Checkpoint witnesses
The Israeli women of Machsom Watch keep a close eye on soldier behavior at the roughly 600 Israeli-controlled checkpoints in the West Bank.
…Some simply observe and report; others attempt to talk with soldiers or intervene on the part of Palestinians. Each “patrol” produces a report of their shift’s events, which is then put up on their website (www.machsomwatch.org). Most checkpoints the women monitor are inside the West Bank, rather than on border points between Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The purpose of such interior checkpoints is solely “to prevent free passage of Palestinian residents between their villages and towns,” says group spokeswoman Adi Dagan. This violates international law, she says. The checkpoints’ hours of operation and procedures are “arbitrary” and often changed, she says, making access to jobs, schools, and hospitals for many Palestinians at best, time- consuming and at worst, impossible.
csmonitor.com
The Israeli Boycott of Palestinian Education
…Under Israeli occupation, all eleven Palestinian universities have been closed, the longest being Birzeit between 1988 and 1992, and the most recent Hebron Polytechnic which was closed by military order for 8 months in 2003. During these periods community-based classes were criminalized and its teachers and students arrested. Since 2000, 185 schools have been shelled and scores of teachers and students have been shot at and arrested. Then there are the less extreme but just as effective obstacles like the 700 restrictions of movement by checkpoints, road-blocks and earth mounds. Through creating and controlling a system of internal borders in the occupied territories, the Israeli military prevents students from accessing Palestinian universities far from their homes. University campuses are then increasingly ghettoised; Birzeit now attracts the vast majority of its new students from the Ramallah and Jerusalem areas, and its intake of people from Jenin has dropped by 100%. This also means students are limited in their course choices; 12 students from Gaza have been denied permission to go to Bethlehem and study Occupational Therapy (a course not available in Gaza) despite them not representing a security threat to Israel–a point the military admitted at the Israeli High Court where the decision is currently being challenged.
However, the latest round of Israeli attacks on Palestinian education has been through the control of its external borders. As an occupying power, Israel is legally responsible for guaranteeing all human necessities and rights in the occupied territories, including the right to education, and is in de facto control of all that goes in and out of the territories, including foreign academics, researchers and students.
Those wishing to study or work in Palestinian universities have to go through farcical procedures that are bad at the best of times. Students are often denied entry if they reveal they will be based inside the occupied territories. This is so common that Palestinian universities even advise students to claim they will be tourists in Tel Aviv instead. While other countries’ foreign students are given visas for the duration of their courses, in the occupied territories they suffer the stress of insecurity and the burden of having to lie–itself in breach of their universal right of access to education. The overall message here is clear: if you want to study, you cannot do it in Palestine.
Why the Boycott of Israel is Justified
The recent boycott resolutions of CUPE and NATFHE against IsraelŐs Apartheid predictably awakened IsraelŐs willing apologists, initiating a high pitched chorus of condemnation and self pity across the Western media, not to mention the blogosphere.
Their arguments, however, are flimsy, not to say rotten.