The thing they were proudest ofA university closed as a punishment, reopened for an envoy · 1976 to 2000
1976 to 2000
The thing they were proudest of
In December 1983 an Oregon paper opened a paragraph with a sentence that is not about war, land or politics.
“Education more than anything else distinguishes Palestinians. Already the best-educated Arabs before what they call ‘al nakba’ — the disaster — the Palestinians since 1948 have placed such priority on education…”
It is the earliest use of the word nakba anywhere in this archive, and it arrives inside a sentence about schooling. What follows in this section is what happened to the schooling.
CP-1983-005Four girls in a mayor’s office
“Plight of four schoolgirls illustrates frustration of West Bank occupation”
High school girls of sixteen to eighteen, sitting in Mayor Karim Khlaf’s office, fined more than a year’s wages for taking part in a demonstration. The reporter notices them trying not to cry, and the reason is not the fine itself but who has to pay it.
CP-1976-011One university, closed and closed again
Bir Zeit was the main Palestinian university in the West Bank. American papers covered its closures for years, and what they printed while doing so is a record of who objected.
“Human rights is a non-controversial issue.”
Dr. Hanna Nasir, the university’s president, saying so to a Michigan daily — from exile. Five years earlier he had been taken across the Lebanese border and left there. The headline over him is one word: Closed.
CP-1979-005“The Closing of Bir Zeit University Ought To Be Reconsidered”
Sixty Israeli professors petitioned for a Palestinian university to be allowed to open, and an American paper printed them at length alongside its exiled president answering the defense minister.
CP-1979-004“Israelis Decide To Reopen Bir Zeit, Palestinian School”
Closed on 2 May after demonstrations, reopened two months later, and the timing is in the copy: the decision coincided with the visit of Robert Strauss, President Carter’s Middle East envoy. A defense ministry spokesman describes the closure as a punishment, which settles what it was.
CP-1979-007“Even Israelis protest West Bank university shutdown”
Written by Munir Fasheh, who had taught mathematics at Bir Zeit since 1962, under his own name in an American daily, with his credentials printed at the foot. The line under the headline calls it a rare Arab-Jew agreement. What they agreed about was whether a university should be allowed to hold classes.
CP-1982-025“Israelis Raid Palestine University”
An-Najah, three thousand students, raided over an exhibition. The Palestine Press Service called it an exhibit of Palestinian folklore; the occupation authorities called it a hostile exhibit, including nationalistic and provocative displays. Among the confiscated weapons the spokesman lists are a plastic M-16 and a wooden model of a Kalashnikov. The university had already been shut for three months the year before, after students marked the anniversary of the invasion of Lebanon.
CP-1984-005And then a question about a poem
In March 2000 Israel’s education minister suggested five poems by Mahmoud Darwish as optional reading in Israeli schools. Three American papers covered the row that followed, on the same day, from three different news services.
“The Arabs are always accused of being a nation of poetry…”
Darwish, answering. He had been banned from Israel and the occupied territories for nearly thirty years. The line under the headline explains the argument: the education minister is assailed for suggesting the poems, as optional reading.
CP-2000-013“The poetry of Arab pain: Are Israeli students ready?”
A headline that asks whether schoolchildren can withstand a poem.
CP-2000-012“It has little to do with poetry, and a lot with politics.”
The third service’s opening sentence, and the plainest of the three.
CP-2000-014Put in order, these clippings describe something narrower than repression in general. A people whose chief distinction, by an American reporter’s own account, was how much they valued schooling, and a set of measures aimed precisely at that: a university closed as a punishment and reopened for a visiting envoy, an exhibition of folklore raided, schoolgirls fined a year’s wages for cheering, a professor writing from a campus he cannot teach on, a poet whose work is too dangerous to be optional.
The next time a school or a university closes somewhere and the reason given is order, it is worth asking what was being taught and who wanted it stopped. American papers recorded all of this at the time. It is in their own pages.