Interview with Sundos Hammad, coordinator of the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University
Sundos Hammad is the coordinator of the Right to Education Campaign — a grassroots Palestinian movement founded in 1988 to document, research, and raise awareness about the oppression faced by Palestinian students, teachers, and academic institutions under Israeli military occupation. The campaign works to empower students to claim their human right to education, to break the isolation of Palestinian educational institutions, and to demand an end to the occupation.
Following her participation in Campus Voices for Palestine: Solidarity against Scholasticide, a UCU sponsored speaking tour, Fobzu invited Hammad for an interview to discuss the ongoing scholasticide in Palestine.
Firstly, could you tell us about the Right to Education Campaign? Where and why was it launched?
The Right to Education Campaign is a grassroots, academic, and student-led movement that was founded at Birzeit University in 1988 with the provision of legal assistance to students and teachers who were arrested and targeted for practicing their right to education. Since then, the Campaign has sought to expose the systematic obstruction of Palestinian higher education in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. At that time, universities, kindergartens, and daycare centres were shut down by military orders. This included Birzeit University, which was closed 15 times between its founding in 1972 and 1988 when it was shut for a total of 51 consecutive months.
The campaign emerged as part of the university’s human rights and advocacy efforts. It was important to establish this body within the university to defend the right to education, break the isolation imposed on Palestinian higher education institutions by the occupation, and document the violations faced by students, academics, and university staff, especially at Birzeit University.
A key part of the campaign’s work has been to build an international network of supporters, including human rights activists, students, academics, and organisations, to advocate for Palestinian students’ rights — especially in the higher education sector. The aim is to amplify the voice of the Palestinian student and empower them to defend their right to education.
In Palestine, education is viewed as a tool of resistance against Israeli colonialism, playing a crucial role in shaping awareness of our national identity and collective rights, particularly the right to freedom and life.
Students at Birzeit University have returned to campus, but their education has been frequently interrupted, particularly over the past year. Could you discuss the types of restrictions and violations affecting students and academics, especially at Birzeit, and how these are impacting the university and its students?
Education in Palestine is continuously and systematically targeted by Israeli forces, and Birzeit University, like other Palestinian universities, has faced its share of violations. Since the beginning of the war on Gaza, restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, including university students and academics, have severely intensified. Settler violence on the roads between Palestinian cities has also increased, leading to the decision to suspend in-person classes and shift to online education for five months during the first semester of last year.
Although this decision was difficult, we believed it would offer more safety to students, allowing them to stay at home and avoid the risks of travel. However, by the second semester, we returned to in-person classes, as face-to-face education not only improves the quality and methods of teaching but also provides a public space for Palestinian students and academics to show solidarity with our people in Gaza through events and demonstrations, which we lost access to during the online semester. This semester, we are following a hybrid model: four days of in-person classes and one day online on Saturdays, which gives students more time to mobilise and advocate for their causes. At the same time, the systematic targeting of students has significantly increased, especially with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
This is part of a broader campaign of knowledge extermination, affecting not only the educational infrastructure but also our ability as Palestinians to produce knowledge and shape our identity. Military checkpoints have become sites of repression, restricting movement, assaulting students physically and verbally, and leading to arrests. These checkpoints play a significant role in disrupting the lives of students, academics, and staff at Birzeit University. Today, more than 140 Birzeit University students are detained in Israeli prisons, including 9 female students, 4 academics, and administrative staff members. The university has been raided four times since September 2023 including three times since October 2023, and the head of the student council was arrested multiple times.
Unfortunately, due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, there were no student elections this year, which has affected the democratic environment that Birzeit University typically offers its students by electing their representatives. Despite these challenges, the hybrid approach this semester has provided students with more space to organise, advocate for their issues, and support one another on the ground.
How are students and academics at Birzeit University responding to the scholasticide unfolding in Gaza, particularly in light of the relentless attacks on academic institutions, students, and staff there? What forms of solidarity and support are being organised during this time?
After the first five months of the genocide, when we were all forced to stay at home due to the switch to online education, the student movements at Birzeit University, along with the staff union and administration, began organising to support our people in Gaza. The main goal was to ensure we played our part in standing with our people through organising events, raising awareness and knowledge production with local and international groups.
Birzeit students joined the global student movement, creating a symbolic encampment where we held daily events and seminars to shed light on what has been happening in Gaza and to discuss the importance of our collective effort to defy attempts to sustain a policy of scholasticide in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Right to Education Campaign has collaborated with other Palestinian universities to issue a unified call for justice and the freedom of the Palestinian people. This statement, signed by 15 universities across Gaza and the West BankWe also organised over 50 webinars in the past year with various international human rights organisations and universities to stop the scholasticide in Gaza and Palestine.
You have recently been on a UCU sponsored speaking tour . Could you tell us more about the tour and the message you were sending?
The tour was titled Campus Voices for Palestine: Solidarity Against Scholasticide. It was crucial during this tour to give space for the Right to Education Campaign and the Emergency Committee for Universities in Gaza to speak about scholasticide in Palestine, particularly in Gaza. We discussed the various forms of assault on Palestinian education and how it has evolved over time. The discussion is no longer about academic freedom but about the total annihilation of the education system. It is an attack on our ability as Palestinians to preserve and express our identity, culture, and unity through higher education and knowledge sharing and production.
The goal of the tour was to reaffirm the resilience of Gaza’s universities despite the destruction and to highlight the need for the international community to end its complicity in genocide. This includes cutting ties with companies profiting from the occupation and its crimes against humanity.
We also encouraged the academic community to build relations with Gaza’s universities, particularly through the Emergency Committee. Since targeting the 12 universities in Gaza, the three main non-profit universities that are represented through the emergency committee have been workign to handle 100% of the higher education needs in Gaza. This is a significant burden, and they need continuous support.
The focus for the international academic community should be on how to support Gaza’s universities and the Palestinian education system, enhancing their resilience. We are also planning activities across Birzeit and other international institutions for the International Week of Action with Palestine from November 23 to 29, highlighting our ongoing resistance against the systematic attacks on education in Palestine.
It is vital that the academic international community continues to stand in solidarity with us, amplifying Palestinian voices and supporting the rebuilding of our educational institutions. We cannot afford to let them erase our identity or prevent us from contributing to our society and our future.
