Peaceful Resistance: Building a Palestinian University Under Occupation

by Gabi Baramki

Overview

This book tells the remarkable story of Birzeit University, Palestine’s oldest university in the Occupied Territories.

Founded against the backdrop of occupation, it is open to all students, irrespective of income. Putting the study of democracy and tolerance at the heart of its curriculum, Birzeit continues to produce idealistic young people who can work to bring about a peaceful future. Gabi Baramki explains how the University has survived against shocking odds, including direct attacks where Israeli soldiers have shot unarmed students. Baramki himself has been dragged from his home at night, beaten and arrested. Yet Birzeit continues to thrive, putting peace at the heart of its teaching, and offering Palestinians the opportunities that only education can bring.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745329314
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	12/09/2009
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Gabi Baramki was a major figure in the Palestinian resistance movement, who devoted his life to education at Birzeit, including 19 years as acting President of the University. He co-founded the PEACE (Palestinian European Academic Cooperation in Education) Programme, and he was awarded the Medal Palme Académique by the French Ministry of Education. He died in August 2012.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

GROWING UP IN PALESTINE

I have always loved teaching, though I never set out to establish a career in that field. Birzeit University has enabled me to spend my life helping young people grow into knowledgeable, public-spirited adults, and I cannot think of a more rewarding job. Our students are vastly more numerous and more successful than I ever dared to envisage when the institution launched its first degree course in 1972.

I could not have envisaged, either, the grim reality of running a university under Israeli occupation: the storming of its campus by armed soldiers, the regular imprisonment of students and staff, those long, punitive closures. The wounding, maiming and killing of so many of our students haunts me to this day. Still, we have never given in. Palestinians have the same right to education as young people anywhere and they need that education to build the free, successful society they deserve.

Education was not universally valued among Palestinians when I was young. Only the rich and members of the professional classes expected their children to study. Becoming a nation of refugees, of people living under a destructive, impoverishing military rule, has profoundly changed attitudes. Education is seen as one of very few escape routes. Families scrimp and save, forgoing even the small treats they allow themselves on feast days, to pay for school books and uniforms. Mothers in villages or refugee camps may sell off the few precious pieces of jewellery received as wedding presents so a child can continue into higher education. For the poor, of course, getting an education has never been easy.

My own parents were fortunate. The Baramkis are Palestinian Christians. My father, Andoni Baramki, came from a Greek Orthodox merchant family able to trace back its Jerusalem roots at least 500 years. Although modest in size, Jerusalem had a wealth of inspiring old buildings, such as the multi-layered Church of the Resurrection, the Dome of the Rock with its delicately adorned blue walls, and the Ottoman Citadel now mysteriously known as 'David's Tower'. Moreover, a mini building boom in the 1920s had resulted in box-shaped modern villas springing up alongside traditional Arab houses with double-arched windows, latticed balconies and cupola roofs. So, when my father developed an interest in architecture, his parents sent him to Athens to study the subject at its Fine Arts Academy.

On his return in 1922, my father both designed and built our family home, moving us from the Greek Orthodox section of the Old City to the Sheikh Jarrah quarter outside the Old City wall next to St George's School and Cathedral. Setting up his own company, he built schools, family residences, villas and even churches all over the country. His outstanding work is the graceful Romanian Convent in Jerusalem. My father's style was unique in that it combined the Arabic arch with the Corinthian heads of the columns supporting it. The windows of his designs were lined with rose-red Bethlehem stone, set against white stone from Hebron.

My father became renowned for the quality of his buildings after the earthquake of 1927, when it emerged that every single one of the houses constructed by him had withstood the tremors. This taught me about the value of 'honesty in work' and about 'the need for high quality' – lessons I have tried hard to convey to my students.

