Birzeit University

These reports raise serious concerns about whether applicants are being assessed fairly, as individuals are being penalized collectively simply for being Palestinian and having lived and studied in Gaza.

That prospect strikes a particular nerve for me personally, as someone who has had the immense privilege of studying and working for several years at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank.

I was welcomed there with open arms as a Jewish Canadian and experienced the richness and sophistication of academic life in Palestine.

With every single university in Gaza now in ruins, The absolute least our government can do is to allow Palestinian students already accepted to Canadian universities to pursue their education, their dreams, and their lives.

It runs to a couple of hundred pages and was produced by an interdisciplinary and intergenerational consortium of Palestinian and Palestinian-based experts with members in Gaza, the West Bank and the Diaspora.

Everyone involved contributed on a voluntary basis and several hundred hours of the underlying data work were done by students at the Birzeit University.

Abdalrahman Kittana, whom you have been hearing throughout this episode, sits on the executive boarder.

The framework Central committed is stated in one line, and I'm quoting, the Fini-Gaza recovery plan consistently stands on the rejection of Gaza as a tabula rasa.

What follows is our conversation.

Dr. Ibrahim Rabaia is an assistant professor of political science and international relations at Birzeit University.

He has served as managing editor of the journal Sha'oun Palestine, Palestinian Affairs, a senior editor at the newspaper Al-Hayat, acting director of the governance sector at the Palestinian Ministry of Planning, and is the chairperson of the Palestinian Forum for Development and Communication.

I am very happy to welcome him to Notes from the World today.

She is currently beginning a project on indigenous urbanism and futurism in Palestine.

The third is Abdelrahman Kitana, a Palestinian architect at Temple University and Birzeit University, who co-founded a project in Nablus bringing historic buildings back into the U.S., and whose research is about architecture and survival in war, homemaking under conflict, and post-war reconstruction.

So, one place, four future, three questions.

Before exploring them, however, we need to look at the instrument that turns the future into practice.

[laughs]

But the thing about this film is that, um, and this has been studied by, um, my friend Rachel Gordon, who's a, she's a professor of history at University of, uh, University of Florida.

Um, well, she's Jewish studies, but her, you know, she's a historian.

And she- Points out that there's a joke about this film that was, um, [lip smacks] that-

Your, your, um, discrimination against by a, a discrimination based on national orgi- origin in an educational setting is against the law.

So, you know, I mean, there's a lot of things like that, like Harvard, now they folded it.

Harvard used to have a program with Birzeit University in Ramallah.

Mm-hmm.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights stated that according to recent statistics, the Israeli municipality carried out 427 demolitions, between the beginning of the year and the end of September 2026 as part of a broader system of measures aimed at altering the demographic and geographic character of the occupied city and entrenching permanent facts on the ground.

And on Monday, Israeli soldiers invaded the Birzeit University campus and vandalized and destroyed a sculpture to commemorate Palestinians who were killed by Israel while they were students.

In Lebanon, Israeli forces continue to carry out relentless airstrikes, drone attacks, and demolitions across the south.

Our contributor Rokhaya Shamsuddin filed this report for The Electronic Intifada on Wednesday evening from Lebanon.

It also amounts to turning the suffering of the Palestinian population into and the sanctity of their homes into an election campaign tool aimed at securing the votes of the Israeli right at the expense of the Palestinian people and Israel's obligations as an occupying power toward the civilian population.

And on Monday, Israeli soldiers invaded the Birzeit University campus and vandalized and destroyed a sculpture to commemorate Palestinians who were killed by Israel while they were students.

This video by Mohamed Nazal shows the memorial sculpture missing from its pedestal.

In Lebanon, Israeli forces continue to carry out relentless airstrikes, drone attacks, and demolitions across the south.