Students for Palestine

19 year old second year Business Administration student of An Najah National University.

Times are hard - this is the only thing I can say about the current situation in Palestine.

For me, being a student at An Najah University is a privilege. It is a rich academic and social experience. An Najah is the largest of the 11 Palestinian universities. In this academic year, it covers the needs of over 16,000 students from all over the West Bank.

But there exists this awkward little fact. An Najah is located in the West Bank city of Nablus which is completely surrounded by Israeli occupation forces. Every road leading out of Nablus is controlled by Israeli soldiers – some call it a siege. This means the movement of students, including myself, is interrupted, delayed and sometimes completely prevented.

There are about 10,000 students who travel into Nablus everyday from nearby towns and villages, and they have to show their ID, empty their bags, prove who they are looking down the barrel of a gun – just to go to classes. This is not an international border – it is the occupied West Bank.

For me, I live just 7km from Nablus. Or at least I used to. Before the circle of checkpoints closed in, I could reach Nablus in 10 minutes taking the direct road over the hill. This road has been closed by the Israeli occupation force, and now my journey takes me on a big detour of 25km. It now takes 45 minutes on a good day, but usually it takes at least two hours. It used to cost 3 shekels, now it costs 12 shekels.

Now - I was given the honour to speak on behalf of my fellow students, so it is my duty to speak their thoughts. I know for a fact that the two biggest problems we share are -

Transport difficulties – if we could, we would all live in Nablus to avoid the checkpoints. But we can’t. There aren’t dormitories, and anyway, we couldn’t afford it.

Which brings me to the second problem, the occupation generally and the Nablus blockade specifically is making us poorer and poorer. It is getting harder for our families to support us through university.

This is our situation. We don’t want to be pitied, we just want the outside world to know about our situation, to understand our side of the story, to see what it is like. Twinning with your university will bring us closer to your experience – it will show us even more the freedom we lack, but it will also bring you closer to our experience.

I look forward to our future conversations and comparisons.

In a special meeting to discuss this issue the Staffordshire students’ union council passed a motion calling for the removal of the travel restrictions on Khaled Mudallal and all Palestinians. The motion was put forward by member of council Assed Baig and passed with no votes against.

The motion called for the following:

1) To pressurize the UK Government to do all in its power to secure the right to travel for Khaled Mudallal and all other Palestinians.

2) To lobby the University and the NUS to pressurize the UK Government to do all in its power to secure the right to travel for Khaled Mudallal and all other Palestinians.

3) To work with the main lecturer’s Union, the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU), to pressure Universities in Israel and the UK to campaign for the removal of travel restrictions on Palestinians.

4) To work with students and lecturers in Israel to demand that Israeli educational institutions end their complicity in the denial of Palestinian human rights and campaign for the removal of travel restrictions on all Palestinians.

5) To send a letter of condemnation to the Israeli Embassy in the UK, calling for a removal of the travel restrictions on Khaled Mudallal and all Palestinians.

6) To work in conjunction with Palestinian solidarity groups to ensure that Palestinian human rights are protected.

7) To organize and run a campaign to raise awareness and educate the Students’ Union membership and University lecturers and staff about the occupation and oppression of Palestine, particularly highlighting the denial of the right to education and the travel restrictions.

Khaled Mudallal urgently trying to get back to Bradford University to start his third year of study, has found him self unable to do so after Israel identified Gaza as “hostile territory” this week, effectively closing it off to the outside world and in the process creating the world’s largest open air prison. Khaled Mudallal, 22, a British-educated business and management student who risks losing his third year if he does not return to Bradford next week, has become its latest inmate.

Staffordshire University students union twins with Palestine Polytechnic (Hebron). Staffordshire University Students Union passed a motion to twin their Students Union with Palestine Polytechnic (Hebron).

In an identical motion to the one passed by Action Palestine in Manchester University the motion stated that students in Palestine have had their right to education consistently denied by the Israeli Occupation: checkpoints, attacks on Universities and limitations on movement which seriously hinder the ability of students in Palestine to learn and that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that everyone has the ‘right to education’.

The union will now lobby Staffordshire University to provide at least 3 scholarships to Palestinian students who wish to study at the Staffordshire University as well as to support the Palestinian students in their “Right to Education” campaign and for their basic Human Rights within the territories of mandate Palestine and refugees.

PRESS RELEASE

Vienna, April 10, 2007

As Israel comes under increasing pressure over its policies against Palestinians, an independent Swedish researcher today releases an extensive analysis of the Middle Eastern conflict since the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. According to Dr. Anthony Löwstedt, the vast majority of grave violations of human rights falls under the responsibility of the Jewish state.

In the third edition of his study, ‘Apartheid: Ancient, Past, and Present’, Löwstedt concludes that no less than 97.8 percent of gross human rights violations so far committed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are sole responsibilities of the Israeli Jews, and 2.2 percent, at the most, are Palestinian crimes.

Israel was accused of apartheid by John Dugard, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Special Envoy to the Occupied Palestinian Territories in February this year. In a report to the Council, Dugard recommended bringing the charge of apartheid, a crime against humanity under international law, against Israel to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Previously, two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and the former South African Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, had also raised accusations of apartheid against Israel.

According to all four and many others, Israel is implementing the same system of oppression that Whites used against the indigenous black majority in South Africa until 1994. And just like Blacks committed a number of violent crimes against Whites and occasionally incited people to violence against South African Whites in the liberation struggle there, Palestinians have carried out similar crimes against Israeli Jews.

However, the overwhelming majority of violent crimes as well as cases of incitement to violence are responsibilities of the privileged ethnicities in both countries, according to Löwstedt. Moreover, he points out seven kinds of systematic, racist crimes which he says are the sole responsibilities of the Israeli Jews and the South African Whites and of similar ethnic elites in other apartheid societies. These crimes include ethnically discriminatory repopulation, citizenship, land, work, access, education, and language policies and practices.

Löwstedt has worked in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as well as in South Africa as an academic and for the UN. He currently teaches at Webster University in Vienna, Austria.

Read the study:

Apartheid – Ancient, Past, and Present: Systematic and Gross Human Rights Violations in Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine, Vienna: Gesellschaft für Phänomenologie und kritische Anthropologie, 2007, 3 rd edition,

http://www.dada.at/gems/gesellschaft/Apartheid.pdf

The author is available for additional comments and interviews by return e-mail at lowstedt@gmail.com.