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Cultural Revolution
Isabel Kershner
ESTEBAN ALTERMAN |
Palestinian students are milling around between classes in the noon sunshine in the courtyard of Al-Quds University's Faculty of Arts. This is the Beit Hanina campus of Al-Quds, in the northern Jerusalem Arab neighborhood of the same name. It's one of five sites dotted in and around the capital that make up this up-and-coming - and arguably most controversial - Palestinian institution of higher learning.
The atmosphere is academic and tranquil, but far from idyllic. Pasted on the walls are posters of a recent shahid, or "martyr": 11-year-old Mahmud Ismail Darawish, killed outside his home by Israeli fire, in Dura, near Hebron, on March 27. He was the brother of a student here.
Inside the cafeteria hangs a large poster of a rifle-toting, camouflage-clad Tanzim militant, Hussein Abayat, liquidated in an Israeli helicopter raid last November. Student representatives have called on the university to stop studies at 1 p.m., to protest the death of six Palestinians during clashes with Israeli troops in the West Bank the day before. And there's a lot of nervous talk about a Palestinian march, planned for this afternoon, on the Israeli checkpoint near Abu Dis, a neighborhood just outside Jerusalem's municipal boundaries in the West Bank, and the location of Al-Quds University's main campus. (In the event, fewer demonstrators than police show up and the march is called off.)
Even in the relatively rarified environment of the Beit Hanina campus, firmly inside Jerusalem's municipal boundaries, the trauma of the intifada is never far away. With some 60 percent of the students hailing from the towns of the West Bank, army checkpoints have become the bane of daily life. Students and staff spend hours on the roads getting to the university or traveling between its various campuses. Senior faculty members have to sneak into the capital illegally from their West Bank homes for meetings at the university's administration headquarters at 8 Nur al-Din Street in downtown East Jerusalem. Many students are unable to pay tuition, their parents having been out of work for months. The university has allowed students to postpone payments to prevent them from dropping out, but senior staff members have been going without salaries as a result.
All of which makes the university's determination to continue its policy in favor of working with Israeli institutions the more remarkable. Alone among the Palestinian universities, and contrary to the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Higher Education's declared policy of non-cooperation, Al-Quds University has in recent years become a pioneer of academic collaboration, engaging in dozens of joint research projects with Israeli academic and professional institutions, as well as others abroad. Now, with the breakdown of regular contact between the PA and Israel and intifada leader Marwan Barguthi calling for a blanket boycott of all things Israeli, Al-Quds University has quickly gone from being a pioneer to one of the last bastions of joint Palestinian-Israeli activity.
The unique vision of the university, and the confidence and clout required to carry it out, derive largely from the personality of its president, Sari Nusseibeh. The scion of an aristocratic Palestinian Jerusalem family, Nusseibeh is a philosophy professor and formerly prominent political activist who long maintained contacts with Israel. With the advent of the Oslo process, Nusseibeh faded out of the political limelight and spent a 1993-94 sabbatical at Washington's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, doing research on issues of self-determination, sovereignty and freedom.
But he clearly had no intention of retreating into an ivory tower. Taking over the presidency of Al-Quds University in 1995, Nusseibeh began shaping it according to his own independent blueprint for Palestinian advancement. The PA Higher Education Ministry policy of non-cooperation, he says, was somehow inherited from the Higher Council for Education of the pre-Authority days. Then, the argument was that there should be no cooperation under occupation. The justification was later modified to no cooperation under closure - so long as Israel places restrictions on the free movement of academics and students between the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem.
"My own feeling is that it would be great if we had an equitable final settlement with Israel first," says Nusseibeh, "but it is also possible to facilitate and instill life into normal relations between people, to use cooperation as one of the means of bringing about the desired results." The council of presidents of the six Palestinian universities and the ministry, he says, are "not convinced. But we're not an army following orders." And he says he has found an understanding there allowing people "to do what they think is best."
The university shuns the touchy-feely school of conflict resolution. "We haven't really gone in for activities such as the weekends in Malta dealing with the Israel-Palestinian conflict, getting people to open their hearts to each other in 'self-help' groups," says Nusseibeh. "We've focused instead on the sciences and professional interests" - primarily research projects in the fields of health, natural sciences and social sciences which accrue a clear "benefit to the university and to the population as a whole in terms of knowledge."
There is also an unstated, but recognized, political dividend. "Of course," says Nusseibeh, "an added value has always been the building up of mutual respect, trust and working relations between the two sides. The peace target is a byproduct, though a calculated one," he states.
Nusseibeh acknowledges that under the pressure of the current intifada, staff members are less enthusiastic and able to pursue joint activities with Israel. Nevertheless, the activities go on, if at a slower rate. "You can't stop a three-year research project on olive growth in January and February and pick it up in March," he says.
AL-QUDS UNIVERSITY WAS formed on paper in 1984, when four existing colleges - the Hind al-Husseini college for women and a college for Islamic jurisprudence in East Jerusalem, a college of science and technology in Abu Dis, and a college of nursing in Al-Bireh, near Ramallah - amalgamated in order to gain university status. A decade later a single board of trustees was formed for all the colleges, with one president and one set of bylaws.