What had produced the mini-boom which provided my father with clients was the arrival of the British mandate. By the time I was born in 1929, the Ottoman Empire had collapsed and Palestine was governed by Britain under a League of Nations mandate. This made its inhabitants subjects of King George V, ruled by a British High Commissioner answerable to the British parliament, whose members we could not vote for. However, the League of Nations had bestowed the mandate on Britain only 'until such time as [the inhabitants of Palestine] are able to stand alone'. The League had, in fact, also endorsed 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people'. This was the beginning of an unfortunate long history of total disregard by the international community of the wishes, opinions and hopes for freedom and self-determination of the great majority of the indigenous Palestinian population, or even recognising their presence as the legal owners of the country. However, since we were the country's indigenous, majority population, most Palestinian Arabs looked forward to eventual national government.

Such a project required an educated population. Palestine was still under-developed, with only one secondary governmental school (the Arab College in Jerusalem). The mandate government had the policy of establishing only a limited number of primary schools in certain rural areas. The two top students from these elementary schools were then transferred to the secondary school in Jerusalem. However there were already primary and secondary schools, some affiliated to religious missions and few national ones, mainly located in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Haifa, Jaffa and Nablus. Middleclass parents from the cities and wealthy families from the villages sent their children, mainly as boarders, to these schools to be educated. When it was time for me to go to the elementary school, my parents decided to send me to Birzeit Higher School, which was established in 1924 by the Nasir family as a national school for boys and girls. It was a modern boarding school with high learning standards.

One of the modern features of the school was that it would be mixed. Palestinian girls tended to be kept at home by all but the most westernized families. Now they would not just be schooled with boys but be taught much the same subjects. Another innovation was that the languages of instruction would be both English and Arabic. Until that point, schools had taught in the mother tongue of their founders, English in the case of Jerusalem's Anglican School, and French if run by the religious order of the Franciscans. While traditional schools taught only in Arabic, those set up by the mandate government hardly bothered with the language. The pupils of the new school would enjoy the blessings of more than one culture.

So, one October morning in 1934 my parents and I set out in the family's bright yellow car to the village of Birzeit, a journey of just over 16 miles from Jerusalem. At that time the road from Jerusalem to Birzeit meandered through Nablus, Ramallah, Ein Sinia and Jifna. It was a narrow road, partially paved until Ein Sinia. It took about an hour by car, which often made me feel car-sick. Once out of Jerusalem, we could enjoy the view of fruit trees and olive groves. Ramallah, a small town at the time, was a summer resort with one hotel, The Ramallah Grand Hotel, commonly known as Hotel Audeh. The town was famous for its delicious grapes, which unfortunately were destroyed by the Phylloxera pest in the early 1950s. From Ramallah we went on the Nablus road as far as Ein Sinia and then took the side road through Jifna village, best known for its 'Mistkawi' apricots. The car struggled to make its way through the unpaved road leading to the village of Birzeit.

The school was situated in the home of the Nasir family. Its stern yellow-stone front hid a comfortable, attractive interior made up of tall, spacious rooms with brightly tiled floors. The house was part of a large complex of other thick-walled buildings in the back. A garden whose centre was a giant cypress tree was closed off from the outside by a tall, wrought-iron gate. It was a serene, peaceful spot, which years later would become a battleground between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian students.

My excitement at being in such a new environment was tempered by the shock of being parted from my parents. I was very young. I remember that on my fifth birthday in November, my uncle George, who lived in Germany at the time, came with my parents and brought me a wooden block shaped like a number five with slots for five candles as a birthday present. Being allowed to sleep in the same room as the school's matron, Miss Jaleeleh Aranki, eased my homesickness slightly.

Meeting the other children helped me to settle in. Boarders came from all over Palestine, from cities like Jerusalem, Haifa, Nablus, Gaza and Jaffa, as well as from smaller places such as Tulkarm and Jenin. Some, like me, had arrived alone, others in a group of siblings and cousins. The pupils, boys and girls, came from the country's various Muslim and Christian communities. We were kept busy and encouraged to get on. Were we not all Palestinians? One of the first boys I made friends with was Faruq Najib Nassar, whose father was owner of Al-Karmel Al-Jadid newspaper.

