U.S. Withdraws Fulbright Grants to Gaza

May 30, 2008
By ETHAN BRONNER

GAZA — The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them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.

Israel has isolated this coastal strip, which is run by the militant group Hamas. Given that policy, the United States Consulate in Jerusalem said the grant money had been “redirected” to students elsewhere out of concern that it would go to waste if the Palestinian students were forced to remain in Gaza.

A letter was sent by e-mail to the students on Thursday telling them of the cancellation. Abdulrahman Abdullah, 30, who had been hoping to study for an M.B.A. at one of several American universities on his Fulbright, was in shock when he read it.

“If we are talking about peace and mutual understanding, it means investing in people who will later contribute to Palestinian society,” he said. “I am against Hamas. Their acts and policies are wrong. Israel talks about a Palestinian state. But who will build that state if we can get no training?”

Some Israeli lawmakers, who held a hearing on the issue of student movement out of Gaza on Wednesday, expressed anger that their government was failing to promote educational and civil development in a future Palestine given the hundreds of students who had been offered grants by the United States and other Western governments.

“This could be interpreted as collective punishment,” complained Rabbi Michael Melchior, chairman of the Parliament’s education committee, during the hearing. “This policy is not in keeping with international standards or with the moral standards of Jews, who have been subjected to the deprivation of higher education in the past. Even in war, there are rules.” Rabbi Melchior is from the Meimad Party, allied with Labor.

The committee asked the government and military to reconsider the policy and get back to it within two weeks. But even if the policy is changed, the seven Fulbright grantees in Gaza are out of luck for this year. Their letters urged them to reapply next year.

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.

The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas’s ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

Since Hamas, a radical Islamist group that opposes Israel’s existence, carried out what amounted to a coup d’état in Gaza against the more secular Fatah party a year ago, hundreds of rockets and mortar shells have been launched from here at Israeli civilians, truck and car bombs have gone off and numerous attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers have taken place.

While Hamas says the attacks are in response to Israeli military incursions into Gaza, it also says it will never recognize Israel.

“We are using the rockets to shake the conscience of the world about Israeli aggression,” argued Ahmed Yusef, political adviser to the Hamas foreign minister in an interview in his office here. “All our rockets are a reaction to Israeli aggression.”

The Israeli closing of Gaza has added markedly to the difficulty of daily life here, with long lines for cooking gas and a sense across the population of being under siege. Israel does send in about 70 truckloads per day of wheat, dairy products and medical equipment as well as some fuel, and it permits some medical cases out.

But Israel’s stated goal is to support moderates among the Palestinians so that Hamas will lose power, and even some security-conscious Israeli hard-liners say that the policy of barring students with grants abroad is counterproductive.

“We correctly complain that the Palestinian Authority is not building civil society, but when we don’t help build civil society this plays into the hands of Hamas,” said Natan Sharansky, a former government official. “The Fulbright is administered independently, and people are chosen for it due to their talents.”

The State Department Web site describes the Fulbright, the American government’s flagship program in international educational exchange, as “an integral part of U.S. foreign relations.” It adds, “the Fulbright Program creates a context to provide a better understanding of U.S. views and values, promotes more effective binational cooperation and nurtures open-minded, thoughtful leaders, both in the U.S. and abroad, who can work together to address common concerns.”

Sari Bashi, who directs Gisha, an Israeli organization devoted to monitoring and increasing the free movement of Palestinians, said, “The fact that the U.S. cannot even get taxpayer-funded Fulbright students out of Gaza demonstrates the injustice and short-sightedness of a closure policy that arbitrarily traps 1.5 million people, including hundreds of Palestinian students accepted to universities abroad.” She said that their education was good not just for Palestinian society, but for Israel as well.

Some Israelis disagree strongly.

“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.”

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.”

She, like her six colleagues, was in disbelief. Mr. Abdullah, who called the consulate in Jerusalem for further explanation after receiving his letter, said to the official on the other end, “I still cannot believe that the American administration is not able to convince the Israelis to let seven Palestinians out of Gaza.”

Taghreed el-Khodary contributed reporting.

Yoga, Sushi, & PhD Students

I took a friend to a yoga class Friday night at the WUK, which is a local artists' collective with various studios, cultural exhibits, and open courses. I had been to the yoga course on Tuesday nights before, but had never gone on a Friday. Interestingly, even though the room for the Friday session is bigger and brighter than the room used on Tuesdays, there were still noticeably fewer people there on Friday, probably because most people want to get an early start on the weekend.