But it is under Nusseibeh, says dean of research and graduate studies Ziad Abdeen, that the university has "mushroomed." Five faculties have grown to 10, offering 35 undergraduate degrees and 36 post-grad programs. Over 5,200 students are currently enrolled, and the staff includes some 400 full- and part-time academics.
The Faculty of Arts houses an avant-garde center for gender studies and a department of economic and social development studies, a Palestinian first. Dean of the Arts Ishaq Qutub says it is designed to turn out a whole echelon of staff for the planning departments in government ministries and the NGO sector. The Abu Dis campus has a medical school, a law school and a dynamic center for chemical and bio-logical analysis, as well as a forensics lab that carries out autopsies for the PA police.
Spread over different campuses that fall variously under the Palestinian and Israeli authorities, Al-Quds faces problems that go far beyond the usual financial ones of the other Palestinian universities. The 200-dunam Abu Dis plot even straddles the municipal boundary of Jerusalem, with some 30-40 percent of the land falling inside the capital's borders as set by Israel in 1967. The split geography has opened Al-Quds up to a host of legal and political challenges.
For now, the university has accreditation from the PA Ministry of Higher Education and is due the same 15 percent PA funding as other Palestinian universities, even though its administration and some of its faculties are in Israeli-ruled East Jerusalem. This violates the terms of the Oslo Accords, according to an Israeli official familiar with the issue. The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added that being in Jerusalem, the university ought to operate with a permit and accreditation from the Israeli Council for Higher Education. Israel has demanded this, he says, but Al-Quds has hired a clever Israeli lawyer who's been "playing for time."
Faculty members, for their part, claim that the university has long been trying to get Israeli accreditation, and complain that Israel doesn't recognize Al-Quds's degrees, paying graduates it employs the reduced salary of non-degree holders.
In the meantime, an Israeli rightist non-profit association has petitioned Israel's Supreme Court to banish Al-Quds University from Jerusalem altogether.
Despite the obvious prestige for the PA of having a national institution such as this in Jerusalem, the geographical split has also led to some bizarre problems with fundraising in the Arab world. Some donors, according to head of planning and development Adnan Manassra, consider Al-Quds part of the PA and won't fund it separately. Others won't help because the university is not all in territory under Palestinian control. The cooperation with Israeli institutions, by the way, is not something the university advertises to potential donors in the Gulf.
While academics from other Palestinian universities have engaged as individuals in joint projects with Israelis, none have the backup of their institutions that Al-Quds researchers have.
Tamara Barnea, director of the Joint Distribution Committee's Middle East Program, initiated a joint comprehensive study with Ziad Abdeen from Al-Quds on "Israeli-Palestinian Cooperation in the Health Field 1994-1998." Published a year ago, it delved into the scope of the cooperation and the mechanisms on both sides that have allowed it to flourish. Five researchers from JDC-Brookdale Institute, JDC-Israel worked for 21/2 years on the project with four Al-Quds researchers. "In health," says Barnea, "you work on a long-term basis. When you decide what vaccination to give a child at 3, it affects generations after. The Joint and Al-Quds have the same ideology and methodology for long-term work."
The cooperation with Israeli institutions wasn't always so open. When Nusseibeh first took over, says Abdeen, "he told me to move cautiously, to keep a low profile." Joint projects were initiated under the umbrella of Nusseibeh's private Palestinian Consulting Group that he'd set up years earlier. "Then, in 1997, I got the go ahead to do the first non-covert joint activity with the Hebrew University," Abdeen recalls.
Today, Al-Quds has 49 such ongoing projects and ties with every Israeli university. As a result, Al-Quds has upgraded its research expertise, benefits from grants other Palestinian universities miss out on, mainly from European countries which concentrate on trilateral projects with Israel and the Palestinians, and has acquired state-of-the-art scientific equipment.
Abd al-Salam Shal'ab, in charge of scientific research at the PA Higher Education Ministry, says he agrees with the Al-Quds philosophy that "science has no borders." Still he upholds his ministry's line that "practically, though not for political reasons," there can be no cooperation with Israel "until there are no borders between the universities."
Hassan Dweik, the dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology, says his staff feels no pressure to stop the contacts "though there are some researchers who don't want to work with Israelis. You can see the changes in attitude over the past few months." Speaking for himself, though, he says he's still in contact with his counterpart at Hebrew University and "we still talk and think about new projects."
Nusseibeh acknowledges that the university might be "touched" by the intifada atmosphere of boycott, but doesn't intend imposing a freeze on contacts yet. "If there's a clear, logical policy argued and endorsed at the different levels of the leadership in a mature and democratic fashion," he says, with a hint of criticism at the way things are being run, "of course we'd adopt the consensus."
Until then, it's business as usual. Nusseibeh points out the absurdity that while the PA was collaborating with Israel in the joint management of a casino, of all things, cooperating at a security level, acquiring water and electricity from Israel and collecting tax revenues based on mutual trade, only academia was subject to an official boycott. "In my opinion, one should boycott anything but science," he remarks.
Palestinian Affairs
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