Email: right2edu@birzeit.edu | Phone: 0097(0)2-298-2059
On Thursday 27th November Action Palestine dropped a banner from a bridge over Oxford Road, which read “ISRAEL: END OCCUPATION, ALLOW EDUCATION”. The banner was part of Action Palestine’s Right to Education Week [1], which aimed to drew attention to the denial of Palestinians’ right to education due to the illegal Israeli occupation.
Sara Mahmoud, a fourth year Physics and Theoretical Physics student, said: “The banner encapsulates the core message of Action Palestine’s Right to Education Week; unless Israel ends its occupation of Palestine, generations of Palestinian young people will be denied their fundamental human right to knowledge and self-development.”
Palestinian students face numerous obstacles; for instance, checkpoints, border closures, economic isolation, detention and harassment [2]. This obstruction to education in the West Bank and Gaza strip is not only a violation of the basic human right to education, but an orchestrated means of undermining and crippling the development of Palestinian society as a whole. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights – ratified by Israel in 1991 – underlines the fact that “Education is both a human right in itself and an indispensable means of realizing other human rights” [3].
References
1. http://www.actionpalestine.org/campaigns/r2e/
2. http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/news/article495
3. http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/0/be35e82a2a526454c1256b0d00307f17?Opendocument
Critics of Israeli policy and sympathizers with...