Closure of crossings traps students in Gaza

· Hundreds studying abroad unable to continue
· Israeli supreme court petitioned on right to travel
Rory McCarthy in GazaCity, The Guardian, 6.11.07. Khaled al-Mudallal expected to spend this autumn sitting in lectures and writing papers for his final year in business and management studies in Bradford, the town he has lived in for six years. But when Mr Mudallal, 22, went home to visit his wife and family in Gaza this summer he found himself trapped. Within a few days of his return Hamas, the Islamist movement which won Palestinian elections last year, seized control of the Gaza Strip. Israel closed the crossings out of Gaza and six weeks ago declared the small stretch of land a "hostile entity". He is one of 670 Palestinian students in Gaza with places on university courses abroad who are unable to return to their studies. Supported by an Israeli human rights group, Gisha, the students have brought a second petition to Israel's supreme court demanding the right to travel after a first petition was rejected. A response is expected today.

"This is my final year, it counts for 70% of my degree. It's the most important year of my life," said Mr Mudallal. "I feel I've been denied my right to education, my right of movement."

He moved to Bradford as a teenager to join his father, who was studying at the city's university. He went to school and then on to the university's school of management. He returned to Gaza last December to marry and came back again this summer to bring his wife, Dua'a, to Bradford for his final year.

He has a visa for Britain that runs until 2010. However, because the crossings were closed he had to cancel a one-year paid placement at a Bradford charity that was part of his course and is still paying £300 a month rent on his flat in the city. "We're living in limbo," he said.

The Israeli government has allowed a limited number of Palestinians to leave Gaza through the Erez border crossing, which leads into Israel, and from there on to Tel Aviv airport or overland into Jordan. In August, Israel began taking students out through Erez and driving them by bus to the Nitzana crossing, which leads into Egypt. However the bus ran only four times, allowing fewer than 550 people to leave, of whom about 80 were students. It has not run since early September.

Mr Mudallal's first petition to the supreme court, on September 17, was rejected because the court was told the bus service would resume. It did not. There are now 6,400 Palestinians waiting to leave Gaza and Mr Mudallal is number 4,845 on the waiting list.

Mark Regev, Israel's foreign ministry spokesman, said: "We are working to find an expeditious solution. We want them to go and study and help build a better future for the Palestinians."

Many others fear losing their university places. Mona Bkheet, 26, won a scholarship for a PhD on civil engineering at Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale. When she came home to Gaza for the summer, she too found herself trapped.

Hassan el-Nabih, 46, who won a place at Boston College, in Boston, Massachusetts, to study a PhD in linguistics under a US government scholarship for Palestinian university academics has a US visa that runs until June 2010 and a permit to cross through Israel from Gaza, but was twice turned back when trying to leave.

Israel breaks promise to Gaza students

DAN IZENBERG , Jerusalem Post, 25.10.07. The army has broken a promise given to the High Court of Justice to renew bus transportation for Gaza Strip students to Egypt so that they can pursue their academic studies abroad, Gisha - the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement - said Thursday. According to the NGO, 670 students with visas to study abroad cannot leave the Gaza Strip because the Rafah border crossing is closed and there is no other way for them to reach Egypt. On September 17, Gisha petitioned the High Court to allow Khaled Mudallal, a student at Bradford University in England, and his wife, to return to his studies. The court rejected the petition after the state said it would renew the shuttle service on October 2. But no buses have operated in the more than three weeks that have ensued.

On Monday, Gisha submitted a new petition on behalf of seven students and four family dependents who are among those waiting to return to their studies.

One of them is Wissam Abuajwa, 30, who was accepted by a British university for postgraduate work in environmental science. This is his fourth attempt to study outside of Gaza. In 2001, he was accepted to a program at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura, near Eilat, but barred from entering Israel. In 2003 he was accepted to a master's program in Germany, but Israel refused to let him leave via the Rafah crossing. Last year, he was accepted for the first time by the British university but barred from leaving. Now, he is trying again.

Another petitioner, Alaa Abo-Jasser, who scored 98.6 on her matriculation exams, was accepted to study medicine at Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany. A German language course to prepare her for her studies began at the university in July.

Higher educational opportunities in the Gaza Strip are extremely limited. Undergraduate and master's degrees are unavailable in key subjects such as occupational therapy, medicine, speech therapy, dentistry and physiotherapy, according to Gisha. There are no doctoral programs in any subject. Furthermore, Israel bars Gaza Strip students from studying in Israel or the West Bank.

For the first time since Cabinet decision declaring Gaza "hostile territory", Israeli Supreme Court asked to nullify collective punishment policy:

“Israel is punishing the student population of the Gaza Strip”

Gisha. Monday, October 22, 2007: University students in Gaza today petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court against an Israeli policy preventing them from traveling abroad to study. “People dream many dreams,” states the court petition, submitted by Gisha. “One wants to be a pilot, another wants to be a scientist… The petitioners dream of studying.”

