Education is as important to Palestinians as the air we breathe. It has been part of our collective being and memory since the very day we were evicted and ethnically cleansed out of Palestine. Education and knowledge are the tools we can use to reaffirm our identity when everything else is stolen from you by force. When you are stateless, with no passport to give you the basic rights of any citizen on this planet, your university degree becomes that passport and it becomes your key to a better future under occupation. Thats the knowledge that most of us have been raised with. The more you know, the more you can serve your cause and your country. And so despite our continuous displacements, the long stories of seeking refuge from one tent to the other, from one neighboring country to the other, Israeli attacks, Israeli destruction, high rates of unemployment, Palestinians have been rated since the Naqba (ie the loss of Palestine to the Zionist entity) among the highest educated Arabs. Education as an empowerment tool has become part of our collective memory and legacy that we pass on from one generation to the other. It is our way of resistance, of being, of affirming, of insisting, of persisting, of existing. Therefore when Israel bombs schools, Palestinian parents will buy their children their new school uniforms, put their books in their schoolbags, and send them to school, in the form of a tent that was put in the their school yard, in front of their demolished school, and expect them to get high grades. [These pictures are of Palestinian schoolchildren attend a class in a tent at the yard of their school which was destroyed during Israels three-week military offensive in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, on December 30, 2009.] This same scenario took place in 2012 and will now take place in 2014.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 09:38:11 +0000
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