from The Journal
After five days in the Middle East with the majority of his sabbatical team, Adam Ramsay tells The Journal about their unique experiences in the troubled region.
We had a slightly bizarre week. Whether it was the people we met or the buildings being architectually similar to Edinburgh, everything seemed strangely familiar.
When we decided to take a week’s holiday to visit our twin student council in the West Bank, I don’t think any of us expected to feel quite so at home.
I met the president of the Birzeit Student Council on my first day there. We both had black and white striped jumpers on. We had both been politically active before coming to university. He had spent 8 years in prison as a result.
Naomi (Hunter, VPSA), Guy (Bromley, VPAA) and I spent one afternoon early in the week sitting in the canteen at Birzeit University. It was sunny, but at 1000m altitude it wasn’t especially warm – rather like Edinburgh at the moment. The canteen was something like a smaller version of the DHT basement.
We were sitting with two locals. Ahmed is a social science student with rapidly paced English and a dark sense of humour. Semma is a journalism student with bags of common sense, a massive smile, and more charisma than anyone I have ever met.
They chatted for a while about what it’s like to have Israeli teenagers with sub-machine guns stop them at check points on their way to university. They explained how, once, they couldn’t get to their lectures because the soldiers had decided only people with hair gel would be allowed through that day. Another time only the pretty girls were allowed through.
Ahmed joked about how he had gone on a trip to Europe once. When he returned, he was arrested by Israeli special services. His hands were shackled to the floor between his feet so that he could neither stand nor sit. He was left like this in pitch black. For eight days.
He spent another week in a 1m x 1m cell with someone else and no light. He was so severely beaten that he has lost the nerve endings in his shoulder. In all, he was tortured for seven weeks. After this, he was imprisoned for six months without charge. He was never accused of committing any crime. Telling people in Europe what it’s like to be a student in Palestine is, apparently, enough.
His dark jokes about being tortured were surreal. What was more bizarre was the fact he was most angry about was missing work and having to repeat a semester.
We stayed that night with a student and his parents in a lovely house in Ramallah. In the morning, the parents pointed over the valley – on the other side was an Israeli Settlement. In the distance is Tel Aviv. It used to take 30 minutes to get to there, they told me. Now it takes three hours. Arabs are banned from the main road.
In Nablus we met a deputy minister in the Palestinian Authority for lunch. He was a lovely man with a white moustache whose combination of an old fashioned sense of propriety and silly sense of humour reminded me of my dad. When his wife went to pray, we asked if he needed to do the same. “No” he said, taking a deep puff of his cigarette, “I quit”.
As we left I asked if he had ever been locked up by the Israeli Defence Force. “Yes. I studied my masters degree in Iraq. They didn’t like that. When I returned, they imprisoned me and I was interrogated.” This is, it seems, a normal part of life as a Palestinian.
That night we dined with a Geography lecturer called Saed. He told us that he used to drink lots, but has given up – he was shot in the liver, and twice in the chest, by an Israeli soldier while he was at a peaceful demonstration. “It’s re-growing though” he said. “I’m OK.”
We visited Najah University in Nablus. Male students expect to be beaten up by soldiers at checkpoints every now and again – one was pulled aside on the way to his lectures, recently. He spent three hours being beaten by a stream of soldiers. It turned out they were new recruits being taught how to torture Palestinians.
Another student was recently murdered when soldiers stormed into his halls and shot him in the head. It later turned out they had “got the wrong person”.
At the end we spent a morning floating in the Dead Sea. Although the coastline is part of the West Bank, it is occupied by Israeli troops. They sell towels with maps of the Middle East. These include The West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights as part of Israel. An expansionist, racist ideology symbolised on such a day-to-day object was bizarre.
And then we were back in surprisingly sunny Edinburgh. The cheery students we met have added us as Facebook friends. They will continue to study. We will continue to work for students at Edinburgh.
We will tell our friends stories of torture, an apartheid wall, roads in Palestine that Arabs are not allowed to travel on. And our harrowing morning on the old city of Nablus, where the walls are covered in photos of local children murdered by Israeli soldiers.
