir Zeit University, the foremost nondenominational center of higher learning for Palestinian Arabs in the occupied territories, was closed by Israeli authorities for an indefinite period after disturbances on May 2, Israel’s Independence Day, in which military vehicles were stoned and a student was shot in the chest… Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi, a lecturer of English at Bir Zeit, said student views at the university, ‘on the whole nationalist, reflect the general mood in the West Bank’… She conceded that many Palestinian Arabs in the region were reconciled to the idea of some kind of permanent coexistence with Israelis, ‘but first give us independence.’

An American professor in the cultural studies department at Bir Zeit, Hugh R. Harcourt, said support for Palestinian nationalism and radicalism among the students was ‘fairly general, but emotional rather than organizational.’

The scholar, who formerly taught at the American University of Beirut, did not hide his distaste for the way the military government administers the West Bank.”

Context added by this archive

The dateline reads Bir Zeit, Israeli-Occupied West Bank. Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi is a lecturer in English here, quoted in an American paper in 1979, more than a decade before she became the person Americans knew as the Palestinian spokesperson. The headline misspells the word university. The page carries an air-conditioner advertisement across half its width.

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