From the Archives

In the back of a movie theater, a Bethlehem University faculty member taught five students while a film played.

Classes like this one met again and again between 1987 and 1990, through the first intifada. Bethlehem University was the first university to be closed, by a military order on October 29, 1987. According to Brother Patrick White, who taught there at the time, the closures went on to reach every school and university in the West Bank, affecting 18,000 university students. The order also prohibited home study and make-up classes elsewhere, so students and faculty who kept meeting risked jail.

They met in hotel rooms and private homes, in monasteries and convents, in groups of five or six small enough to go unnoticed. In the stories people at Bethlehem University still tell, schedules and locations traveled by word of mouth, before cell phones and the internet, and some classes met in basements and old folks’ homes.

Writing in August 1989, Brother Patrick reported that for university students the 1987-88 academic year had lasted one month, and that there had been no 1988-89 academic year at all. Students kept asking him when the university would open again.

1982 – