Israel’s war against Palestinian education

The Israeli war against Palestinian society does not spare education; rather, Zionist leaders have always been alert to the dangers posed to their project by a Palestinian leadership with access to education. The struggle of Palestinians to sustain and build their educational institutions in the face of brutal occupation is a story of determination and unsung popular heroism under military rule.

The ongoing siege of Gaza and the dense matrix of control over the non-Jewish population of the West Bank involves constant attrition of the education system.

Gaza schools opened last month with a severe shortage of classrooms. After three years of banning the import of any school books or writing materials on grounds of ‘security’, Israel’s cat-and-mouse game currently allows in school supplies to Gaza, while continuing to ban building materials to a degree that leaves teachers and children without classrooms in which to use their newly-arrived pens and books. Gaza school students are packed into classrooms with up to 50 students, and shipping containers are pressed into service as classrooms.

The science labs that were bombed and destroyed by the Israeli Air Force at the Islamic University remain have not been re-built.
Due to the crisis caused by the Israeli blockade, which is supported by the UK and the EU, 40,000 children had to be turned away from Gaza’s schools at the beginning of the current school term. Another victory for Israel’s full-spectrum campaign to make life so difficult for Palestinians that they will repent of their electoral behaviour in voting for a party unauthorised by Israel.

Israel’s attacks on Palestinian education are, like the siege of Gaza generally and the ethnic cleansing of areas of the occupied West Bank, crimes against international law including, in the case of education, Article 50 of the Fourth Geneva convention, which states that the
“occupying power shall, with the cooperation of the national and local authorities, facilitate the proper working of all institutions devoted to the care and education of children.”

The Israeli occupying power enforces two separate legal systems in the areas under its control, one for Jews and another one for Palestinian Arabs, in an apartheid system so naked that US ex-President Jimmy Carter had to concede the validity of the South African terminology.

The Israeli military works to impose the system of control that can bring about the desired end once spelled out by a Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan:“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”
A day earlier, in case anyone to dispel any doubts as to his meaning, Eitan had gone on record:
“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel...Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” (April 13, 1983)

The Israeli military that Eitan once commanded still acts in the spirit of this statement, using fixed checkpoints that make travel a lottery at any time, Jewish-only roads, unmanned roadblocks to prevent wheeled traffic, flying checkpoints near schools and universities. The timetables that any education system depends on thus become an impossibility. One day students might get to class on time but not the teachers, while another day the teacher will have only a handful of students.

Students are not exempted from the sadistic experiments and other diversions Israeli occupation soldiers inflict on Palestinians under their control. Here is the testimony of one Israeli soldier describing how he and his comrades “did all kinds of experiments” on Palestinians at their illegal checkpoints. “We would check who can hold his breath for longest…choke them… Block their airways, you have to press the adams apple. It's not pleasant. Look at the watch as you're doing it, until he passes out. The one who takes longest to faint wins." (YNet News 14.08.08)

Students are frequently arrested, and routinely tortured. Student union Presidents have been arrested for the crime of being a student union President. During periods when the Israeli military (confusingly known in the West Bank as the ‘Civil Authority’) has shut down universities as a form of (illegal) collective punishment, students and staff have organised underground classes in mosques, churches and private homes. Israeli military checkpoints have searched and arrested Palestinian students for possession of a university textbook. This is not a scene from the science fiction film such as Fahrenheit 451, but a reality Palestinians had to face in their struggle for education.

Readers will probably not be aware of the full suite of repressive measures open to the Israeli military to hamper and impede Palestinians seeking education. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently exposed the Israeli secret police, Shin Bet, policy of blocking students educational progress by imposing travel restrictions that prevent them reaching their place of study, then offering to remove the block if the students becomes an informer. (This tactic is also well-documented as being used with Palestinians needing life-saving medical treatment for themselves or loved ones.)

The UK government, and probably your MP, supports these crimes. We have no choice but to respond actively to the call issued by the entirety of Palestinian civil society, including students and trade unions for a general boycott against Israel and its programme of state enforced apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

Mick Napier
chair@scottishpsc.org.uk