Imagine living on a campus where U.S. military troops stormed in tearing down posters, breaking up demonstrations and arresting your classmates — all in the name of national security.
For Lian Derini and Emad Nazzal, two Palestinian students at the Birzeit University in Palestine, this hypothetical is their reality as college students in the middle of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
As part of the Right to Education Campaign through Birzeit University, Derini and Nazzal will be touring the U.S. for 14 days, working to inform American students through their own testimonies about the difficulties many Palestinian students face when trying to get an education.
These challenges, presented by Derini and Nazzal, include crossing multiple checkpoints to be eligible to attend universities, cooperating with the military involvement that is dispersing “anti-Israeli” activities, facing the constant fear of arrest for participating in those activities, censorship and the possible closure of any university at any time.
Derini noted censorship can be one of the greatest obstacles these students face.
“Intellectual censorship is very obvious in the universities,” Derini said. “It prevents anyone from doing any speech or any demonstrations about Palestine.”
Nazzal and Derini said Israeli officials often claim controlling Palestinian education and strongly supporting pro-Israel history and geography textbooks are more important than the physical conflicts and violence Palestinians face everyday.
“In the schools there, I was taught how to be an Israeli citizen and that I am an Israeli citizen and should be loyal to the state of Israel,” Derini said. “I learned about Jewish history and culture, but I was ignorant about my own history as a Palestinian. We do not have the right to preserve our culture and our history, we are not treated like a national minority.”
It is impossible, however, to talk about the educational censorship without talking about the ongoing violence.
Several UT students, including Jacob Price, senior in mechanical engineering who studied abroad in Israel for five weeks, expressed concerns about the way Palestinians are reacting towards the Israelis as well as how the conflict should be resolved.
“Do I think there are times when violence is necessary?” Price asked. “Yes. But, to me, strategically, non-violence is a much more effective means to an end there.”
Amira Sakalla, senior in supply chain management who invited Derini and Nazzal to visit UT, said this difference of opinion can be largely attributed to inadequate coverage of the conflict by American media.
“I think that a lot of American media can be biased toward Israel, even just in the way things are worded,” Sakalla said.
Nada Habiby, senior in management and a Palestinian-American, agreed, stating she witnessed the violence this summer and can validate that Derini and Nazzal’s stories are accurate and are often misrepresented by the media.
“Everything that they’ve said, I’ve lived through, I’ve been through,” said Habiby. “I couldn’t go out at night, I had to stay at the house I was staying at. I could barely walk around during the day because it was so dangerous for a Palestinian to be walking around.”
Derini and Nazzal also mentioned how they saw many aspects of their own struggles reflected in the recent protests taking place in Ferguson, Missouri. They used their experiences there to identify several similarities between the two conflicts.
“This experience in St. Louis and Ferguson changed my whole opinion about what’s happening in America and about what’s happening in Palestine,” Derini said, noting the protests, demonstrations and police reactions to the conflict, like using tear gas among other weapons, reminded her of the conflict in Palestine.
Sakalla said she hopes students who attended left with a greater understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as well as an increased appreciation for the difficulties of completing an education in countries stricken with political strife.
“They came here to talk about their student experiences, and I think it’s valuable to understand what other students in the world have to go through,” Sakalla said. “I think it makes the whole situation much more real and easy to understand.”
