Honestly, I’m having trouble coming up with the words to explain this one. From the NYTimes:
GAZA — The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.
Bright, eager to learn, advancement-motivated Palestinians are now being denied grant money, available through the Fulbright program, because Israel will not allow the students to leave Gaza to attend college. Israel’s own responses to the issue are conflicting.
Israel’s policy appears to be in flux. At the parliamentary hearing on Wednesday, a Defense Ministry official recalled that the cabinet had declared Gaza "hostile territory" and decided that the safety of Israeli soldiers and civilians at or near the border should be risked only to facilitate the movement out of Gaza for humanitarian concerns, like medical treatment. Higher education, he said, was not a humanitarian concern.
But when a query about the canceled Fulbrights was made to the prime minister’s office on Thursday, senior officials expressed surprise. They said they did, in fact, consider study abroad to be a humanitarian necessity and that when cases were appealed to them, they would facilitate them.
They suggested that American officials never brought the Fulbright cases to their attention. The State Department and American officials in Israel refused to discuss the matter. But the failure to persuade the Israelis may have stemmed from longstanding tensions between the consulate in Jerusalem, which handles Palestinian affairs, and the embassy in Tel Aviv, which manages relations with the Israeli government.
Seven students in Gaza had already been granted Fulbright approval. Notified by mail that they were losing their Fulbright opportunity, they were urged to reapply next year. The article goes on to briefly explain the travel restrictions, and includes a quote from one of the Fulbright recipients.
Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.
"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."
Just like with any other rational argument, an Israeli lawmaker chimed in with his thoughtful words.
"We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."
If we are to take Steinitz’s comments on face value, the issue is quite simple, really. Now it is up to these seven students to overthrow Hamas. That’s really all they need to do. If these seven intelligent and eager to learn students would simply overthrow the ruling government, which I should mention was elected when the US demanded that the Palestinians hold national elections, they would be allowed to go to college and receive their Fulbright grants.
Diplomatic snafus are really nothing new in the world, and this is just one of many that deserves significant attention. Israel is preventing these seven students, specifically, from leaving Gaza to attend college. Assuming that the grant money would go to waste, the State Department is denying these seven students their Fulbright grants, because Israel will not allow them to leave. They were told to stay in Gaza if they wanted to receive their Fulbright grants, and that decision to stay has now rendered them unable to receive the great honor they stuck around to have bestowed on them.
By denying the students their Fulbright grants, the US has, perhaps unintentionally, furthered Israel’s decision of not letting them leave. What good would it do to rally the Israeli government to allow them to leave when the US has yanked their ticket out from under them? The Israel-Palestine conflict is an issue that is far too complex to be solved by seven well-meaning students, and admittedly it may never be resolved in my own lifetime, but this incident does absolutely nothing to help advance any goodwill between the two countries.
Denying these students the Fulbright grants they earned is likely to further disenfranchise the youths. Though the situation could be viewed from any number of perspectives, it would be incredulous to blame this specific incident on Hamas alone. Hamas is unlikely to look at the issue of seven students being denied passage and Fulbright grants and decide that they need to give up their role of elected government. It is equally as unlikely that these seven students will look at the decision by Israel to deny them passage, and the subsequent decision by the US to deny them Fulbright grants, and blame Hamas for their troubles. In this specific incident (I cannot stress that enough, I am only talking about this single issue of seven students losing their Fulbright grants), it is much more likely that these decisions will only help to spur anger toward both Israel and the US.
I wanted to bring this to everyone’s decision because I doubt I will be seeing any coverage by the traditional media, and it is truly disappointing that the State Department made this decision.