Dennis Fox’s Weblog

In response to the previous posting about my talk at the Al Quds University Human Rights Clinic on Sunday, a reader asked my impression of the university.

Al Quds, as I understand it, is a grouping of several initially independent colleges in and around Jerusalem. On Sunday I went to the law school, on the main campus in Abu Dis. There’s also a medical school and other departments at Abu Dis, but I’m not sure which departments are in which locations. Two years ago, during an earlier visit with Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, FFIPP held an international conference at an Al Quds campus in East Jerusalem, which only had women students. That was much smaller. Most Americans would recognize Abu Dis as an ordinary campus — buildings ranging from old to modern, 8000 students (male and female) moving from class to class, hanging out, doing what students do.

This campus, then, is about the same size as Birzeit University in Ramallah, which I’ve now visited briefly several times. That’s where I’ll return to in December for a week or so when my six-week Fulbright to Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva ends. Ben Gurion has about twice as many students as Al Quds.

My impressions of Al Quds were very favorable. Palestinians in general have a very strong interest in education, with a high literacy rate. Many more students go to college and on to advanced degrees than, I think, most outsiders realize. That they do this under such difficult circumstances is remarkable. I don’t know how many American college students would persist in getting to class if they had to go through checkpoints every day that sometimes hold them up for hours, or climb over high fences and walk through mud, or deal with the many other indignities and difficulties that Palestinians constantly have to deal with.

Most obvious at Abu Dis is the Separation Wall, which stands across the narrow street from the university’s gate and snakes away in both directions, separating the campus from East Jerusalem and more than doubling the time it takes students and professors to commute from Jerusalem. Instead of a fairly straight, uncomplicated 20-minute ride, the bus now goes the long way around, past Jewish settlements, through traffic in Palestinian towns. The wall stands as a constant reminder of the Israeli occupation and, at least for students in the human rights clinic, of what they are up against.

When I asked what they plan to do after graduation, two of the law students said they want to go to Columbia University in New York to get a masters degree before returning to Palestine to work as lawyers. It sounded like Al Quds has an arrangement with Columbia, but even more generally there is strong interest in advanced degrees, which Palestinians as  many others believe is the route toward personal and societal improvement. I’m less sure about that, but that’s a topic for another time.

In other respects, the students I met and saw at Al Quds varied widely, as was also the case at Birzeit. On the obvious level, there’s great diversity of dress and appearance, most with clothing, hair styles, body language, and attitudes that would fit in easily in any American college. Palestinian universities have many of the things US universities have — Internet access, job fairs, student governments (though aligned with political parties; the Al Quds student government is dominated by Fatah supporters, while Hamas won the majority at Birzeit), and more.

Women’s dress is perhaps the most visible sign of diversity. This is also the area many people ask about — Are all the women veiled? Does everyone have to conform to Islamic dress code? The immediately obvious answer is no. I saw no full-face veils at Al Quds on Sunday, and only one at Birzeit last month. More women at Al Quds than Birzeit had their head covered with a variety of scarves, but there clearly is no uniformity. There wasn’t much flesh showing — bare midriffs and cleavage are a lot more plentiful at Ben Gurion University — but women’s dress ranged from conservative to stylish and even to sexy. Students, of course, are both Muslim and Christian, with some of them coming from other Arab countries (I met one from Saudi Arabia) and even a few from inside Israel.

What’s more — and this is something that surprised me a bit — women students at Al Quds and Ramallah who wear a head scarf seem just as likely as their Israeli-Palestinian counterparts at Ben Gurion University to follow the letter of the Islamic code more than what I take to be the spirit. Shoulder-to-floor dresses or robes are often tailored and sometimes form-fitting, and women who cover their heads often wear ordinary jeans and sweaters, sometimes with makeup and other accessories. It reminded me of Orthodox Jewish women who, to cover their own hair in accordance with tradition, wear stylish wigs.

Although the Palestinian teaching style tends more toward lecture than discussion, during and after my talk students asked questions, offered good comments, and willingly expressed disagreement with each other, with the teacher, and with me. Several stayed afterwards to sit in the professor’s office for tea and more conversation about issues that came up in class — including whether Palestinians would willingly move from a tradition-based customary law dispute resolution process to a modern legal system, which the Birzeit Law and Society research project is designed to facilitate (the teacher thought yes, eventually; the most vocal student thought no). Somehow we even got into some discussion of anarchist theory.

We also went to the edge of the campus to look at east at the desert hills, at scattered Palestinian villages, and at the Jewish settlement in the distance.

After my visit the professor drove me to the central bus station in West Jerusalem. He lives in East Jerusalem, but rarely drives westward, and wasn’t sure how to get there. However, he brought a student along who works in a West Jerusalem law office who gave directions. During the long ride — not the short one we would have had before Israel built the separation wall — we talked more about the issues that had come up in class and in his office afterwards. It did seem to me that he, and others I’ve met at Al Quds and at Ramallah, are very interested in building ties to outside academics as part of a process of normalizing life in Palestine once that becomes feasible, which, from within academia, involves enhancing the facilities and standards of the universities. I think they are off to a good start.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 11:47 am and is filed under Israel/Palestine. 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.