Facilities at the new school were fairly basic. The dining room served as a classroom for elementary students, and until the age of eight we were given our baths in small aluminium tubs by women from the village. There was no electricity and the kerosene lamps would be turned off at night. As the school toilets were outside in the courtyard, getting there meant a long, unlit walk away from our second-floor dormitories, often in high winds or rain. Water for toilets and washing was pumped from the cisterns that collected rain from the roof but sometimes ran out in the dry season. Drinking water was brought daily from Birzeit's main spring, called Ein Fleifleh. It arrived at the school in four cans, each 20 litres in capacity, mounted on the back of the school donkey and emptied into fixed a 250-litre container located in the school yard for our use. Throughout my stay at the school, it was the same person, known to the pupils as 'Shurra', who drove the donkey up and down the hill to supply the three buildings with drinking water and pumped the water from the cisterns to the tanks on the roofs.

Inside the house, juniors slept five or six to a room. The roof above the senior boys' dormitories leaked badly when it rained. After I'd joined them, I heard one of the boys joke that we at least had running water in all our rooms. Following a particularly big downpour we sometimes had to move our mattresses into the classroom below. Conditions for the female pupils, who slept in a different building but shared classes with us until the sixth grade, were better.

Our days started at six in the morning. We woke up, washed, made our beds and lined up for breakfast at seven. As we grew older, we had a study hour before breakfast. Getting out of bed was especially difficult during the winter months when it would be still quite dark and we would be snuggling and warm in our beds in the unheated dormitory. Our breakfast generally consisted of labaneh (partly dehydrated yogurt), olive oil and a mixture of herbs and spices called zaatar. At other times, we had bread with three kinds of home-made jam, prune, grape and apricot. The last was my favourite, but other pupils felt differently. Bored with the jam routine, one of my fellow pupils one day wrote a little Arabic ditty to express this: 'Jam, jam, each morning at daybreak, dear Miss Mary this gives me a belly ache.' (Miss Mary, one of the five Nasir sisters teaching at the school, was in charge of food.)

In fact, we had little to complain about. There was fresh hot milk (to which we could add cocoa brought from home) and we were also served eggs twice a week. Lunch usually consisted of rice and a stew made of seasonal vegetables cooked with some meat. The dishes were brought in from the main building by the school's maids, who carried them on their heads for the 300-yard walk to the dining room.

The maids also prepared dough in the kitchen, which was then baked in the traditional village oven. As they walked back, we would sometimes jump up and snatch one of the freshly baked loaves from the baskets on their heads. Although this was forbidden, the maids tolerated our behaviour, at least while we were small, because the hot bread was delicious, much nicer than the bread offered with our meals, which was often stale, so that we didn't eat very much of it.

Birzeit was renowned for its good food, and especially for serving rice, which was not easily available during the Second World War. The school would buy it from farms in the upper Jordan Valley near Bisan. Different parts of Palestine had different soil and lay in different climatic zones; because of this, farmers grew a variety of crops. Palestine was never a desert.

At 3 o'clock every afternoon, we would all go for a country walk to the village of Birzeit. During winter and spring, we would also go flower-picking in the wild meadows. The village was surrounded by low hills flecked in green, brown and red as far as the eye could see. Some of the landscape was unchanged since biblical times. Starting in November, we would collect narcissi, which grew in profusion at the end of the old Jaffa Road by a small copse called Al-Hursh. Until 1948, a bus passed daily from Jaffa on this road going to Jerusalem. It passed through the village of Salameh and Birzeit and many other Arab villages. Salameh was ethnically cleansed in 1948 and on its land the main campus of Tel Aviv University was built.

February and March were the season for wild tulips, best found at the valley near Attara. Red and coloured anemones would appear in Al-Marj, just before you reach Birzeit (where the current university campus has been built) and in the area near Jifna. It was our country and we loved it.

