The Evening Sun · 11 January 1982

CP-1982-025

Even Israelis protest West Bank university shutdown

A rare Arab-Jew agreement

By Munir Fasheh

Transcribed from the clipping

“THE ISRAELI military government, on Nov. 4, ordered the closing, until Jan. 4, of Bir Zeit University, the main Palestinian university in the West Bank. The acting president, Dr. Gabi Baramki, the entire administration and a number of faculty members and students, including all members of the student council, were placed under either house or town arrest, and others were imprisoned. Later, some were freed… Closing Bir Zeit, the most influential and well-known of the five Palestinian universities in the West Bank, is equivalent to closing the top 20 percent of the universities in the United States, deporting their presidents, putting hundreds of administrators and faculty members under arrest and jailing thousands of students… In 1974, Bir Zeit was closed and its president, Dr. Hanna Nasir, was deported. No educational institution in the West Bank, including elementary schools, has escaped closure at one time or another; some, like Abudis University, have been shut permanently. Bir Zeit started in 1924 as a small private school, added its first freshman year in 1951, and by 1973 was a full four-year institution… About 40 percent of the 1,800 students currently enrolled are women… Bir Zeit students, who have grown up in the shadow of the occupation, do not live in an abstract world… In addition, because of the loss of most of their land, Palestinians have increasingly turned to education as their only hope for survival. Any measure against Palestinian educational institutions threatens the existence of Palestinian society itself. The most serious measure so far has been Military Order 854 (July 6, 1980). One provision requires that every faculty member and student, before applying to any university in the West Bank or Gaza, must apply for a permit from the military government. What a credential to require for an education!… On Nov. 7, for example, about 100 professors and students from Hebrew University marched in the West Bank to support Bir Zeit and protest Israeli treatment of the university. In October, a Hebrew University committee asked that Order 854 be rescinded; it released a report that, with previous closures in mind, said that closing a university is an act of collective punishment… For Israeli Jews to stand firmly against the military occupation and its policies is, however, the beginning of a real basis for Jews and Arabs to live together in peace. The main crime of Bir Zeit University is simply that it is Palestinian. For the Israeli government to demand that Bir Zeit not be Palestinian is like telling a bird not to fly.”

Context added by this archive

A Palestinian writing under his own name in an American daily in 1982, and the paper prints his credentials at the foot: he had taught mathematics at Bir Zeit since 1962 and was dean of students from 1979 to 1981. The pull-quote the paper chose is his complaint about Arab institutions, not about Israel: “But no head of an Arab academic institution has yet raised a voice for Bir Zeit’s academic freedom.”

Cite this item

"Even Israelis protest West Bank university shutdown," The Evening Sun, 11 January 1982. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1982-025. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1982-025

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