BLOG: Palestine's Women Struggle On
More than 90% of the Sigma catalogue is marked in red for Palestinians. This means that Israel prohibits Palestinian university science professors, such as those at Birzeit University near Ramallah, from ordering most of the chemicals and acids they need for scientific research. Instead of being able to focus on research, Palestinian academics have to think about logistics.
Similar challenges face their colleagues throughout the Palestinian territories. There is the temptation to work for an international NGO that would likely pay double of university salaries, the closure of roads to campus, the refusal of some western academic journals to publish their research, the risk of being denied re-entry on return from international conferences, prohibition on importing some technological equipment.
Palestinian universities are also low on gender equality: at Birzeit only 20% of the faculty are female. The dearth in female teaching staff has to do with the fact that no Palestinian universities offer PhDs. And although Palestinians value education highly, with some of the best literacy rates in the developing world (91.7% in 2009 according to the Palestinian Centre Bureau of Statistics), many families will not send their daughters abroad for graduate school. They don't want their girls living on their own, either abroad or at home, where they could find themselves under fire from the Israeli army or settlers.
The concern is real. Children from the Jalazoun refugee camp near Birzeit attend a UN school that is located alongside a settlement guarded by an Israeli armed watchtower, and settlers who carry guns in their pockets even in the grocery market. Four children from this UN school were recently shot dead on the grounds that they were throwing stones at the settlement. Settlers who kill Palestinians with their weapons do so with impunity. In this climate of insecurity, families want to protect their daughters all the more.
Even so, in universities such as Birzeit, female professors are making remarkable contributions to Palestinian intellectual life. Professor Rita Giacaman, who received her PhD in pharmacy from the University of California at San Francisco, founded the Institute of Community & Public Health at Birzeit in 1978. Rita wakes up in the early hours each day to work on research publications until dawn, then goes to teach her classes and administer the institute (currently directed by another female faculty member, Rana Khatib).
In another corner of the Birzeit campus is Vera Tamari who directs the Ethnographic and Art Museum of Birzeit, which includes an online virtual gallery. The museum is a work in progress and has in the virtual gallery's permanent collection Palestinian amulets that were hidden for 50 years in a local YMCA by a Palestinian collector who fled his home during the 1948 nakba (catastrophe). Today Palestinian school children come to the museum for an introduction to their cultural heritage, as well as to see the modern Palestinian art on display.
The heart of Birzeit University is the media centre run by Nibal Thawabteh, who was awarded an International Women of Courage award in 2008. The centre produces TV and radio programmes, trains students and mid-career professionals, has journalists on the ground in Gaza, runs the first children's audio library in Palestine and publishes a newspaper.
Naela Khalil, a prominent journalist at the Palestinian Al Ayyam newspaper, works at the media centre. She recently won an award for investigative reporting on political arrests by Fatah and Hamas which prompted Amnesty International to investigate Palestinian prisons. Palestinian broadcast news employs more females than print journalism because women are discouraged from working in the field and staying late in the newsroom to write their stories. If Naela works until 10pm, her male colleagues ask “don't you have anything to cook at home?” Several times Naela has entered the newsroom only to hear her male counterparts hush each other saying: “Quiet, here comes Naela.” Naela, like a number of female Palestinian intellectuals, is neither quiet nor afraid to listen.