cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/26019
Birzeit University is no longer what it once was. The transformation has been gradual and, therefore, easily rationalized, but the result has been the hollowing out of a university that once led the Palestinian struggle.
It was an ordinary Tuesday morning when Israeli forces arrived at Birzeit’s campus. The semester was drawing to its close. Students were still inhabiting the familiar, minor dramas of university life: the arithmetic of grades, the quiet panic induced by syllabi reread too late, the low-level guilt attached to courses in which effort had not quite matched ambition. These anxieties, rehearsed and recognizable, belonged to a calendar that assumed continuity. The morning, like most mornings, appeared to agree with that assumption — until it didn’t.
The soldiers entered with confidence. They were under direct orders to disrupt and induce some shock into the body of a university with a long history of tit-for-tat with Israeli military authorities.
Birzeit had its golden age at the moment of its inception, or shortly thereafter. It lasted for a decade or two, depending on who is doing the remembering. It was an era defined less by institutional stability than by the university’s repeated closures by the Israeli military; classes reappeared in borrowed houses, in improvised rooms, in spaces whose chief qualification was that they could be made to disappear. Teaching became an exercise in logistics as much as in pedagogy, knowledge passed on under conditions that assumed interruption as the norm rather than the exception.
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