Organising under apartheid: interview with a Palestinian student activist

Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, the violence and repression from the Israeli military have risen dramatically in the occupied West Bank. According to the UN, more than 600 Palestinians, including more than 100 children, have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank since October last year. Now, West Bank villages are being subjected to the heaviest assaults in decades.

But even in these circumstances, students at West Bank universities are organising resistance. Ghaied Hijaz is a Birzeit University activist in the Right to Education campaign, which defends the rights to education of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. She spoke to Red Flag’s Danica Rachel about the West Bank’s current situation and Palestinian university activism. The text has been edited for length and clarity.

When did the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University start, and what is it about?

The Right to Education campaign started in 1988 during the First Intifada. We document any violations, especially when it comes to education or students or academics. We provide legal assistance to students and teachers who get arrested and also after they’re released from Israeli prisons. We help them cope and get back on track with their academic performance and everything else.

We also mobilise and create a broad network of solidarity groups in the United States, Europe and Asia, basically everywhere. Before the war, we used to receive many visitors to the campus from different universities, mostly US universities. We talked to them about the situation we witnessed, the Palestinian issue and Palestinian rights.

It’s an independent group. It has a diverse collection of people from every single political and ideological background—Fatah or PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] or Hamas or anyone. We work with the student factions in different universities, no matter what their background, and we sometimes create events and activities in different universities.

Has it become more difficult to be politically active in the West Bank since 7 October?

Definitely. In the first 24 hours after October 7, the arrest campaign started in the West Bank, and within the first week, there were hundreds of detainees. It has been ten months, and there have been more than 10,000 or 11,000 arrests. We have seen cases of people being arrested for their Facebook posts, and sometimes their sentence is longer if their post got more interactions.

People are arrested every day—our friends, classmates or family. Conditions in the prisons are terrible, that we have not seen in years, and maybe we have never seen before. People who get out of prison describe it as a torture camp. They compare it to Abu Ghraib. So it’s become difficult, because you feel like you’re always targeted, and if you’re not targeted by the Israeli occupation, you’re intimidated by the Palestinian Authority. So we feel like every single word we say we’re going to pay for it, and we are watched all the time.

What organising and activism have you been able to do since the genocide started? Are you mainly focused on local issues or is Gaza solidarity also a focus?

Of course, we are focusing on Gaza. Mainly, we have been joining other organisations and grassroots initiatives in the West Bank to try to organise a state of popular, peaceful resistance. But in the West Bank, we have been met with military violence. Before, when towns were raided, they would not shoot at anyone going on the street. The increased military violence increased the fear, and that also decreased the ability to organise. Because when you are organising a peaceful protest heading to a checkpoint or something, it’s almost like a suicide mission.

In addition to that, with military checkpoints, movement became impossible between cities. And so cities were isolated and people were isolated. There was no ability to join people from different cities and organise a main, big protest or something, and that also decreased the ability to organise, but people still continued organising protests and sit-ins in the centre of the cities or at embassies or at the UN.

And also boycott campaigns. We also keep raising awareness, documenting, researching, and creating spaces where people can sit and discuss political issues. But everything that has been done, whether it was in the university or outside the university, is focused on Gaza, is focused on our efforts to stop this genocide, to resist the occupation and to just save the people.

Is it true that you ran the German ambassador to the Palestinian Authority off your campus?

He was in a museum next to the university. His visit was, he said, an effort to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and to discuss further cooperation initiatives or something.

But the students were not able to accept the presence of the ambassador of Germany, who supported the genocide from day one and spread dehumanising propaganda against Palestinians, and denied our right to exist and to resist. There is no acceptance of these colonial powers of these genocidal countries. And so students didn’t even think, and they just went to the museum and demanded that the German ambassador leave immediately. And he left; he was forced to leave.

How does student activism relate to the broader Palestinian resistance?

