With the 2009-2010 academic year under way, 838 Palestinian university students are still waiting for the authorization that will enable them to leave the Gaza Strip in favor of overseas universities. (full article…)

More than a month into the school year, the Israeli restrictions have caused severe shortages that leave students unable to afford supplies such as notebooks. Students are obliged to share or take turns studying from used textbooks and workbooks. Some did not receive any books for this year’s classes. Supplies smuggled through tunnels underneath Gaza’s southern border with Egypt have failed to make up for the shortages caused by Israel’s arbitrary restrictions on imports of educational materials. (full article…)

Israel’s hermetic sealing of the strip, as part of its blockade against Hamas, has prevented most supplies of paper, textbooks, notebooks, ink cartridges, stationery, school uniforms, school bags, and computers and their spare parts. (full article…)

GAZA CITY, occupied Gaza Strip (IRIN) – Some 1,200 students at al-Karmel High School for boys in Gaza City returned to class on 25 August without history and English textbooks, or notebooks and pens — all unavailable on the local market.

Severe damage to the school, caused during the 23-day Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip which ended on 18 January, has yet to be repaired. Al-Karmel’s principal, Majed Yasin, has had to cover scores of broken windows with plastic sheeting. (more…)

You can download the 2009 Arab Human Development Report here – but if you do, I suggest that you spend more time reading it that the correspondents of Ha’aretz apparently did. I came across an editorial entitled, “It’s a sorry plight to be a citizen in many Arab states”—a self-styled distillation of the report’s findings… Yet while the report spent most of it’s time addressing the problems of human security in Iraq, Somalia and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Zvi Bar’el of Ha’aretz includes only the following token reference to the conditions in Palestine:

The report notes that during the past seven years some 78,000 homes were demolished or damaged in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The infrastructure suffered damage to the tune of $728 million. Economic growth during those years was negative, standing at minus 2.9 percent annually. About a fourth of the workforce in the territories is unemployed. Yearly per capita income stabilized at $1,178 in 2007, about a third less than in the peak year of 1999. (more…)

So who’s behind these terrible conditions? There’s no mention of Israel’s responsibility for any (let alone all) of this. In fact, there’s no mention of Israel in the entire article! Turning to the actual report, it quickly becomes clear why this is. Israel is identified again and again in the report as the primary cause of Palestine’s poor education, miserable infrastructure and generally awful humanitarian conditions. Just a few of the points that Ha’aretz was willing to ignore:

>>> “In … the Occupied Palestinian Territory … people’s basic rights to self-determination and peace have been forcibly annulled. They face threats to their lives, freedom, livelihoods, education, nutrition, health and physical environment from outside forces whose presence wreaks institutional, structural and material violence on them every day” (p. 14).

>>> “Palestinian farmers suffer because Israeli settlers monopolize most ground water sources” (p. 49).

>>> “Food conditions have deteriorated for most Palestinians, but those in Gaza are particularly affected as a result of Israeli restrictions on the movement of goods and persons and as a result of the blockade (p. 126).

>>> “Most threats to Palestinian human security come from Israeli forces” (p. 170).

>>> “Forty one years of occupation, as well as the expansion of Israeli settlements, have prevented Palestinians from controlling their own affairs, and render illusory any notion of the economy as a means of meeting their most basic needs” (p. 177).

>>> “A 2003 World Bank report on the state of the Palestinian economy two years after the Al Aqsa intifada noted a sharp decline in all major economic indicators … The report added that the chief cause of the Palestinian crisis was
Israel’s blockade” (p. 178).

>>> “The Palestinians have paid a heavy price for exercising their democratic
rights via the ballot box” as Israeli punishment for electing Hamas has taken the form of “a total blockade, obstructing all communication with the outside world for whatever purpose” (p. 179).

>>> “In the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the absence of a budget in 2006 and the Western boycott of the Palestinian government caused an acute educational crisis” (p. 182).

During the 22-day war that Israel launched on December 27, 280 schools were damaged, including 18 that were completely destroyed. “Today, one month before the start of the new school year, more than six months after the ceasefires, none of these schools have been properly rebuilt or rehabilitated due to lack of construction materials,” the agencies said. (more…)

The high number of its prison inmates is exceptional. The quality of its health care is exceptionally bad. The degree of its social inequality is exceptionally acute. Public education has gone into exceptional decline. The Americanization of the Holocaust and uncritical support for Israel have demonstrated an exceptional ability to gloss over uncomfortable truths, including broad American indifference to Hitler’s genocide as it happened. (more…)

A Hadera elementary school has been accused of racial discrimination, for its singling out of a number of students of Ethiopian origin, all born in Israel, for extra Hebrew lessons. (more…)

