Book Review: School of Palestine

A book looks at the role Palestinian students play in crafting a national identity and fighting for statehood.

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Students at Al-Quds University demonstrate during student elections in 2011. (photo credit: SETH J. FRANTZMAN)
Students at Al-Quds University demonstrate during student elections in 2011.
(photo credit: SETH J. FRANTZMAN)
In 1969, the General Union of Palestinian Students received a letter from the former chairman of its Cairo branch. He was unable to attend the union’s conference in Amman that year. However, he reminded the students that they should continue to be “the fertile revolutionary soil, from which we learned to rebel and unite, and from which we experienced revolutionary struggle... there is no dignity for our people nor liberation for our lands, lest faith pervade our souls.”
The letter was signed, “Yasser Arafat,” the new chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
It is sometimes forgotten today that Palestinian politics was born in student organizations.
The Palestinian national identity, its current institutions and its ideology owe much to a period in the 1950s and 1960s when Palestinian student groups operating among diaspora communities of refugees forged a new path.
This history and its modern incarnations are the subject of Students and Resistance in Palestine: Books, Guns and Politics, a new book by Ido Zelkovitz. Zelkovitz, an accomplished young scholar at the University of Haifa, set out to examine how the Palestinian student movement played such a key role in the quest for national independence. This is an intensely academic study, but it is accessible to both a general and an expert audience. As one of the first major studies tracing the Palestinian student movement through to the present, it is an important contribution to understanding the history of the Middle East in modern times.
The author begins by tracing why student politics played such a singular role in Palestinian nationalism. Other nationalisms have coalesced around coffee houses and intellectuals, but not this one. “The Palestinian tragedy was one of organization, political and social devastation, which might have led to a crisis of identity [after 1948],” he writes. The opposite happened, however: The outcome of the 1948 war and the displacement of some 800,000 Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East created a strong Palestinian identity more than it destroyed it.
The book’s early focus is on Egyptian student life. This was where Arafat rose to prominence in the 1950s. It also happened to be the center of politics in the Arab world after Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 coup. There is a tendency in the book to look back and see the goings-on in Egypt as the important focal point. But what of Palestinian students living in Israel or the West Bank in those years? The author does not say much about them.
The early manifestos the students put out under the auspices of GUPS stressed that “the popular democratic organization is the basis of a Palestinian revolution, which is the only path to complete liberation.” Much of this language dovetailed with the prevailing socialist and communistic language then popular in Europe among students and intellectuals.
Zelkovitz shows how Palestinian students in Germany in particular played a major leadership role.
From its earliest years, GUPS was an integral partner of the PLO. The student leadership was also more strident than other Palestinian organizations in advocating “armed struggle.” It is important to understand that in those years before 1967, the “struggle” was for removing Israel from what is now Tel Aviv and inside the Green Line. It was only later that the PLO would begin to focus its hopes on the West Bank for establishing a Palestinian state.
Those reading this book and imagining student politics at a Western university will welcome Zelkovitz’s inclusion of GUPS propaganda posters showing armed men seeking to liberate Palestine.
“Wherever Death May Surprise Us, It Will Be Welcome,” shouts one poster from the 1960s.
One of the most interesting aspects of this study is its examination of the creation of a Palestinian education system in the West Bank after 1967. “The founding of the Palestinian universities was by no means simple,” he writes. “Power struggles between the local leadership in the territories and the PLO abroad complicated the effort.”
Zelkovitz argues that the Israeli authorities and the IDF viewed the new universities as a “hotbed of nationalism... Israeli interference in Palestinian academia was absolute.” Bir Zeit University was closed 14 times between 1979 and 1988 due to political and nationalist activities.
The Oslo period saw a shift. With newfound autonomy, new universities were built – including Al-Quds University, whose president, Sari Nusseibeh, became a leading light for Palestinian academic achievement. The book cites Nusseibeh as writing that “in 1997, two years after taking over, wandering around campus I felt the stirrings of an intellectual community among students and teachers, as well as the budding signs of a new culture of freedom of thought.”
The universities also became a microcosm of politics. The rise of the Islamic Movement and Hamas, and their competition with Fatah, had a parallel on campuses during student elections. “Supporters of the Islamic Bloc did not shy away from violence in their attempts to dominate the Palestinian campuses and did not fear a clash with the nationalists,” the author writes.
Zelkovitz sketches this whole history in brief. He doesn’t cover the whole cornucopia of intellectual and student developments.
An interesting question is to what degree future events are predictable from a look at debates among the students – what developments taking place today on campuses will play themselves out in the future? The book raises important questions, and the reader is left with the unequivocal view that paying attention to Palestinian student politics is essential to understanding Palestinian affairs.