   
A university for the liberation of Palestine
Ilan Gur- Ze'ev, Haaretz, 22 December 2009
One of the recommendations coming out of research presented at a conference in Nazareth on higher education in Israeli Arab society was the establishment of an Israeli Arab university. (A recent article in Haaretz noted that Israeli Arab university students were going to Jordan to study.) The recommendation is based in part on the fact that more and more young Israeli Arabs are studying at Jordanian universities because they are not accepted at Israeli institutions of higher learning.
The Haaretz article did not discuss the real background behind the demand. The establishment of a separate university for Arabs is a major component of the historic enterprise designed to return Palestine to the Palestinians and begin the decolonization of the area.
The subject is important and complex and should be examined honestly and courageously. For that purpose, we should compare the Israeli-Palestinian case with the way other nation-states deal with minority demands to establish an exclusive university. Pragmatically speaking, one could ask if, in light of the decades of experience in various places around the world, separate universities for minorities aid their integration into society and placement in lucrative employment, thereby increasing their prospects for social mobility, or just the opposite.
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Three possible models should be considered. In some societies there is only a small amount of tension between the minority and majority. In some societies a serious crisis prevails between the minority and majority. And finally, there are societies characterized by a struggle between the minority and majority.
According to these criteria, countries that can be compared to Israel are not the Netherlands or even the United States, but rather countries like Sudan, Sri Lanka, Georgia and Macedonia. In these countries, society is divided along national lines and there is a continuous, extreme and multidimensional struggle between the minority and majority. In these countries, the minority asserts its demand for establishing universities in the context of a national liberation movement and not an effort to achieve equal civil rights.
Thus, the Palestinian leadership in Israel is taking advantage of liberal discourse and the multicultural agenda in the postcolonial context to fortify the Palestinian liberation effort with a highly powerful weapon: educational autonomy that at its core would have an Israeli university exclusively for Palestinians. The real goal of the effort to establish an Arab university is not to reduce the number of Israeli Arab students going to Jordan to study, but to increase the frustration and tension. Ostensibly it's a case of focusing on young Palestinians in academia. The main goal, however, is not to achieve high research standards or intellectual enhancement, but to stoke political activism designed to liberate Palestine from its Zionist captivity.
Israeli Arab political activists in the Knesset and academia are not put off by data that point to low academic standards at minority universities elsewhere around the world, which increases the chances that such a school would be a diploma-mill granting degrees that are worthless on the job market. The transformation of such a university into a focus of escalating political, social and cultural tensions in Israel does not put these activists off either.
Perhaps on the contrary, the possibility of increased tension and the intensification of the struggle by concentrating on a Palestinian university in Israel encourages them to act with greater energy. Those of us, especially Israeli Arabs, who have an interest in the democratization of life here and in contributing to increasing the symmetry and cross-pollination between Jews and Arabs, must join forces to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian university in this country.
The writer is a professor of educational philosophy at the University of Haifa.
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