Israel is preventing some 670 students from the Gaza Strip from traveling to the USA, Europe, Jordan, Asia and other destinations to pursue higher education. Since the government declared the Gaza Strip “hostile territory,” restrictions on movement to and from Gaza have been further tightened, and a busservice taking students out of Gaza has been canceled. Many of the students “imprisoned” in Gaza have already missed the start of the academic year at universities around the world. Some stand to lose their places for the entire year – and scholarships – if they do not arrive to their campuses immediately

Palestinian students trapped in Gaza

Guardian, 05/10/07. We find it deeply ironic, given the recent heated debate on the proposed academic boycott of Israeli universities by the UCU (Report, September 29), that the Israeli supreme court on October 2 ruled that Kahled al-Mudallal, a Bradford University student, cannot leave Gaza and return to his studies in the UK. We hope the voices that criticised the boycott and called so vociferously for preserving academic freedom and promoting dialogue will lend their support to those of us calling on the Israeli government to reverse the supreme court decision, and on the UK government to do all in its power to support the human rights of students like Kahled.

This is not just an issue of academic freedom, important though that is, but is a flagrant breach of a fundamental human right to education. This judgment undermines both academic freedom and the very possibility of constructive dialogue across communities.
Sarah Perrigo,
Dr Mandy Turner,
Prof Jenny Pearce,
Prof Mike Pugh,
Prof Donna Pankhurst,
Prof Nana Poku,
Valentina Bartolucci and 10 others
Department of peace studies, University of Bradford

The right to education is a human right as stated in the UN universal declaration of human rights. Khaled al-Mudallal is one of hundreds of Palestinian students who are currently unable to leave Gaza to begin the new academic year. The British government should do everything in its power to ensure that Israel lifts the restrictions that are preventing Khaled and other students leaving Gaza to complete their education.
Richard Burden MP
Gemma Tumelty President, NUS
Sally Hunt General secretary, UCU
Ruqayyah Collector NUS Black Students' Campaign
Dan Judelson Jews for Justice for Palestinians
Professor Irene Bruegel
Betty Hunter Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Professor Lynne Segal
Richard Kuper

Support Khaled Mudallal's right to education!

A shameful silence

Priyamvada Gopal, Guardian, 05/10/07. The organisation we look to for the protection of free speech has shut down debate on Palestine . Announcing that the proposed boycott of links with Israeli universities would be illegal, the University and College Union asserted that debates related to the topic under its auspices would also be "unlawful". On the basis of last week's legal opinion (the details of which remain shrouded in mystery), the union's leadership has summarily cancelled public debates to have been attended by "legitimate representatives of organisations from both Israel and Palestine". How, in an apparently democratic context, can it be "unlawful" to discuss an issue or possible action? Are discussions of economic sanctions against, say, Burma illegal? What about sanctions against Hamas-led Palestine? It is a particular travesty when such a blatant attack on civil rights comes from the very organisation members expect would defend them were they to be harassed for their scholarly opinions.

The move comes at a time when academic freedom cannot be taken for granted. In the US, it is under increasing assault from within and outside academia. Even as freedom of speech is invoked as the great western value to be spread across the globe, by force if necessary, its limits are marked by two unbreachable taboos: anti-Americanism, and criticism of the Israeli state and its occupation of Palestine. Organisations such as Campus Watch monitor what academics write and teach, compile blacklists and attempt to shut down debate, despite their claim to support free speech. Respected scholars who have faced campaigns include Columbia University's Middle East specialist Joseph Massad, who was accused and then cleared of anti-semitism; outspoken Michigan professor Juan Cole; and Norman Finkelstein, refused tenure and forced to resign after DePaul University came under external pressure. Most recently, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was banned by the University of St Thomas in Minnesota because of his stance on Israel/Palestine.

Dissenting Jewish academics are themselves the target of what Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer call "the Israel lobby". These authors, by no means anti-American radicals, came under fire simply for attempting to open discussion on US-Israel relations.

Though encomiums to free speech underpin displays of civilisational superiority by America and other western polities, it is undermined in practice by flagrant breaches of academic integrity and protocol. It is impossible to imagine a white European or American head of state, even an authoritarian such as Putin, being described in the demeaning way that the Columbia University president Lee Bollinger introduced Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - as "a petty and cruel dictator". The same Bollinger was president when the investigation of Massad and other scholars took place. There is no excuse for inviting an elected leader to talk at your university only to undermine him as lacking in "intellectual courage" before he has had a chance to speak. It's called a set-up.

The UCU leadership's call for constructive engagement over a divisive boycott is looking like a set-up, too. Sadly, the pressure exerted by people identified as part of the Israel lobby - including the Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who is quick to denounce criticism of Israeli policy as anti-semitic (never mind if it comes from Jewish intellectuals as well) - has succeeded in shutting down discussion, let alone criticism, of the Palestinians. Is silence the only constructive approach to the Palestinian question?

Writers and intellectuals have a moral obligation to criticise violations of human rights and freedom wherever they occur - Iran, Zimbabwe, Burma, Guantánamo or South Africa. The military occupation of Palestine should be no exception. Whatever their views on boycotts, academics must not allow such persistent exceptionalism to suppress debate in an organisation expected to defend, not undermine, their right to freedom of speech and engagement.

· Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the English faculty at Cambridge University
pg268@cam.ac.uk