They say protests are about freedom of speech -- for themselves and for Jews
The scene here last spring was reminiscent of American campuses in the 60’s: Radical students were accusing universities of gagging political expression, while moderates and university officials were suggesting that Communist agitators had spawned the unrest.
But the protests were being led not by long-haired antiwar activists but by clean-cut students from Israel’s Arab minority -- Palestinians who live in Israel proper and are Israeli citizens. Given that the opening of the fall semester, in October, seems likely to coincide with the declaration of a Palestinian state and an Israeli general election fought over the peace process, the student activism may redouble.
Buoyed by a series of vehement demonstrations that made banner headlines in the local press and caught university officials off guard, Arab student leaders have announced plans to lead a nationwide strug gle for freedom of speech on the campuses. Jewish student leaders charge that the Arab students are being manipulated by Arab politicians, especially those in the Israel Communist Party.
“The time has come when we can remain silent no more,” declares Khulood Badawi, head of the Arab Student Committee at the University of Haifa. After several years in which Arab students have remained relatively quiet, the time has come to make their grievances heard, she explains.
But issues of concern to Arab students are being taken seriously, and solutions are being achieved, maintains Peleg Reshef, head of Haifa’s Student Association. “Our problem is with the [Arab] politicians. They are using the Arab students like puppets,” he charges.
If the Arab students are elated by the attention their campaign has received, Jewish students and university administrators are worried. The recent demonstrations, which included violent clashes between Arab and right-wing Jewish students, brought back memories of similar battles in the early 1980’s. Then, during the administration of the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the campuses were hot spots for national controversies such as the building of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and the peace treaty with Egypt.
In recent years, however, Israeli students, both Jewish and Arab, have been less inclined to bring national issues onto the campuses. Student governments have concentrated on issues of specific interest to students, such as lower tuition.
The Arab Student Committees, popularly elected bodies that work to further the interests of Arab students, have also focused on campus issues. As university administrators developed de-facto working relationships with the committees, Arab student leaders even came to tacitly accept universities’ adamant refusal to grant them official recognition. (The universities recognize the official student association on each campus as the sole legitimate representative of student interests.)
The quiet period ended in early April. The trigger was Land Day, an annual day of protest by Israel’s Arab citizens against government land confiscations and for civil equality. In recent years, Land Day had passed relatively quietly, but this time some of the demonstrations turned violent and led to police intervention. An elderly woman in one village died, apparently from inhaling tear gas.
A few days later, Arab students at the University of Haifa organized a demonstration to protest what they charged was police brutality. Right-wing Jewish students organized a counterdemonstration. There was mutual taunting, and the students exchanged blows. The police showed up -- the university says a Jewish demonstrator impersonated a campus security officer and called them in -- and a number of students, both Arabs and Jews, were arrested.
That demonstration made headlines and was quickly followed by similar events at many other Israeli campuses.
Arab political leaders and Arabs in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, from all parties joined some of the protests, but the presence of Communist Party officials was especially notable. That was hardly surprising, given that the Communists, in the form of an umbrella group called the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (or Hadash, in its Hebrew acronym), control the Arab Student Committees on most campuses.
While Hadash is officially a Jewish-Arab movement, most of its members and leaders are Arab.
For a good part of Israel’s early history, the Communists were pretty much the only independent political voice for Israel’s Arab citizens. In recent years, however, two other Arab parties have gained considerable support, some of it at the expense of Hadash. A new, younger Hadash leadership is now trying to regain its status as the chief voice for Palestinian citizens of Israel.
For many observers, that is the context of the recent demonstrations. Students aren’t apathetic about issues, and Hadash is taking advantage of that, observes George J. Kanazi, a professor of Arab literature at the University of Haifa who has been active in promoting Jewish-Arab dialogue on the campus.
Indeed, Mohammed Barakeh, Hadash’s general secretary and a member of the Knesset, emphasizes that the movement is taking a leading role in the current struggle. Mr. Barakeh, who entered politics when he headed the Arab Student Committee at Tel Aviv University in the 1980’s, says Hadash has always been part of the academic landscape. The movement’s role now, he says, is to create a broad coalition, including Jews, to fight for democracy on campuses.
“The university administrations have not yet internalized what the fundamental character of what an academic institution is,” he says.
The Arab Student Committees are careful to frame the current campaign as one that will benefit all Israeli students, not just Arabs.
“This is a fight for freedom of speech at the universities,” Ms. Badawi maintains.
Ironically, the battle was started at an Israeli institution that has a notably liberal policy on student demonstrations and political activity. Eighteen percent of the University of Haifa’s students are Arab, more than at any other Israeli university. It has set aside a space where students may demonstrate peacefully without permission, although they are required to tell administrators of their plans 24 hours in advance.