If we want to look at the history of the Palestinian revolution, it started with students. It started with refugee students in Egypt and in the Gulf areas, and they created the Palestinian factions, all of them, without any exception—from Fatah, to the PFLP, to Hamas. So the role of the students is to maintain this revolutionist mindset, to maintain the resistance, to maintain the ability to organise and to object to what undermines our rights.

And we have seen the student movement’s role even after that, in the First Intifada and the Second Intifada, and in recent years—how they always stood in the face of any policy that was meant to undermine the role and the meaning of the student movement.

On another level, especially after 7 October, many students have found their way to participate in physical violent resistance, joining small military groups, as in Tulkarm and Jenin, that we call Kateeba Tulkarm [Tulkarm Brigade] and Kateeba Jenin [Jenin Brigade]. They’re just students who, most probably, were not able to get to their university, and lived in a refugee camp for all of their lives and witnessed the continuous Israeli raids.

So they’re also part of the student movement, and they’re part of the Palestinian revolution, because the Palestinian resistance could not just be forced to be peaceful, because when we are met with extreme violence, we are supposed to defend ourselves in the same way. And so these active students are also part of the student movement to play a fundamental role in the Palestinian resistance and the Palestinian revolution.

Does what you do on the campuses influence the broader politics of the West Bank?

I would say so, yes, because, especially at Birzeit, it’s kind of the most open university and the university where people can actually express their opinions and develop, let’s say, their ideologies and their political identity. So everybody that goes to Birzeit goes through this healthy process of accumulating ideas, accumulating concepts to go into society and be an active political citizen. And many of them go and work with humanitarian organisations, political organisations, cultural organisations.

What impact has the global student movement had at Palestinian universities and among other activists in the West Bank?

It had such a great effect. Most of the universities in the West Bank turned to online learning for the first three, four months of the war. And still, until now, there are some universities that cannot teach on campus. So student organising, student activism decreased. Students felt like they were out of touch not being able to do anything.

When the encampments started, students in the West Bank looked, felt ashamed, because these are people outside who are doing stuff that we’re not doing. We’re just sitting home and we’re not able to do anything. So I would say that it’s revived the spirit of the students again, because after three or four months of just continuous disappointment and feeling helpless and useless, they felt again that, yes, students can do something.

The scenes of the encampments were so inspiring and they encouraged us to try again. Let’s try to organise protests again. Let’s try to have an influence again. If people in the West, in the US, and in Australia and in France, who are not physically connected to the struggle, are doing this, we can do that too. We should do that too.

And then, in Birzeit, even though we had protests and activities before, we also started a symbolic encampment in solidarity. Then, to strengthen the student movement and the student encampments, we created the Popular University for Gaza, or, as we called it, the Martyrs’ University for Gaza, where we held discussions and lectures and protests, just to strengthen the student movement, to revive the student movement and also to stand in solidarity with the students in Gaza.

Thousands of students in the West have been following what’s going on in Palestine. What’s something you think activists might not know, but should know about Palestine and the current situation?

I don’t know if these are new things to say, but I would say that the most important thing for people to remember is how crucial these days are. This war is not just like any other war. We had escalations before, the violence was escalated before, the First and the Second Intifada, the wars in Gaza. But this war is different.

The threat is not just about the death of people, it also includes the complete erasure of Palestinians. When we say genocide, we mean genocide because we see it happening with more than 40,000 people killed in Gaza, and possibly much, much more.

If the war stops right now, it doesn’t mean that everything is solved, because we still have a major crisis. In Gaza, they have nothing to live with. People would have to leave if they had no schools, no universities, no municipalities, disease spreading. And that’s the plan that [Israeli National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu were always saying: to limit or to decrease the population of Gaza. That’s genocide, that’s ethnic cleansing, and it has never been more clear.

And the same is happening in the West Bank. Residents of towns and villages are subjected to daily raids from Israeli settlers, not just the military. And so we are seeing the actual threat of ethnic cleansing—it’s very obvious and it’s very clear.

We must not fall into this discourse of just calling for a ceasefire. We have to call for justice, for freedom.