Young Palestinians fight for equal right to higher education
For more on the militarisation of Israel’s universities, see The university at the heart of Israel’s war industry. The report here from Electronic Intifada is followed by a short extract from the first report by Academic Watch. To download the whole report (PDF) click on the headline.
Palestinian students “surrounded by guns” at Israeli universities
Israeli forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a protest against Israel’s bombing of Gaza at Hebrew University, 20 November 2012. Photo by Mahfouz Abu Turk / APA images.
By Sawsan Khalife’, Electronic Intifada
22 February 2013
The world tends to forget that there are Palestinians living in Israel. They are the natives of this land and since their villages, towns and cities are located within the “legal” borders of Israel, they are citizens. Citizens on paper, yes, but far be they from equality.
Palestinian municipalities in Israel receive substantially less funding than Jewish Israeli municipalities, putting Palestinians at the bottom of the socio-economic scale (see the Arab Association for Human Rights’ ”Fact sheet: Discrimination in Israeli law”).
Palestinians in Israel are discriminated against systematically — and this is especially true in Israeli academia.
The hard fact is that only 11 percent of undergraduate students in Israeli academic institutions are Palestinian. The proportion is even lower for postgraduate studies, according to data from the Internal Council for Higher Education. Palestinians comprise 7 percent of masters degree students, 3 percent of doctoral students and 2 percent of the academic faculty.
Moreover, a mere 22 percent of young Palestinians in Israel meet the minimum requirement for university acceptance (compared to 44 percent of Israeli Jews). And even those Palestinians who do make the requirements are less likely to be accepted to university (32 percent of Palestinians are refused, compared to 19 percent of Jews) (“Israel to launch campaign to attract more Arab students to universities,” Haaretz, 21 October 2012).
Discrimination before college
“The Arab student has already been discriminated against even before reaching the point of applying to an academic institution,” said Yara Sa’di, one of the authors of a new report by Academic Watch, which documents numerous forms of discrimination against Palestinian students in Israel.
“Arabs attend schools with poor budgets, and are taught contents that do not prepare them for the PET,” the Psychometric Entrance Test, an exam for securing places in universities.
If a Palestinian student in Israel does manage to beat the odds and enter university, he or she will not enjoy the basic rights that define academic institutions in democratic countries. Palestinian students have encountered an increasingly aggressive effort to deny them freedom of expression and restrictions on their cultural and political activities in recent years.
In addition, Israeli universities are becoming more militarized. For instance, Haifa University renewed an academic contract with the Israeli army, according to which a special track allows Israeli soldiers to obtain a masters degree in five years.
Documenting discrimination
Academic Watch is the result of a “youth empowerment” program run by the Nazareth-based Arab Culture Association.
As part of the Academic Watch project, a group of Palestinian students who attended different universities and colleges in Israel underwent legal and journalistic training. The students then established a page for Academic Watch on Facebook.
Academic Watch offers a platform to report and expose incidents where Palestinian students have suffered any form of discrimination or oppression.
The annual report for 2011-12, which was released this month, is to be the first in a series of publications. In addition to underlining blunt discrimination, the report also exposes a violation of international law in examining the case of Ariel University (“Annual summary report 2011-12,” Academic Watch, February 2013 [PDF]).
Having recently received approval by the Israeli government, Ariel is the ninth recognized Israeli university. As it is located in the fourth largest Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, it is by definition an illegal institution.
Ban on running for office
Among the incidents of discrimination faced by Palestinian students in Israel is the ban imposed on Palestinians at Safed Academic College in the Galilee from running for president of the students’ union. The ban was introduced secretly last year. When Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, submitted a query about it, the students union denied that such a ban existed.
About 60 percent of students at Safed college are Palestinians, yet a condition requiring that candidates had to have performed military or civil service in Israel effectively bars them from seeking election. Palestinian citizens of Israel are exempted from joining the army.
According to Academic Watch, this amounts to “a severe violation of their rights to be elected and to elect, in addition to their right to express their opinion by voting to a person who will represent them and their ideas and outlooks.”