“It’s a kind of Hyde Park,” explains the university’s president, Yehuda Hayut, emphasizing that he has made Jewish-Arab coexistence a priority of his six-year tenure.
The demonstration site, a lawn that lies between a classroom building and a dormitory complex, is a favorite place for students to sit around and munch on sandwiches or chat with friends. It is not a major intersection of student life, however. The Haifa campus is built on a mountaintop in such a way that most student traffic passes through a series of interconnected buildings. The outside, off-to-one-side demonstration site, charge the Arab students, was chosen precisely because that is where they are least likely to be seen.
“True, it’s not right in the middle of the campus, but then we can’t impose politics on the majority of students who are not interested,” Mr. Hayut maintains. He also notes that a location inside would heighten the danger of a physical confrontation between opposing groups.
Haifa’s policy contrasts sharply with those of some other Israeli universities. At the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, halfway down the Mount Carmel peak that the University of Haifa crowns, the administration has consistently forbidden students to stage political events on the campus. The Technion’s Arab students hold their demonstrations off campus.
The Technion policy violates Israel’s constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, says Belal Hassan, chairman of the Arab Student Committee at the Technion and another Hadash activist. He and students at universities with similar policies intend to file suit and are prepared to take their case to Israel’s Supreme Court, he says.
“The university rules actually allow demonstrations, but the university doesn’t observe the rules in practice. We’ve submitted dozens of requests, and none have ever been approved,” Mr. Hassan says. But Haviva Roger, a Technion spokeswoman, says the institution bans all demonstrations, a policy supported by its official student association.
While the Arab student leaders say that the free-speech fight is for the benefit of Jewish as well as Arab students, they have another agenda geared to Arab students. The Arab Student Committees also plan to ask the Supreme Court to order universities to teach some of their courses in Arabic, Mr. Hassan says. Arabic, he notes, is one of Israel’s official languages, yet university instruction is required to be in Hebrew.
In the department of Arabic language and literature, most of the courses are taught in Hebrew, Ms. Badawi says. Wouldn’t it make more sense, she suggests, if Arab students at least learned about their own culture in their own language?
Ms. Badawi also cites other university policies that she says discriminate against Arabs. For example, students have to be 20 years old to be accepted into the school of social work. Jewish students serve in the army and are over 20 by the time they matriculate, but Arabs, most of whom don’t do army service, come right out of high school and then have to wait two years if they want to study social work.
Some Jewish student leaders say that the new militancy by Arab students is a threat to public order on campuses and to understanding between Jewish and Arab students. Mr. Reshef accuses the Arab students of fomenting violence.
“They broke the university’s rules, and that should not be tolerated,” he says.
His voice sounds like that of a friend betrayed. In the last student elections, he headed a slate sponsored by Dor Shalom, a political movement founded in the early 1990’s to promote peace and social justice. After the elections, Dor Shalom formed a coalition with Hadash.
Mr. Reshef says he has worked hard for Haifa’s Arab students. Among other things, he says, he is the first student leader to appoint an Arab as coordinator of the Student Association’s activities for Arab students.
Instead of working within the system to solve problems, the Arabs have decided to take matters into their own hands, he says. In so doing, he says, they are endangering their alliance with sympathetic Jewish students like himself. “Even people from the left are frightened now,” he warns.
While Mr. Reshef maintains that national politicians have been behind the campus demonstrations, others say that the opposite is true. Amal Jamal, a lecturer in political science at Tel Aviv University, says that it is the students who are spurring Arab leaders nationwide to close ranks and take a more militant stand.
Israel’s Palestinian citizens are frustrated, he explains, not only by the slow pace of the peace process but also by their own leadership. In 1999’s national elections, he notes, three Arab parties competed vociferously with one another even though their positions on most issues were quite similar.
Arab students are more unified than the national parties. Paradoxically, the Arab students found their unity and their new muscle partly though cooperating with Jewish students on an issue that has preoccupied Israel’s student leadership for the past few years: an attempt to lower tuition. Mr. Hassan, the student leader at the Technion, notes that Arab students played an influential role in a six-week national strike by students for lower tuition that ended in December 1998.
That struggle failed, but it did show that Jewish and Arab students had common interests, Mr. Hassan says. Nevertheless, Arab students were eventually disappointed, he says. They had expected that their support for the tuition fight would translate into general student support for Arab demands.
University officials hope that a modus vivendi can be found that will allow the Arab Student Committees to pursue their interests without spurring a backlash from Jewish students. But Mr. Hassan and Ms. Badawi say the struggle will continue.
Obviously elated with her success in calling attention to the problems of Arab students, Ms. Badawi makes no bones about what the future holds. “If we hadn’t made noise, nobody would have listened,” she says.
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