Israel Orders Partial Closing of Troubled West Bank University

Israeli military authorities Friday ordered the partial closing for two months of the occupied West Bank’s second-largest university after the seizure of what they called “inciteful literature” during a midnight raid a week earlier.

The shutting down of Birzeit University, about 10 miles north of Jerusalem in a village of the same name, was the first action of its kind by the national unity coalition of Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres since it took office last September.

Classes have been suspended since the raid, on March 1, and the authorities’ next move had been awaited by the Palestinians of the West Bank as a test of the government’s stated intention to take a more conciliatory line toward Arab residents of the occupied territories.

Milder, Yet Disruptive

The sanctions announced Friday are less stringent than those imposed after a similar incident last summer involving another Arab university. But they are nonetheless expected to cause a major disruption of academic life at Birzeit.

A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry, which oversees the territories captured during the Six-Day War of 1967, said Birzeit’s new campus is to be closed for two months, but that the school’s smaller old campus two miles away will be allowed to reopen.

Gabi Baramki, acting president of the university, said it hopes to reopen classes for as many of Birzeit’s 2,400 students as possible on Monday, using the old campus.

Baramki said about that 75% of Birzeit’s students--as well as all the administrative offices, computers and laboratories-- are at the new campus. “I think what they did is, in fact, to close the university without the pressure on them” of doing it openly, he said in a telephone interview.

Guerrilla Group Exhibition

The Defense Ministry spokesman said the decision was made because of materials found at Birzeit the previous weekend. He added that investigations of 52 people arrested during the raid are continuing and that “further measures are expected to be taken.”

The army raided Birzeit to stop an exhibition planned in honor of the 16th anniversary of the founding of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist guerrilla group supported by Moscow and by leftist Arab regimes and considered by the Israelis to be a terrorist organization.

Among the items they found were Palestinian nationalist posters and tape recordings, signs and books. Some of the items, which the army put on display for reporters last weekend at a military administration headquarters in nearby Ramallah, depicted Palestinians bearing arms and advocated violence against Israel.