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| Fidaah Abed (L) and Zohair Abu Shaban (R). Rafael D. Frankel |
Scholars accepted to grad school, but stuck in Gaza
Three Fulbright scholars are waiting to see if Israel will allow them to leave Gaza to study in the United States.
from the June 12, 2008 edition
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According to Mark Regev, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman, the political echelon has directed the military to facilitate the Fulbright program.
But "the situation with Gaza is not normal," Mr. Regev says. "The regime there is conducting a war against the Israeli population in the south. It's illogical to assume Israel would have business as usual with the Gaza Strip while the regime there is trying to kill our people."
Hamas and other militant Gaza factions have attacked the border crossings numerous times since Israel withdrew from Gaza nearly three years ago. Militants have also launched rockets and mortars at nearby Israeli towns with near daily frequency, leading to the hard-line Israeli policy.
On Wednesday, Israeli leaders said they will give Egyptian efforts to broker an Israeli-Hamas truce more time before pursuing any broader offensive in the strip. That decision came as violence continued on the Gaza border and an Israeli attack on suspected militants killed a 6-year-old Palestinian girl.
In taking up the case of other trapped Gaza students, Gisha has filed petitions with the Israeli High Court of Justice involving two cases of students who were offered positions in the United Kingdom and Germany. In hearings last week, the court criticized the state's blanket refusal of exit permits and directed it to clarify the reasons for that policy within 15 days.
The chairman of Israel's parliamentary committee on education, Rabbi Michael Malchior, also criticized the policy. "We are a nation that for years was prevented from studying. How can we do the same thing to another people?" he said. "Trapping hundreds of students in Gaza is immoral and unwise."
In particular, critics of the policy point out that such students are the very people Israel should be helping in Gaza, as they represent the more secular, pro-peace segments of Palestinian society that Israel and the US want to see emerge victorious in the political and social struggle here against violent Islamist forces.
"Often American and Israeli officials believe that hard-line policies will turn people against our adversaries such as Hamas and Hezbollah," says Theodore Kattouf, who served as US ambassador in Syria and the United Arab Emirates and is familiar with the Fulbright screening process. "However when the general populace bears the brunt of those policies, the law of unintended consequences usually prevails."
Abed calls himself a "victim" of the Hamas coup. He was accepted for a master's degree in computer engineering at Columbia University. "We had no part in what happened here. Why are [the Israelis] treating us like criminals? It would be better for Israel to have their neighbors be educated than angry."
While statistics could not be obtained for the public Palestinian Authority schools that Abu Shaban and Abed attended, exams given in Gaza schools run by the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) paint a picture of a struggling education system. According to UNRWA, around 80 percent of its students in grades four through nine failed comprehensive math tests and about 40 percent failed Arabic language tests.
Abu Shaban and Abed say they often studied with 50 other students in the same classroom. Moreover, they say, there were days when fighting prevented them from attending classes.
"Fulbright scholars are always the best and brightest," says UNRWA Gaza assistant director Aidan O'Leary. "Here in Gaza, because of the violence and the socioeconomic decline, these are really the very, very best."
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