In May 2012, Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, approached the student union on the issue. Additionally, a statement signed by more than 100 British student movement leaders condemned the ban.
The report also referred to how Palestinian students in Israeli universities have been prevented from showing films about the West Bank such as Jenin, Jenin and Bilin Habibti, from inviting public figures representing Palestinians in Israel to participate in student activities and from commemorating the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing which led to Israel’s establishment in 1948.
While the report is confined to incidents that occurred in 2011 and last year, Academic Watch continues to monitor discrimination since then. It has, for example, highlighted the case of Emad Shaqour, a second year undergraduate student of economics and business management in Haifa University.
When Shaqour was in need of a tutor during the 2013 academic year, he inquired about a tutorial program that pairs students who share the same native tongue. Not knowing that there was a separate office in the university for Arabic-speaking students, Shaqour entered an office dealing with tutorial issues and addressed a young woman staffing it in Hebrew. Shaqour said that the woman was very helpful until he asked for the phone numbers of tutors who spoke Arabic. It would appear that it was only at that point the woman realized he was Palestinian.
“Dangerous”
“She gave me the list of numbers saying, there are different offices for you,” he said.
When he pulled out his phone to call one of the numbers on the list she politely told him not to make the call in that place, claiming it was the wrong place for him to be. “She was trying to be politically correct but she must have felt like she did something wrong since she asked, ‘I hope I didn’t offend you?’ and I answered ‘I hope this wasn’t discrimination.’
“Even though she was very careful expressing herself, I still got the message that she was telling me [that] I am not allowed to speak Arabic in these university offices. And I know how to recognize discrimination, however polite it may sound.”
With the help of Academic Watch, Shaqour’s story received some media attention. However, when the news reached the university’s administration, he was summoned to a private meeting in the office of a university dean. The dean’s personal secretary held a copy of a press article — in English — about the incident and informed him that he shouldn’t have alerted the media.
“He told me that what I did was wrong and dangerous,” Shaqour said. “He said I should have come to them with this. But I did nothing wrong and I am not afraid.”
Last year, Haifa University removed Arabic from its official logo. So perhaps the dean’s office was correct to use the word “dangerous.” It could be be dangerous for the international academic community to know that Arabic is a language non grata at Haifa University.
“Alienation”
Yara Sa’di added: “You can’t escape the feeling of alienation when you are an Arab student in the Israeli universities. On the one hand, you are in an academic environment, but on the other hand you are surrounded with guns. It has reached a point where it’s difficult to see the contradiction. It has become the norm — uniformed soldiers carrying automatic weapons are part of the academic landscape.”
According to the Academic Watch report, the militarization of universities has become so prevalent that “student soldiers” carry weapons on campus. These “student soldiers” are the pride of Israeli academia. Along with students who join “public diplomacy” programs — known as hasbara programs in Hebrew — they are groomed to be ambassadors for Israel. They will be the ones who seek to justify and excuse Israel’s numerous violations of human rights; the university is there to teach them how to diplomatically tiptoe around war crimes and how to find loopholes in international law.
The report also reveals that “the majority of members of the administrative boards in the Israeli post-secondary institutions are reserve soldiers, members of the army personnel orShabak [Israel’s security agency].” So it does not come as a surprise that the “student soldiers” and the future ambassadors are the beneficiaries of various scholarships, fellowships and generous financial aid.
“There is no separation of powers between the academia and the military,” Sa’di said. “When a military base is located on the ground of the Haifa University dorms, and several universities are in contact with weapon manufacturers, It becomes clear that the academia has a military agenda.”
Sawsan Khalife’ is a political activist and journalist from Shefa-Amr in the Galilee region of Palestine.
Annual Summary Report, 2011-12
By the Youth Empowerment Project and Academic Watch, published by the Arab Culture Association
November 2012
EXTRACT: 1. Introduction and 1.1 Updates on Militarization
1.0 Introduction
This report is the first in a series to be released throughout the 2012-2013 academic year on the discriminatory practices and policies in Israeli post-secondary institutions. This report summarizes instances of racist and discriminatory actions within Israeli academia evidencing the nondiscretionary infringement upon the rights of Arab Palestinian students. All of the cases mentioned in this report have been publicized in various media outlets and exposed by active student movements. The intent of this report is to gather and deliver this information in a concise and cohesive manner thereby encouraging more students to monitor, document and expose future violations through the Academic Watch.