I chatted with the teacher for a few minutes while we were waiting for the class to begin. I learned that he is working on his doctoral dissertation in philosophy, but when I asked him what school he was attending, he proceeded to tell me that he actually wasn't attending any school at the moment. He was just writing the dissertation and then would submit it to one of the Viennese universities for approval. I looked at him quizzically. "Don't you need to be enrolled in a doctoral program in order to get a doctoral degree?" I asked him. "No," he replied, "the dissertation is most of the work. Once it's written, you just need to find a professor to approve it and then the school will grant you the degree." I'm far from an expert on the Austrian university system, but I do know several PhD candidates here and they are all enrolled at their universities. I hope he knows what he's doing!

After yoga, my friend and I were both starving since neither one of us had eaten dinner before class. We found what looked like a little chain Japanese restaurant, right down the street from the WUK. The menu looked reasonable, so we decided to give it a try. We were both amazed. The food was excellent -- much better than expected for Austria, which is not known for its "ethnic" cuisine. Between the two of us, we had miso soup, seafood soup, sushi, curried duck, and coconut pudding. We had plenty to take home, too! It's always a nice surprise when an average-looking restaurant turns out to serve far-above-average food.

Together with a few other friends, I've been compiling a list of restaurants we need to visit before leaving Vienna. I'm definitely adding this one to the list!

Blogging on the spot

So I'm sitting in Cafe Phil, which is one of Vienna's only smoke-free wireless cafes. (Not that your wireless should be smoking in the first place, but anyway ...) About an hour ago, a small television crew came in the front door and now I'm watching them set up for an interview. It looks like some sort of British travel show.

Oh, wait. The interview just started. They're definitely not talking about travel or cafes; they're talking about Amstetten. I can hear the interviewer's questions, but I can't hear the guy's replies. His voice isn't carrying over the din of the city street.

Now the cameraman closed the front door. The interviewer is asking what the guy (cafe owner, I think) thinks is particular about the case in Amstetten and what it says about Austrian society. She's asking the questions in English and he is replying in German. I hear comments about cultural amnesia ... taking issue with the term "incest" ... neighbors seeing things they didn't want to see ... reputable member of society ...

I can't hear his exact replies and I can't move any closer without getting in the way. Darn it.

I'll have to ask when and where the interview will be broadcast.

Back to work ...

Tale of Two (Three?) Cities

Two weeks ago, I took a day trip with a friend to Budapest, the capital and largest city of Hungary. The city originally consisted of three towns--Buda, Pest, and Óbuda—which were combined in 1873 to form the capital. Today, the Danube River divides Budapest, with Buda in the west and Pest in the east. Óbuda, translated as “Old Buda”, forms District III of the Buda side of Budapest.

Budapest is about three hours by train southeast of Vienna. When we arrived in the city, the first thing I noticed was how similar it is to Vienna, just a tad more Eastern European. Of course, that’s because Austria and Hungary used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so the architecture and design of the two cities are quite similar.

Every so often, we saw signs of German-language influence. We recognized a few words on street signs or menus and overheard some German conversations (though probably from tourists). The Hungarian language actually belongs to the Uralic family of languages, to which Finnish and Estonian also belong. Therefore, the biggest German influence is just words that have been imported from one language to another; Hungarian has no true German roots. Hungarian sounds similar to many of the Slavic languages and is considered one of the most difficult for English-speakers to learn.

Armed with a travel guide and phrase book, we gave ourselves an interesting tour of the city. Not thinking that we were traveling on an Austrian (aka Catholic) holiday, we were a bit surprised to find everything in Budapest closed. Apparently, it was not only a state holiday in Austria—“Christi Himmelfahrt” or “The Ascension”—but it was also a state holiday in Hungary. Ooops! We made the best of our day and visited all of the outside landmarks, which took the entire day anyway!

We spent most of our time walking along the Danube River. It’s a long river! It was somehow comforting to know we could follow the same river we see every day in Vienna into another country with a completely different culture. The people change, but the river remains the same.

Throughout the day, we visited the most important outdoor sites: the Parliament, St. Stephen Basilica (the largest Catholic church in Budapest), the state opera, the Buda Castle (residence of Hungarian kings since the 13th century), the Castle District (how cool! I want to live in a city with a castle district!), the Citadel fortress, the National Library, and the Palace of the Arts. I’m sure we passed plenty of other landmarks that we just didn’t recognize.

One of the most moving sights was not marked in any guidebook, but was rather an outdoor memorial installation.



A line of old shoes marked the area where Arrow Cross militiamen, the Hungarian Nazis, shot countless lines of Hungarian Jews into the Danube River. The shoes represent these victims. It’s sobering to realize that wherever you travel in Europe, you are always reminded of the Nazi past.

After a full day of sightseeing, we boarded the train around 8pm in Budapest to arrive in Vienna around 11. School and work dragged by on Friday, both from exhaustion and the lingering “travel mode”. I slept soundly Friday night to wake up to a bright, sunny day on Saturday – perfect for spending outside in Vienna!