An issue that is rarely discussed in the American media: the occupation helps to stifle Palestinian intellectual life and the free exchange of ideas by limiting scholars’ travel, to archives, foreign institutions and to meet one another. Amy Kaplan has a fine piece on the subject in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Oh and yes she says that Palestinians bear some of the responsibility for the lack of resources, but the overall conditions are oppressive:
I spent 12 days driving back and forth between my hotel in East Jerusalem and universities in the West Bank. On each trip I waited at a military checkpoint along Israel’s security wall to have my passport inspected. One thing became immediately clear: Freedom of movement is fundamental to intellectual life. How can ideas and speech circulate freely if teachers and students cannot? In my encounters with Palestinian academics, I was struck both by the obstacles that living in the occupied territories imposes on their mobility, and the creativity that allows Palestinian intellectual life to be so vibrant today…
In Jenin and Nablus we drove through glistening new campuses, where students seemed preoccupied by final exams and summer vacations. At a meeting with deans at Birzeit, however, we did hear about how restrictions on movement—both from outside and within the territories—are creating hardships. Palestinian universities do not yet have the resources—or the political stability—to grant doctoral degrees, so they rely on the outside world to train faculty members. Many students complete their bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Palestine and then go abroad for their Ph.D.’s. The universities draw heavily on professors with foreign passports, many from the Palestinian diaspora. Yet it has been increasingly difficult for these scholars to get visas, and even harder to renew those visas after their three-month term expires, when visitors can apply for renewal only after leaving the country. At Birzeit, an assistant professor in the history department had just been denied re-entry—in the middle of the semester. At An-Najah National University, in Nablus, the semester length has been tailored to accommodate foreign students and faculty on three-month tourist visas. The unpredictability of the visa process makes planning and hiring difficult and demoralizing.
The problem was brought home when I was planning to meet a literary scholar from Al-Quds University, one of the organizers of the Melville conference. He canceled by e-mail, explaining that he couldn’t meet me in Jerusalem because he had been denied re-entry at the Jordan border four weeks ago—before the end of the semester. In addition to the “unfairness and the debilitating effects,” he wrote, there was the problem of getting physical possession of his final examinations to grade….
The roundtable discussion emphasized the relationship between democracy and an open research environment. Without freedom of movement, Palestinian academics risk isolation from the outside world and from one another. American academics can work to end that isolation by engaging in exchange programs, collaborative research, and guest teaching. A debate is raging about whether an academic boycott of Israel would violate the principle of academic freedom, but there has long been a de facto boycott of Palestinian academe.
In Jerusalem on May 31, a few hours after the Israeli raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla, I tore myself away from the television news to attend a final meeting in the rooftop garden of our hotel. The only person missing was the Palestinian co-director of PARC [Palestinian American Research Center, a specialist in education and development who has worked across Europe and the Middle East, and who had organized every detail of our visit. Our host, a resident of Ramallah, did not have a permit to join us on the other side of the wall.