This report shows that the 2011-2012 academic year saw more aggressive oppression of freedom of expression and of the organization of cultural and political activities by Arab students.This is particularly true for Palestinian Nakba commemoration activities in the middle of May 2012, during which university administration or the official student unions prohibited the organization of any Arab cultural and political activities – be it by preventing the entrance and hosting of leading political and societal figures, by excluding activities from the campus or even.by prohibiting the organization of an artistic or cultural festival.
Additionally, this report documents the blatantly racist practices of Im Turtzu, an extreme right-wing pro-Zionist student movement, which has been an effectively oppressive tool in threatening the rights and freedoms of Arab students in Israeli universities. This movement has become increasingly active in all universities, and evidence in this report shows Im Tirtzu’s general incitement of Arab students, as well as the activists who support them, in every initiative or activity held by Arab students, especially commemorating the Palestinian Nakba, the.Palestinian prisoners’ cause, or the hosting of leadership figures.
In addition, this report highlights a number of phenomena and notable events that took place during the previous academic years, most prominently the phenomenon of exacerbating (racism of all kinds against Arab students in the Safed (Zefat Academic College, in addition to the militarization phenomenon.that is taking over the state’s academic institutions.
This report will be followed by a series of specialized reports dealing with the cases of discrimination against Arab students .and the militarization in the Israeli universities and colleges. Meanwhile, our work continues with the administration of the Academic Watch” page on Facebook and with the network” of field activists. The Watch Project strives to harness all of this information in order to better expose the racism, discrimination and political oppression exercised against Arab students, as it is the most important step to eradicating such racist and.discriminatory practices.
1.1 Updates on Militarization
All reported cases of violations of Arab students’ rights and student groups in Israeli academic institutions mentioned in this report, constitute a part of the ongoing militarization process of these institutes. The militaristic character of these institutes has manifested itself in many ways. Here are some of:the developments which have taken place during the past year.
• The majority of the members of the academic tracks and the administrative boards in the Israeli post-secondary institutions are reserve soldiers, members of the army personnel, or the .general security (“Shin Bet”) personnel In January 2011, General Ami Ayalon was appointed head of the administrative board of the University of Haifa. In 1992, Ayalon had been appointed head of the Israeli navy and was promoted to Colonel. In 1996, he moved on to become the head of “Shin.Bet”, the General Security Services.
•The renewal of an academic contract between the University of Haifa and the Israeli army.
Under the provisions outlined in this contract, Israeli soldiers can learn on a specially developed academic track to obtain a Master’s degree in five years. The University’s rector, Ben Artsi, stated that the University of Haifa was proud to continue being academic home for the security forces.” It is worth noting” that the University of Haifa has, for many years, been providing special programs for Israeli army units, such as the Havatsalot military intelligence unit. The soldiers who belong to these unit
walk around campus in their army uniform, brandishing their weapons. This makes the militarization process more visible and gives it an air of legitimacy, making such behavior the norm in.the Israeli academic institutes for higher education.
• The Hasbara Fellowship Programs
Hasbara is a term used to describe public diplomacy or relations. In the past year, the University of Haifa introduced a new program called the Hasbara Fellowship – a program primarily concerned with the management of Israel’s public relations in.media and in the international arena in general Tel Aviv University also offers a similar degree called the Ambassador Club. This program is financially assisted by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and by the right-wing American Institute, Stand With Us.
The academic institute in Ari’el offers a similar joint program with the Ministry, in which students receive training courses. The Association of Students’ Union also offers its own Hasbara program, aimed at fighting against “anti-Semitism and the delegitimization of Israel”, where each participant receives two thousand dollars in return for publishing comments and messages on social networks for five.hours per week.