Getting to Class Is a Test for West Bank Students

Islam Tawil sweated in the broiling afternoon sun, waiting for permission to make his way to school.

An Israeli armored personnel carrier stood in his way, blocking him and hundreds of other students trying to get to Birzeit University, the oldest and most prestigious West Bank college. The personnel carrier had roared into a spot next to the huge chunks of cement that have made the road impassable for cars for months.

Tawil, 26, of Ramallah, was carrying a large, boxy computer that made the wait all the more tiring. But he needed it because it contained his all-but-complete senior dissertation. He was staying the night with a friend at Birzeit because he could not afford to miss the deadline for turning it in the following day.

Then, as quickly as they had arrived, the Israeli soldiers climbed into their vehicle and sped off, the heat of the engine exhaust raking across the students as they stood in a bedraggled line. In seconds, Palestinians began scrambling over the cement barrier, many of them late for class.

“Our life is very bad,” said Tawil, climbing into one of the taxis waiting in a long row. “I should have graduated two months ago.”

Since Israel moved into Ramallah and other parts of the West Bank this spring, throwing up checkpoints and roadblocks, Palestinian student life has been in turmoil. The situation was exacerbated in June, when the army reoccupied seven of eight major Palestinian cities after back-to-back suicide bombings.

The closures and checkpoints not only have made life miserable, they have fundamentally changed how hundreds of students and faculty members manage their lives. At Bethlehem University, classes have met catch-as-catch-can when curfews were lifted, extending the school year to August when it should have ended in June. But that is better than at An Najah University in Nablus, which had to shut down because of extended curfews. There will be no graduation ceremonies at any West Bank university this summer.

At Birzeit, students fed up with long hours of waiting at checkpoints have moved into any rooms they can find in the nearby Palestinian village of Abu Qash. Others have moved into the few available dormitory rooms. The alternative, they say, is to live a life in which uncertainty and frustration are the norm and danger is a real threat.

Albert Aghazarian, a spokesman for the university, said there are no official records on the number of students who have moved from their homes in Jerusalem and Ramallah to finish the school year, but he estimated it at 1,000, a fifth of the student body. “The logistics have been a nightmare,” Aghazarian said. “We’re constantly trying to improvise. You waste so much energy trying to catch up.”

A trip along the route most students normally take underscores the difficulty they have faced, particularly in the last month of curfews and road closures.

There are two checkpoints in Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem, where traffic can easily back up for hours as Israeli troops search almost every car and truck for weapons or explosives that might be used in an attack. After those checkpoints, students must drive or take a taxi to a point where the road is barricaded and impassable by car. Then they take a taxi on the other side.

The good news is that the school year, extended more than a month because of the difficulties of getting to class, ends Aug. 15. The hope is that when sessions resume in October, the “situation on the ground,” as circumstances here are often referred to, will have changed.

Ahmed Humain, a third-year mechanical engineering student from Ramallah, has rented a room in Abu Qash until the end of the school year. The final straw was a missed test.

“One day I had an exam at 11 in the morning,” he said. “So I left at 8. But they [Israelis] stopped me for three hours. Then they took me to jail. They let me go, but by then I had missed the exam.”

Even women--who ordinarily would commute rather than leave the family home--have relocated. Hiba Subluban, 21, took a room with four other female students, paying $280 for the month so she doesn’t have to endure the checkpoints and searches.

“We just don’t know when they are going to open or close the checkpoints,” she said, talking with friends in the school science building. “I can’t believe that in the last month of my senior year, I had to move so that I could go to school.”

Rafeef Salamen, also a senior, used to drive each day from Jerusalem. For a while, she tried to take back roads to avoid the checkpoints, but that presented other problems. “It’s dangerous because of the settlers,” she said, referring to Israelis living in the West Bank who have become increasingly threatening to Palestinians.

Instructors, too, have problems getting to school. Nashat Aqtash, a journalism professor, shares an apartment with five other men and makes the arduous 20-mile journey to his family in the village of Beita no more than twice a month. Since June, Palestinians have not been allowed to use the paved roads connecting the main population centers in the West Bank.

Aqtash described the restrictions as “humiliating” and said it now takes him four hours to reach his village. In better times, it was half an hour.

He said that a week earlier, he was stopped at an army checkpoint while returning from his village. He said he and others were kept standing in the sun for three hours before being released.

The time was getting short. Only two hours remained before the 6 p.m. curfew--just barely enough time to get through the lines. Those who hadn’t found places to live nearby began streaming out of the campus gates to begin, once again, their own battle with checkpoints.