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the
Bombing of a University in Gaza?
Targeting
Islamic University
By NEVE
GORDON and JEFF HALPER
December 31, 2008
Not one of the nearly 450 presidents of American
colleges and universities who prominently denounced an effort by
British academics to boycott Israeli universities in September 2007
have raised their voice in opposition to Israel’s bombardment of the
Islamic University of Gaza earlier this week. Lee C. Bollinger,
president of Columbia University, who organized the petition, has
been silent, as have his co-signatories from Princeton,
Northwestern, and Cornell Universities, and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Most others who signed similar petitions,
like the 11,000 professors from nearly 1,000 universities around the
world, have also refrained from expressing their outrage at Israel’s
attack on the leading university in Gaza. The artfully named
Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, which organized the latter
appeal, has said nothing about the assault.
While the extent of the damage to the Islamic
University, which was hit in six separate airstrikes, is still
unknown, recent reports indicate that at least two major buildings
were targeted, a science laboratory and the Ladies’ Building, where
female students attended classes. There were no casualties, as the
university was evacuated when the Israeli assault began on Saturday.
Virtually all the commentators agree that the Islamic
University was attacked, in part, because it is a cultural symbol of
Hamas, the ruling party in the elected Palestinian government, which
Israel has targeted in its continuing attacks in Gaza. Mysteriously,
hardly any of the news coverage has emphasized the educational
significance of the university, which far exceeds its cultural or
political symbolism.
Established in 1978 by the founder of Hamas — with
the approval of Israeli authorities — the Islamic University is the
first and most important institution of higher education in Gaza,
serving more than 20,000 students, 60 percent of whom are women. It
comprises 10 faculties — education, religion, art, commerce, Shariah
law, science, engineering, information technology, medicine, and
nursing — and awards a variety of bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
Taking into account that Palestinian universities have been
regionalized because Palestinian students from Gaza are barred by
Israel from studying either in the West Bank or abroad, the
educational significance of the Islamic University becomes even more
apparent.
Those restrictions became international news last
summer when Israel refused to grant exit permits to seven carefully
vetted students from Gaza who had been awarded Fulbright fellowships
by the State Department to study in the United States. After top
State Department officials intervened, the students’ scholarships
were restored — though Israel allowed only four of the seven to
leave, even after appeals by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
“It is a welcome victory — for the students,” opined The New York
Times, and “for Israel, which should want to see more of Gaza’s
young people follow a path of hope and education rather than
hopelessness and martyrdom; and for the United States, whose image
in the Middle East badly needs burnishing.”
Notwithstanding the importance of the Islamic
University, Israel has tried to justify the bombing. An army
spokeswoman told The Chronicle that the targeted buildings were used
as “a research and development center for Hamas weapons, including
Qassam rockets. … One of the structures struck housed explosives
laboratories that were an inseparable part of Hamas’s
research-and-development program, as well as places that served as
storage facilities for the organization. The development of these
weapons took place under the auspices of senior lecturers who are
activists in Hamas.”
Islamic University officials deny the Israeli
allegations. Yet even if there is some merit in them, it is common
knowledge that practically all major American and Israeli
universities are engaged in research and development of military
applications and receive money from the Pentagon and defense
corporations. Weapon development and even manufacturing have,
unfortunately, become major projects at universities worldwide — a
fact that does not justify bombing them.
By launching an attack on Gaza, the Israeli
government has once again chosen to adopt strategies of violence
that are tragically akin to the ones deployed by Hamas — only the
Israeli tactics are much more lethal. How should academics respond
to this assault on an institution of higher education? Regardless of
one’s stand on the proposed boycott of Israeli universities, anyone
so concerned about academic freedom as to put one’s name on a
petition should be no less outraged when Israel bombs a Palestinian
university. The question, then, is whether the university presidents
and professors who signed the various petitions denouncing efforts
to boycott Israel will speak out against the destruction of the
Islamic University.
Neve Gordon is chair of the department of politics
and government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of
Israel’s Occupation
(University of California Press, 2008).
Jeff Halper Jeff Halper is the Director of the Israeli Committee
Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and author of
An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting
Dispossession, Redeeming Israel (Pluto Press, 2008).
He can be reached at
jeff@icahd.org.
http://www.counterpunch.org/gordon12312008.html
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