“The Only Liberated Place”: Birzeit University and the Fight for the Future of Palestine

Just before dawn on September 17, 2024, urgent voices jolted Layla awake in her family’s home in Ramallah. Occupation forces, her mother and brother whispered, were at the door. In the living room, an Israeli soldier checked the family’s ID cards one by one. Then he informed them that they had come for Layla, who at the time was beginning her third year at Birzeit University. 

There was no arrest warrant. Occupation authorities rarely issue warrants, preferring arbitrary arrests meant to harass and intimidate Palestinians. Layla was not surprised that they had come for her. They had murdered her friend Rami earlier that year. A few weeks later, they had arrested her brother, only to release him without explanation. In the occupied West Bank, students are targeted as much for their associations as for their political activity.

“The captain told me, ‘You are here because inti mahbooba,’” — you are loved, Layla recalls.

The head officer ordered her to get dressed. She went back into her room and grabbed her best pair of long socks and a hoodless jacket, since the prison guards, she knew, confiscated anything with a hood. When she returned to the living room, Layla tried to comfort her weeping mother by listing the names of all the girls in her class who would keep her company in prison. 

This strategy of consolation proved ill-advised. “She started cursing me and all my friends, asking what the hell we did,” Layla said, laughing at the memory. 

Occupation soldiers handcuffed her and marched to a military jeep. Over the next 48 hours, they dragged her from one processing center to another, interrogating her, beating her, and subjecting her to intimidation and sexual harassment. At one point during her interrogation, they forced her to balance on a beach ball for hours, the strain leaving her abdomen and legs in agony.

When she finally reached Damon Prison in Haifa, Layla felt that she was walking into a giant cage that was hosting a school reunion. Classmates cheered her name when they caught glimpses of her through the glass window of the prison’s large sliding doors. Passing by them on the way to her cell, she stretched her fingers through the iron bars to meet theirs — the only human touch she would know for months. 

Layla is one of hundreds of Palestinian students detained by the Zionist occupation since October 7, 2023. Birzeit alone has seen more than 150 of its students arrested — the highest number from any Palestinian university outside Gaza. At al-Quds and an-Najah, students have faced the same pattern of raids, arrests, and silencing. 

The repression at Birzeit is part of a broader strategy in which the Israeli regime seeks to suffocate all forms of Palestinian life under its grip.

Since its establishment in the 1970s, Birzeit has shaped Palestinian political life, making it a target of both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian Authority (PA). Still, the university administration has guarded the student body’s right to engage in political activity over the decades, making Birzeit one of the rare campuses where students from across the political spectrum openly organize.

“We call it the only liberated place,” said Hadeel Shatara, an educator and Birzeit University administrator who was previously imprisoned by the Zionist regime. 

At Birzeit, the pressures of life under occupation are woven into the curriculum. Professors routinely excuse the absences of students who go into hiding during the occupation’s deadly witchhunts. Because Israeli forces carry out most of their arrests at the start of final exams season, an attempt to sabotage academic careers, the administration allows students to sit for exams late, or to retake their classes free of charge.

The repression at Birzeit is part of a broader strategy in which the Israeli regime seeks to suffocate all forms of Palestinian life under its grip.

Death, too, is stitched into campus life. When a student is martyred — like Rami in 2024, or the brothers Jawad and Thafer Rimawi in 2022 — the body returns to school grounds one last time. Classmates carry the martyr’s coffin on their shoulders in a solemn procession before burial. 

“It is part of our identity, something we're really proud of,” Shatara said.

Historically, the university admitted only the top-performing students from each village, filling the campus with bright young minds from Akka to Gaza City, and from affluent Ramallah to the refugee camps. Before the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, nearly a third of the student body came from Gaza.

Cafeteria debates and classroom arguments held during that period seeded the DNA of the student movement. Figures like Bassam al-Salhi, secretary-general of the Palestinian People’s Party, and political leader Marwan Barghouti sat in on those gatherings, which gave rise to the political parties and ideologies that Palestinians inherited.

“It is known that much of the organizing during the First and Second Intifadas came out of Birzeit,” Shatara said. “The student movement led the streets.”

Over time, the political party structure on campus consolidated into three major factions: the Hamas-aligned al-Wafa’ Islamic Bloc, the Fatah-aligned Martyr Yasser Arafat Bloc, and the PFLP-aligned Democratic Progressive Student Pole. Student elections are not popularity contests; they serve as barometers. In the nearly two-decade absence of national elections, Birzeit’s polls have come to signify the pulse of the majority. Since 2015, the Islamic Bloc has dominated these polls, which has discouraged the PA from holding national elections that could upend Fatah’s rule.

Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli regime has ramped up its attacks on students at Birzeit. Due to the campus popularity of the Islamic Bloc, occupation forces have singled out and punished groups and individuals they perceive as aligned with Hamas. The occupation, aiming to paralyze political activity on campus, treats engagement in student activism as grounds for an automatic arrest. No student elections have been held at Birzeit since the genocidal war on Gaza began nearly two years ago. 

Elections, Shatara explains, are “a celebration of democracy.” To hold such a celebration now, she added, would not only be tone-deaf but could also expose students to an increased risk of arrest. These days, much of the political organizing at Birzeit happens underground.

“It is known that much of the organizing during the First and Second Intifadas came out of Birzeit. The student movement led the streets.” —Hadeel Shatara, educator

“They arrested the entire first and second lines of command in the Student Union,” Shatara said. “So a third line started showing up.”

