Palestinian students are fighting for their right to education

This article Palestinian students are fighting for their right to education was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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The scenic campus of Birzeit University sits on a hill near Ramallah, 12 miles northwest of Jerusalem, in the occupied West Bank. Vast blue sky is visible from every road and sidewalk. Palestinian flags wave in the breeze.

The familiar campus bustle of classes, friends and events was violently interrupted on Jan. 6, 2026, when Israeli forces raided the university in broad daylight, firing live rounds and employing sound grenades and tear gas to disperse crowds of students. Forty-one people were injured, with three students sustaining gunshot wounds and three hit by shrapnel, according to Al Jazeera. Eight thousand students were trapped on campus during the military assault.

The raid coincided with the student union’s protest in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners and a screening of “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” a film about a six-year-old girl murdered by the Israeli military during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The Israeli occupation forces wrote in a statement that the raid was targeting “a gathering in support of terrorism.”

This was the 26th raid on Birzeit University’s campus since 2002 and the sixth since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023. The other 25 universities in Palestine also experience raids, often in higher volumes, like Al-Quds University outside of Jerusalem. 

Attacking Birzeit’s campus, especially while class is in session, is part of a systematic policy “to intimidate students and undermine their right to education, with the aim of suppressing Palestinian consciousness and targeting national institutions,” said a statement from the university following the raid, authored by the Right2Education campaign. 

The right to education

Since its transition from a college to a university in 1975, Birzeit University has been forcibly shut down by Israeli military order 15 times. The longest period was 51 months, starting in January 1988, shortly after the start of the Palestinian uprising known as the first intifada. In response to these violations and forced hiatus, Birzeit student volunteers birthed the Right2Education campaign. They provide legal aid to students and faculty facing arrest and imprisonment by the Israeli occupation forces and have begun to develop an international network of solidarity around the human right of education for Palestinians.

The campaign has expanded beyond Birzeit University, with affiliated chapters at Hebron University in Hebron, Al-Quds University in Abu Dis and An-Najah National University in Nablus. 

The need for student legal representation has only grown more pressing. When Israeli occupation forces stormed the campus on Jan. 6, they arrested several students, part of a pattern of increased arrests since October 2023, with an estimated 9,000 Palestinians being held indefinitely in Israeli prisons. Sundos Hammad, coordinator of the Right2Education campaign at Birzeit University, said that student arrests have doubled since the genocide began and more than 150 students are currently imprisoned.

The campaign is also steadfast in its fight against scholasticide, which it defines as “deliberate destruction of education as a means to deny Palestinians the ability to rebuild their future and pursue justice and liberation through knowledge.” Scholasticide is part of the larger Israeli settler-colonial project that seeks to control, disrupt and ultimately erase every aspect of Palestinian life. 

Aya Dola, who studies English literature at Birzeit, joined the campaign because she wants people to understand “the difficulties that we suffer daily just to get a very basic right to education. Even though it’s a fundamental human right, it becomes a privilege here in Palestine.”

One of those difficulties is simply getting to school. Palestinians are unable to travel between Gaza and the West Bank, and checkpoints between local cities make travel tedious. “The number of the checkpoints and roadblocks [in the West Bank] after the genocidal war in Gaza have increased from 600 before to over 1,000 today,” Hammad said. 

In front of the Birzeit University campus stands the Atara military checkpoint. “If the occupation decides to close the gates, it deprives more than 10,000 students from going to their university,” said Dola. “They control the process of our education.” She said the closures take a toll on her mental health.

The barriers mean that many students are limited to the school or university nearest to their home. For Nael Bateer, who is from Tulkarem, a town northwest of Nablus, it previously took an hour and a half to reach Birzeit. Now, checkpoints have lengthened the journey to six hours, making it unlikely for other students from his town to attend the university. 

Bateer, a second-year accounting student and spokesperson for the campaign, explained that fragmentation — the “physical and academic isolation of educational institutions” — is a calculated tactic of movement restriction by the occupation to separate Palestinians who share the same national identity and history. 