Schools in the Gaza Strip operated by the United Nations have reopened for the first time since the Israeli offensive against Hamas militants. (more…)

A new word emerged from the carnage in Gaza this week: “scholasticide” – the systematic destruction by Israeli forces of centres of education dear to Palestinian society, as the ministry of education was bombed, the infrastructure of teaching destroyed, and schools across the Gaza strip targeted for attack by the air, sea and ground offensives. (more…)

The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the biennial report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families. (more…)

For Burg, Israel’s troubles are self-inflicted. Specifically, he maintains that the principal cause of Israel’s problems is the legacy of the Holocaust, which has become omnipresent in Israeli life. “Not a day passes,” he writes, “without a mention of the Shoah in the only newspaper I read, Ha’aretz.” Indeed, Israeli children are taught in school that “we are all Shoah survivors.” The result is that Israelis (and most American Jews for that matter) cannot think straight about the world around them. They think that everyone is out to get them, and that the Palestinians are hardly any different than the Nazis. (more…)

During the last two days of August, the Egyptian authorities permitted approximately 3,300 people to cross the Gazan border at Rafah into Egypt ‘for humanitarian reasons’.

Those who entered Egypt included Gazan patients, students, and an undisclosed number of Egyptians who had been stranded inside the Gaza Strip. The sight of more than fifty busloads of travelers heading out of Gaza may have given the impression that movement restrictions are finally easing inside the Gaza Strip. But almost 900 other Gazans on board the buses were turned back at the border. Amongst them was twenty year old Nevin Abu Taima from Rafah – who is still desperately trying to return to the US in order to resume her political science degree.

‘My family lives in the Brazil refugee camp, in [the south of] Rafah’ she says. ‘Our house was destroyed by the Israelis in 2005, and we spent the next six months living in a local UNRWA school. We are a big family of eleven children, and some of my brothers and sisters also have families of their own – all of us were living together in one classroom. Can you imagine that?’ (more…)

It seems the U.S. State Department has reversed the decision to deny the seven Gaza students Fulbright Grants. And while this is good news in principle, it should not be praised out of context—or too early.

The spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry’s department of civilian affairs, Major Peter Lerner (whom I dealt with regularly when arranging coordination in and out of Gaza), says that each of the the Palestinian students will face security check before being allowed to leave Gaza.

Fine. This sounds very reasonable… but I am skeptical that these students will actually be granted permission to leave. Since June 2007, approximately 670 students have been unable to pursue higher education abroad due to the total closure of the territory by the Israeli military. (more…)

It could be called one of Africa’s tragic historic ironies. Centuries after the last slave had been put into bondage and sold to Latin and North America as well as the Caribbean on Africa’s infamous slave coast, which are nowadays the shores of Togo and Ghana; what has been called the twenty century equivalents of slavery victimize too many of the youngest and most vulnerable citizens of these countries: human trafficking, which often results in forced and monetarily uncompensated out-of-household labor.

Meet Karine Assilatanon, 15 years old, from the village of Davié outside of Lomé, located in a region in which malnourishment among children is widespread and poverty hinders most children from pursuing the three years of pre-school education, which the Togolese government officially provides. Countrywide, 39 percent of all girls are not enrolled in school, a condition that serves as a breeding ground for child exploitation, particularly of girls. Approximately 11 years ago, Karine’s mother, who is widowed, was informed about the possibility that her daughter could work in neighboring Ghana. Knowing that Ghanaian wages, although still beneath international standards, were higher than in Togo, her mother decided that she should work there. However, promises of a salary turned out to be empty, and Karine had to press fruits for juices without receiving any payment. According to estimates of CARE caseworker Rose Adjowoa Kpogli, working shifts for girls like Karine can last up to 22 hours, with as few as 2 hours off for sleeping in extreme cases. All too often, these girls become victims of rape or sexual harassment. (more…)

What better way to punish Hamas than by punishing Gazan students?

The American State Department recently withdrew the Fulbright Grants for Gazan students hoping to pursue higher education opportunities in the United States. And on what grounds?

Well, it seems that because Israel isn’t letting them out anyway, it’s better not to waste money on students condemned to a future of imprisonment. The politics of accomodation work yet again, but this time the hopes of seven talented students have been drastically crushed by this moral cowardice.

True, the money can be used elsewhere, but why not take a moral stand against the collective punishment of Gaza? First, there is no guarantee of Israel policy regarding Gaza and simply assuming that Israel will never allow these students to leave the Strip is tantamount to supporting Israeli oppression in the first place. (more…)