Birzeit Wins Again: Students of the West Bank Unite | Ramzy Baroud

[Tace]

Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust

May 6, 2015

In November 1993, I was on a mission.

At the age of 21, I wanted to change the world, starting with Birzeit University, the second-largest Palestinian university in the West Bank, situated near Ramallah, in the heart of the occupied territories.

Back then I had made a name for myself with my nationalist poetry and my first poetry collection was published a year earlier in Gaza. It was called The Alphabets of Decision. Each assortment of verses started with a letter in the Arabic alphabet, going in order. “It was time for the poor and peasants of Palestine to articulate their political agenda, rejecting the entire culture of political defeat,” I wrote, or something to that effect, in the introduction.

Birzeit was my platform and my audience quickly multiplied. My last performance was in front of a crowd of thousands, who cheered, chanted and, once I concluded my call for rebellion against Oslo’s “Gaza-Jericho First” agreement and the assured the defeat it heralded, we marched outside the campus, only to be greeted with Israeli army bullets and tear gas.

That was anything but a fatalistic act compelled by the fervor of youth. At the time, local, Israeli and international media were eagerly awaiting the student council election results in Birzeit. A leading hub for Palestinian nationalism -- to be compared to Najah University of Nablus -- Birzeit was the first litmus test for late PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s Oslo “peace process.” The idea was this: if the Fatah (al-Shabiba) supporters won the elections, it would be understood as a symbolic popular mandate that the Palestinian people were in favor of what it turned out to be political folly and a strategic calamity that has since then institutionalized the Israeli occupation and Palestinian division.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/birzeit-wins-again-students-of-the-west-bank-unite-ramzy-baroud

[oberliner]

1. At least it's clear to all now where he stands on the Hamas/Fatah divide

Good that he is being so upfront about that here.