UPDATE: Birzeit University continues to lose international faculty as Israel persists in discriminatory policy

On September 23, Birzeit University students organized a sit-in on campus to express their solidarity with their international faculty as part of the university’s Right to Education Campaign. Students’ demand was simple, reasonable, and powerful: “We Want Our Teachers with Us.”

Heightened restrictions on Birzeit University’s right to hire and maintain international faculty persist into the 2019-2020 academic year. Israel has escalated what can only be understood as a policy whose ultimate goal is the elimination of any international faculty presence at Palestinian universities.

 Right to Education Campaign wrote: “The international exchange of ideas is at the heart of academic life. The right to academic freedom and its component freedom of expression—which includes the “freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers,”—are protected under international human rights standards including Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Israel is a party. International faculty at universities such as BZU not only benefit the campuses where they work, but represent the long-term development of a broader, more diverse Palestinian higher education system as well”.

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