Palestinian Universities Under Occupation, February-May 1988

As the Palestinian uprising became "institutionalized" in the spring of 1988, Palestinian education, officially banned by the military authorities in the West Bank, found new channels through neighborhood-organized classes for primary and secondary students: classes held in private homes. This development mirrored the course of the five-month-old uprising, which moved beyond confrontations between the army and demonstrators, to challenging the twenty-year-old structures of military power by the development of alternative structures by neighborhood and popular committees. University education, however, remained problematic, although faculty and administrators began to formulate new ideas to match the "new life" of the uprising. 

Penny Johnson, staff, Public Relations Office, Birzeit University.