Just showing up on campus is a challenge now. Over the last two years, the occupation has added more than 100 new checkpoints across the occupied West Bank, bringing their total to around 900. The humiliation of the checkpoint is a universal Palestinian experience, but Birzeit students face particular scrutiny.

“The soldiers check every student’s ID and bag,” Shatara explained. “If they spot a Birzeit textbook, they pull the student aside and make them step out of their vehicle.” Sometimes, they steal textbooks and notebooks.

The administrator added that dozens of students had been beaten simply for trying to get to class on time.

Alongside attacks by Zionist forces, students feel the weight of a secondary occupation: the Palestinian Authority. Whereas PA forces used to limit their repression of students to campus interrogations, they now stalk young people into their neighborhoods and homes. On December 5, 2024, the PA raided Jenin in an operation they dubbed “Operation Protect the Homeland, targeting armed resistance groups. Palestinian Authority forces arrested dozens of Birzeit students during the operation. Shatara recalled that the university hired its own lawyers to fight for the students’ release.Birzeit won.

“The PA uses the same method that the occupation uses — collective punishment,” Shatara said. “Both regimes are working together.”

Some Birzeit students had already endured time in Zionist prisons before setting foot on campus. Shadi, now 19, was a 16-year-old high school student when soldiers came for him. As with Layla’s case, occupation forces arrived at his family’s home in Jerusalem at 5 a.m. They came in 10 military vehicles carrying some 70 soldiers.

“After they’d drag us to the yard and torture us, you won’t believe it, we’d go back to cook and play games. We’d laugh for the rest of the day.” —Layla, Birzeit University student

Once inside, they punched and kicked him in front of his parents and brother. The soldiers pointed their guns at Shadi’s relatives as they beat him, telling him that if he resisted, they would shoot them. Before he even made it out of the house, he had a broken nose and several broken teeth.

“I was done for. I wasn’t conscious,” Shadi recalled.

Zionist forces held Shadi for “processing” for 16 days before moving him, like Layla, to Damon Prison. The whole time, he was barefoot. The only clothes he had on him were the ones he had worn to sleep on the night of his arrest: a pair of shorts and a t-shirt from a marathon he once ran in Bethlehem, which read “urkud ila al-hurriya” — run for freedom on the back. “You’re running for freedom, eh?” one soldier sneered as he punched Shadi repeatedly.

What stung him the most, he said, was how the soldiers mocked his faith. Curses against Jesus and Mary became the soundtrack to Shadi’s two months in prison. Like Layla, he believes he was arrested for no other reason than to terrorize his community in Jerusalem.

“They wanted me to be an example for others,” Shadi said. “When there’s a Palestinian guy who’s Christian and speaks English, it’s dangerous for them.”

When Layla entered Damon Prison, her fellow detainees welcomed her with a small cake they made from scraps of tahini, jam, and toast saved for the arrival of new detainees. Her memories of cell raids, daily strip searches, and gnawing hunger are interwoven with moments of singing and dancing with her peers.

“After they’d drag us to the yard and torture us, you won’t believe it, we’d go back to cook and play games,” she recalls. “We’d laugh for the rest of the day.” Games were their way of reclaiming their agency and resisting.

Since her release, the occupation has continued to harass her. Intelligence agents call her and other freed student prisoners at random, reciting what they had observed her doing during the day: arriving and leaving campus, attending lectures, sitting with friends, etc.

Shadi’s freedom is also incomplete. Although his imprisonment was years ago, his case remains open, and the threat of sentencing still hangs over him. He doesn’t allow himself to plan beyond his final court date, let alone imagine a long-term career. The judge presiding over his case is an Israeli settler living illegally on Palestinian land.

“When the judge is your enemy,” he asks rhetorically, “how are you supposed to be free?”

For Shatara, the biggest obstacle facing the student movement in Palestine is the weakness of the broader Palestinian political movement. Today, students have no real model in the political party structure to emulate, no coherent strategy to build upon.

“They have to count on themselves,” Shatara said. “But sometimes you need someone to point things out for you, someone with experience to learn from. All they’ve seen during the past 20 years is a failing experience.”

In the occupied West Bank, there is no safe space left to engage in political activity. Drones circle incessantly overhead. Cameras freely swivel from rooftops. Spyware tracks all calls and texts. Still, Shatara is adamant that the student movement, which has carried past revolutions in Palestine, will rise again.

“When the judge is your enemy, how are you supposed to be free?” —Shadi, Birzeit University student

“No matter how hard the situation is getting, the younger generation will find a way out,” she insisted. “We need to rebuild trust in these students, to protect their work and give them space to act.”

When students erected encampments on university campuses across the world in solidarity with Gaza, students at Bizeit felt a rare surge of hope.

“Here, students feel that everything they try to do is pointless, because wherever they turn, they face attacks,” Shatara said. “But when they saw something happening on campuses abroad, they thought: people know what’s going on. Students are moving.”

For a moment, the isolation engineered by the occupation — through checkpoints, arrests, prisons, raids, and surveillance — seemed less absolute. Solidarity pierced the walls of the occupation.

“We're in the belly of the beast here, just like in the U.S.,” Shatara said. “The students here know they are responsible for the future of Palestine. They know they can’t just wait for a hopeful picture of the future to come. They have to create it with their own hands.”

—Additional reporting by Zach Hussein.