Dennis Fox’s Weblog

Yesterday I spent four hours at Birzeit University, just outside Ramallah. One thing I wanted to do was set up a meeting tomorrow afternoon with Institute of Law academics and a few of our JVP delegation members, where we’ll talk not just about human rights issues but also about obstacles to studying Palestinian institutions under trying circumsances.

My main purpose, though, was to get to know some of the researchers I’ll be working with when I come back in December, and this was our main focus. The Institute of Law is creating a Law and Society Department, to expand traditional Palestinian legal research and education to the kind of interdisciplinary work now common in many Western universities but so far nonexistent here. This kind of research is often critical of how legal institutions operate in practice, which makes the effort somewhat controversial.

I had originally hoped to use my Fulbright grant to spend six weeks at Birzeit, where I would teach a course on Psychology, Law, and Justice, discuss research directions with faculty and graduate students, and generally hang out and learn more Arabic. However, when Fulbright told me the State Department does not let them fund visits to Palestinian universities “for safety reasons” I arranged to go to Israel’s Ben Gurion University instead, where I’ll teach essentially the same course.

So when I come here after the end of my grant period it will be for a shorter time, just a week or ten days. According to the Birzeit website, the teaching semester will be just about over, though yesterday that seemed unclear. My contacts said they would see if it is still possible to arrange a compressed course over a period of a week or so. If not (and I suspect not), they suggested other possibilities — small group meetings with researchers and other faculty about how social scientists in general and psychologists in particular approach legal issues, a lecture to interested faculty, a larger semi-public forum that typically attracts outside lawyers and judges. It may turn out to be a lot of last-minute arranging, and may  end up just having informal talks with people, but they are eager to have outside academics spend time there, give them feedback on their work, and help them make contacts with university departments abroad.

I had been concerned that my decision to spend six weeks at an Israeli university would be a problem, because Birzeit has a policy of non-cooperation with Israeli universities and some have called for a larger boycott of some or all Israeli universities. They assured me, however, that the policy does not apply to individuals, and they say their faculty and students would be interested in hearing what my Israeli students have to say about how law and justice interact. All in all, the meeting left me feeling positive about my December visit.

They also talked a bit about a range of legal and human rights issues from both academic and personal perspectives — about being stopped at the airport in Tel Aviv for hours and being put in a room with drug smugglers, about the difficulty of moving around the West Bank, about the inability to pay salaries to keep their researchers because of Israeli restrictions on money coming into the country. It was good to see their sense of humor despite all this, though I detected some concern when one of them said he sometimes thinks they are working in a vacuum, with their work to create a functional law-based society increasingly disconnected from the deteriorating society outside the university.

After the meeting, I had lunch in the student cafeteria with a visiting graduate student who works not only in Birzeit but is also helping set up a legal clinic at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem/Abu Dis while using the library at Tel Aviv University to work on her PhD in international criminal law;  I had met her the evening before at a dinner with some of our JVP group. She’s now arranged for me to be a guest speaker in a class at Al Quds on human rights issues, in late November. During lunch she talked about how human rights law can be used to reshape issues in ways that are not always positive. That matches my own concerns about law more generally.

After lunch I took the service (group taxi) back to Ramallah, bought an umbrella (it rained heavily during the day, leading to  the power going out half a dozen times during my Birzeit visit), and walked back to my hotel for a nap. A few hours later I went out for dinner with Richard from our JVP group, ending up in a Chinese restaurant that turned out to be pretty good despite the fact that we were the only customers. It was a long day, but a good one.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Israel/Palestine, Law/Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.