http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?id=58726&mador=4&datee=10/17/99
Sunday, October 17, 1999
The University of Hard Knocks
By Gideon Levy
This morning, 165,000 Israeli students will attend
their first day of studies in the new academic
year at the country's universities. Can we take a
moment to throw a bit of a damper on their festive
day by reminding them about what their
counterparts are enduring just an hour's drive
from their campuses?.A case in point is the
student Yasser Thalahma. He will not be coming to
the campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
in Be'er Sheva this morning, as he dreamed and
planned. Three years ago Thalahma, 27, earned a
B.A. in economics from Bir Zeit University in the
West Bank. His final grade was 76. For the next
three years he worked in construction for a Jewish
contractor in Be'er Sheva. He made NIS 120 a day.
His plan was to save money so he could continue
his studies and get an M.A. He wanted a good
university and he was accepted by BGU. "We are
pleased to inform you that you have been accepted
for M.A. studies in the 1999-2000 academic year in
the Department of Economics," the letter he
received from the university stated. The envelope
also contained a list of courses he would have to
make up: "linear models," "introduction to
econometrics," "the Israeli economy." Fine. But
for a Palestinian student, getting accepted to a
university is only the start of the road to the
institution. Thalahma also needs an entry permit
to Israel.
The trip from his village, Al Bourj, near Dura, in
the Hebron area, to Be'er Sheva takes about 20
minutes and involves passing through an Israeli
army checkpoint. A Palestinian needs a permit to
get through the checkpoint. Thalahma applied to
the Civil Administration and received an entry
permit valid for three months. The three-month
period ended a month ago. He applied again and
received a new response: barred for security
reasons. Thalahma has never been arrested and has
never even been detained for questioning. He has
no criminal background and no security background.
He is only one of 13 children in a family whose
father is a construction worker and all he wants
to do is broaden his horizons and improve his
prospects in life.
Having no other alternative, he took a lawyer from
Hebron, who sent a letter to the legal adviser of
the Civil Administration in Beit El. Whenever the
lawyer called to ask about the request for an
entry permit, he was told that the subject was
under examination. Of course no one bothered to
explain to his client why he is barred from
entering Israel. The High Court of Justice is a
possibility, but in the meantime Thalahma has no
money to pay for an Israeli lawyer, having already
made a first payment of NIS 2,700 to BGU.
So today, Thalahma will be at his home in the
village or on the scaffolding in Be'er Sheva. To
get to Be'er Sheva he takes an illegal route - if
they catch him, they catch him, he says. But to go
to university without a permit is already a
different story. He doesn't want to walk around
the campus like an outlaw, he told me over the
weekend in his village, and he is afraid that if a
closure is suddenly imposed, or if he is caught,
he will lose the entire academic year. If that
happens, he will also lose the prospect of being
able to break the circle of poverty in which he is
caught: His dream is to work as an economist for
the Palestinian Authority.
A different Israel would be pleased that the young
man from the village has dreams of getting ahead,
and might even encourage them. After all, an
economist in the PA is better than a terrorist in
the town square. But instead, Israel, which in the
past opened its gates to thousands of students
from Africa and Asia, is closing them to nearly
all the Palestinian students from the areas it
occupies. All we are willing to give the
Palestinians in the way of know-how is information
on how to conduct interrogations with the use of
torture and how to implement "administrative
detention" (arrest without trial), and of course
how to wage what is known as the war against
terrorism. Economics and other subjects taught in
universities are not part of this curriculum.
To the tens of thousands of Israeli students who
are beginning a new year of higher education
today, all this is a foreign experience. The most
serious plight most of them know is finding a
parking space. Do they know that hundreds of
students are stuck in Gaza and are not permitted
to attend the universities in the West Bank that
they enrolled in - an hour from their homes -
because Israel does not let them move from one
Palestinian-controlled area to another? Do they
know that some of them actually traveled through
Egypt and Jordan in order to get from Gaza to the
West Bank and pursue their studies? Or that others
smuggled themselves into the West Bank by all
manner of bizarre routes, where they attend
university and live in fear? Do they know that
every Palestinian student is liable to be arrested
at any given moment, on the way to or from the
university, for interrogation, or in an attempt to
recruit them as informers for the Shin Bet
security service, or to be placed in
administrative detention, as has happened to
hundreds of them?
Two months ago, Khader Kados, from Kalkilya in the
West Bank, a business administration student, was
placed under arrest without trial; his colleague
Mahmoud Shabana, a humanities student, who
recently completed a prison term of
five-and-a-half years and had hoped to be able to
resume his studies, was instead placed in
administrative detention and will not be studying
this year; the physicist Jihad Shehadeh was once
arrested on the way to his wedding; and a
professor of architecture, Jamal Imro, was
severely tortured for 25 days before being
released. They, together with thousands of their
colleagues in the universities, are exposed to a
brutal reality and their freedom is extremely
restricted, mainly by Israel, but more recently
also by the Palestinian Authority, which sends its
secret service agents to the campuses, as
described in a report issued by the Palestinian
Group for Upholding Human Rights.
Their basic rights are limited, their
possibilities of studying are sabotaged, their
lives are hard. On the day a new academic year is
beginning, is it too much to expect Israeli
university staff and students to take a little
more interest in them
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