“This isolation limits academic exchange. It prevents the unification of the educational system and forces each region to operate as a separate entity,” Bateer said. 

The Right2Education campaign documents Israel’s escalating attacks on education and urges global actors to “demand lifting of movement restrictions and the prevention of students from Gaza from reaching West Bank universities,” Bateer said. Such “divide and conquer” tactics, also a pernicious feature of the Israeli occupation for non-students, seek to squash Palestinian autonomy and collective power.

“We need more than solidarity”

The goal of Israeli scholasticide, and genocide generally, is erasure — to convince the world that Palestinians do not exist. The Right2Education campaign is involved in several efforts to confront scholasticide through transnational academic solidarity.

The campaign urges international academic institutions to cut ties with Israeli universities, partner with Palestinian academic institutions, and divest from weapons manufacturing and war profiteers, along with “any companies that invest in the occupation and apartheid that we live under,” Hammad said. 

Internationally, the demand for divestment from funding the occupation became louder after the genocidal assault on Gaza began in October 2023. Student movements globally and at over 150 universities in the U.S. created solidarity encampments for Gaza — including one at Birzeit University — and faced arrests, suspensions, expulsions and evictions.  

The academic freedom of students in the U.S. is also challenged when support for Israeli apartheid is on the line. Columbia University students Leqaa Kordia and Mahmoud Khalil, who are Palestinian, are among numerous student leaders targeted by the Trump administration for their anti-Zionist organizing. 

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University administrations around the world have engaged in divestment conversations, though many conceded only to provide investment oversight committees. Dozens of student governments have voted in favor of divestment and are still pressuring their institutions to take meaningful financial action. But there have been a few successes: In the U.S., the University of San Francisco voted in May 2025 to sell its investments in apartheid profiteers and enablers after 18 months of pressure from students. In New York, Union Theological Seminary became one of the first institutions in 2024 to completely divest from Israeli companies, and the CUNY Union representing faculty and graduate students followed suit. 

One particular target of divestment campaigns has been Palantir, a U.S. surveillance tech corporation, which holds several university research partnerships and investors, and has active contracts with the Israeli occupation forces, ICE and the U.S. Department of Defense, furthering state violence and genocide from the U.S. to Palestine.

In a 2025 report, U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese outlined “reasonable grounds” that Palantir allegedly laid the technological foundation for Israeli military-developed surveillance systems like Lavender and Hasbora (the Gospel in English) that are used in Gaza. These systems use artificial intelligence to generate automated airstrike and assassination targets in Gaza, according to +972. 

The American Friends Service Committee is championing the Purge Palantir campaign, mapping institutional stakeholders across sectors like education and healthcare. They pressure investors and institutions to end their relationships with the surveillance tech company. Even before October 2023, students have been resisting academic relationships with Palantir. In 2019, over 1,000 students across 17 U.S. colleges pledged not to work at Palantir due to their contracts with ICE.

After months of pressure from the student body and other actors, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, research program cut ties last year with Elbit Systems. Amid ongoing protests, students around the world and the Right2Education campaign are hopeful that other institutions like Cambridge University will follow suit and divest from war profiteers for good. 

Cutting ties to the military-academic complex 

In addition to boycotting and divesting from weapons manufacturers, the Right2Education campaign calls for international academia to sever relationships with Israeli universities — which have deep ties to the arms industry. 

Israeli weapons manufacturers Rafael, Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries were developed from military research infrastructure laid at multiple Israeli universities such as Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science, founded as far back as 1912. 

Israeli faculty and students of these institutions created weapons used against Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” referring to the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral lands to establish the state of Israel. 

After 1948, Israeli universities stretched their campuses over ethnically cleansed villages and even used confiscated books from Palestinian homes to grow their libraries, anthropologist Maya Wind explains in her book “Towers of Ivory and Steel.”

Today, programs like Hebrew University’s “Havatzalot” unite academic study and military intelligence training. Many of its graduates have gone on to serve in Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s surveillance intelligence unit, similar to the National Security Agency in the U.S. The Israeli Defense Ministry also sponsors Hebrew University’s “Talpiot” partnership program — an even more selective program that is often a launchpad into the Israeli military elite. 