In March there would be an annual competition among different schools organised in cooperation with the Palestine Horticultural Society. Prizes were handed out for the best wild flower arrangements, focusing on the variety of plants. Birzeit's pupils almost always won that competition. Our arrangements would include anemones of all colours, orchids of a local variety known as Nahle (bee), wild honeysuckle (which we called 'wild jasmine'), ranunculus and cyclamen, as well as tulips and narcissi.

My favourite walk was the road that went in the direction of the small village of Burham. We liked this road because it was lined with huge flat boulders on which we could run and hop from one boulder to another. I especially liked the presence of a few trees interspersed between these boulders. On Sundays we would often go for picnics. One of the most beautiful picnic sites was Al-Saqi on the Attara Road. Not only did it have an old orchard still producing fruit but a spring on the site fed into several cool ponds. However, the site I liked best was in Jalazon. It had shady trees, climbing rocks and a spring which would spout tiny waterfalls in the early part of the year. (Today, Jalazon is the site of the West Bank's largest refugee camp).

When we got older, we could roam further afield. Birzeit was on the road to Ramallah, then a small hill town whose coolness in the summer months made it a popular location for Arab holiday homes. At weekends, we were sometimes allowed to visit friends or go to the sweet shops there. Today's West Bank pupils, hemmed in by Israel's military checkpoints and army bases, can only dream of the carefree mobility we enjoyed.

Most of us in those days were happy at Birzeit, with our physical needs met, if in somewhat spartan conditions, and our minds exposed to some of the brightest and best teachers in Palestine, as they taught us a full range of subjects, including Arabic, mathematics, music and – my favourite – chemistry. We also benefited from the Nasir sisters' love and deep appreciation of English. Fluency in the language was valued under British rule and teaching was bilingual at first, then in English for all secondary classes. When the mandate authorities in 1942 allowed students to sit for the matriculation exams in Arabic as well as in English and Hebrew, Birzeit switched to Arabic, but retained the higher English syllabus with its emphasis on English literature.

The school's principal, Nabiha Nasir, had received her education at the Evangelical School in Bethlehem and was a well-known figure in the Arab women's movement. Although short and stocky, she knew how to put even the biggest boy in his place if he interrupted her lesson. Her sister Ni'meh Faris, known as 'The Mrs', was a strict but truly brilliant English teacher. I owe my grasp of the language and my deep enjoyment of Shakespeare to her. Yet another sister, Najla Nasir, taught the middle years, while Aniseh taught the kindergarten and the first and second year primary class.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Peaceful Resistance"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Gabi Baramki.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 Growing Up in Palestine
Chapter 2 Peace and War
Chapter 3 Occupation and Education
Chapter 4 Targeting Birzeit
Chapter 5 Developing Birzeit
Chapter 6 "Cells of Illegal Education"
Chapter 7 "Shaking Off" and Being Shaken
Chapter 8 Not Obeying Orders
Chapter 9 Networking Round the World
Chapter 10 Harassment and Hair Gel
Chapter 11 Preaching to the Choir
Appendix i Chronology - Birzeit University
Appendix ii Deportation Statement from Hanna Nasir November 74
Appendix iii Israeli lies and half-truths 16 January 1979
Appendix iv Press release from BZU after 1979 closure
Appendix v BZU press release after opening in April 1992
Appendix vi Report from 5 Hebrew University professors
on order 854 - 1980
Appendix vii-a Example of Required loyalty oath. A Commitment form - 1982-3
Appendix vii-b work permit A with item 18 - 1980
Appendix vii-c work permit B without item 18 - 1980
Appendix viii Letter to Secretary Baker - March 1992
Location of Photograph and Maps
Map-Photograph Captions

Editorial Reviews

'Gabi Baramki's tireless devotion to Birzeit University has allowed the institution to survive and even thrive against incredible odds' President Jimmy Carter

From the Publisher