Wednesday 17 April 2024
The Ministry of Education has made it official: for the first time ever there won’t be a matriculation exam in Gaza this year. It’s important to know that even after Hamas took power in the Gaza strip in 2007, exams remained the same in all Palestinian territories, in Gaza and the West Bank. It is important for us Palestinians that despite the division between Gaza and the West Bank, between Hamas and Fatah, we should have the same education. But today it is hard to imagine how exams could be held in the Gaza strip, with the north almost completely levelled and half the Gazans removed to the south and living in makeshift tents.
In any case, most of the schools and universities have been totally or partially destroyed. We had seven universities in Gaza, not counting the professional schools. Palestine University has just published an internal memo, informing professors and employees that it can no longer pay their salaries and that they were free to seek employment elsewhere. A way of announcing that the University is bankrupt. It is a private university, the most recent to be created in the Gaza Strip. Opened in 2007, it had thousands of students and offered many courses : engineering, architecture, medicine, etc.
Just natives who we feed and put to work
The purpose of all this militarily meaningless destruction is perfectly clear: the Israelis want to destroy any possibility of education in Gaza. Like all colonial powers, they do not want an educated society; just natives they feed and put to work. Their goal is to change an educated society into an illiterate one. For us, education is a primordial value, and we are a young society. Over 75 % of young people have a college education. We are the best educated population in the Middle East, according to UN statistics.
Even with the blockade imposed since 2007, even in an open-air prison, parents do all they can to make sure their children have a diploma, often going into debt. Many young people are drawn to medicine, which can be studied at Palestine University, at Al-Azhar University and at the Islamic University. Yet these studies are very expensive, nearly the equivalent of $5,000 per semester.
To complete the seven-year course in medicine can cost as much as $90,000, everything included. In spite of that, parents urge their children to study, and the latter are very motivated. We Palestinians know that education is the best weapon against the occupation
Even in Israeli prisons, Palestinian prisoners go on studying. Many have earned their diplomas in prison. Even those serving lifetime sentences, who know they’ll never get out, have nonetheless obtained their masters degrees or their doctorates.
In Gaza there is only one public institution of higher learning, al-Aqsa University. All the others are private. The Islamic University is funded by Hamas, al-Azhar by Fatah. The others were created by groups of professors.
Even before 7 October, these establishments were in trouble. They extended credit to students who couldn’t pay the enrolment fees. At one point, the Islamic University was about to go bankrupt. For quite a while now, many institutions have reduced their professors’ and employees’ salaries by 50 % or even 70 %. Today the educational system is completely destroyed. Thousands of students have only one solution: trying to pursue their studies elsewhere. One way of depriving the Gaza strip of its youth and its future.
I don’t know how those youngsters are going to make out. I’ve had phonecalls from friends who want to know if their children can go to Cairo to continue their education. Unfortunately, Egypt does not offer a residence permit to students. Right now, only those who can pay $5,000 to leave here can go to Egypt. But the procedure to enrol in a university over there is very long and isn’t perfected yet. It is rumoured that Mohamed Dahlan, one-time head of Preventive Security in Gaza, under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority and now advisor to the United Arab Emirates, is negotiating with the Egyptians the reception of students. But that would simply mean the emigration of our young people.
The information concerning the shut-down of Palestine University has begun to circulate. I just got a phone call from a doctor friend of mine, Moumen Shawa. He has three children who are all medical students at Al-Azhar university, but he is afraid it will also declare bankruptcy:
“One of my sons should be getting his degree in dentistry in two years’ time, and the other two their medical degrees. I spent all my savings for them.”
He had thought at first that the war would only make them lose a year, but now he believes that education in Gaza “is over and done with for the rest of our lives”. He even told me that if he managed to get them to Egypt, he wouldn’t be able to pay the enrolment fees for a medical school over there, plus their living expenses and rent. He wanted to know if I, “with my connections” could help get his kids into a medical school in France for the coming year: “I heard that France gives scholarships. The language isn’t a problem, they can learn it”. The poor guy, he asks the questions and supplies the answers, answers that I don’t know. He’s desperate for his offspring to be able to go on with their studies abroad. It’s his lifelong dream, to see them all become doctors.
Like any other young people the world over
That’s just one example among others of people who have done everything they could, spent all their money so their children could have an education, become doctors or architects. The daughter of another friend is in her second year of medicine at al-Azhar University. Becoming a doctor is her dream too. Her father tells me she hopes to resume her studies next year. To reassure him, I tell him losing a year isn’t too serious, she can go on taking classes on line, and regard this as a sabbatical.... But just between us, he says: “Rami, Rami I’m afraid there won’t be a university any more, and that my daughter’s dream will go up in smoke.”
The Israelis want to keep us from studying because they want to make us into ignoramuses, but young Palestinians have ambitions. They want to live, like any other young people the world over. They dream of studying like in France, where you don’t have to have a lot of money to enrol in a university. We are not an ignorant society, we’re a society which knows full well what’s going on. Victor Hugo wrote: “Every child who is taught is a man who is gained.” And we have many men.
Translated by Noël Burch.