In the U.S., high-ranking universities like Columbia, Stanford and Princeton have active study abroad programs and other relationships with Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and others in occupied Palestinian territory. The University of Michigan remains in partnership with Technion and Weizmann, whose academics helped facilitate the Nakba. 

At least eight U.S. universities have partnered with Ariel University, established in an illegal West Bank settlement of the same name. Ariel has given academic credits to student volunteers involved in Hashomer Yosh, a formerly U.S.-sanctioned youth organization known for settler violence against Palestinians. 

Last year, Harvard ended research ties with Birzeit University and the 12 universities in Gaza and instead expanded partnerships with Israeli universities. 

But others, like MIT, are taking a different path.

Academic partnerships

International collaboration with Birzeit and other Palestinian universities — a key tool to combat erasure — is growing. Recently, Right2Education conducted a tour in the U.K. that focused on expanding collaboration. The tour was fruitful in creating several paths to ongoing institutional cooperation, connecting Birzeit University and U.K. academics, faculty and students. This year, Birzeit University piloted the Palestinian Student Research Project, modeled after similar programs at MIT and funded by a grant from them. 

Birzeit University currently holds several other partnerships with international academic institutions, including in the Netherlands, Lebanon and Jordan. Birzeit is also discussing research and academic collaboration opportunities with Japanese universities.

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In Gaza, education is a daily act of quiet resistance

These partnerships are especially vital in Gaza. All of the universities in Gaza have been destroyed partially or completely. Over 193 professors and more than 18,000 students have been killed in Gaza since the genocide began. 

“The world is dealing with the universities in Gaza as if they no longer exist. But these universities have resumed their online teaching since last June 2024,” Hammad said. “Academic collaboration with Gazan universities affirms their right to exist and their right to education.” 

Birzeit University’s “Rebuilding Hope” campaign supports online instruction in Gaza in partnership with West Bank universities, provides resources to Gazan universities and seeks to rebuild educational infrastructure. 

Education as an act of anti-colonial resistance

Since its creation in 1948, the state of Israel has used education as a tool for the Zionist settler-colonial project, enforcing state control over Palestinian educational institutions. Although the Palestinian Ministry of Education oversees education in Palestinian territories, curriculums are censored by the Israeli government, removing references to Palestinian history, heritage and culture. This censorship serves to normalize Israeli narratives. 

Hammad explained that knowledge erasure is a type of “invisible violation,” different from the physical restriction of movement or other tactics. 

“The occupation wants us to say that ‘we don’t have a past, we don’t have history,’ because our past and history create our identity, and they want to erase our identity,” said Dola, the English literature student at Birzeit. “It is really difficult to experience [this] as a student, suffering and enduring all these things,” she continued. 

Regardless of occupation and genocide, Palestinians have always made space for their history, stories and reproduction of knowledge. “We believe in our education as a form of resistance. It’s a part of our lives to be educated,” Hammad said.

During the university closures of the first intifada, popular teaching projects emerged, fusing political and cultural education. Educator Yamila Hussein describes these efforts as a fight to “‘Palestinianize’ the curriculum with a vision of national identity and the national struggle.” Leadership during the first intifada distributed communiques seeking to bring a more revolutionary consciousness into the education sector and catalyze the mass mobilization of students and teachers to defy Israeli repression of education. “If knowledge were not resistance, the occupation would not be working against it,” Bateer said. 

The Right2Education campaign maintains emergency support for universities in Gaza and advocates to sustain education in the West Bank, especially for rural elementary schools like Al-Tahadi, which face ongoing settler attacks. The campaign also facilitates ongoing opportunities for students to tell their stories at international gatherings, despite the risks of arrest and repression.

“Ignorance is a potent ally of the settler-colonialism that we live under. It is a potent ally of the status quo that has been enforced on us,” Hammad said. “Education can change that status quo; it leads to the Indigenous empowerment of our people and our self-determination, which leads to our liberation.” 

This article Palestinian students are fighting for their right to education was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/04/palestinian-students-birzeit-fighting-for-right-to-education/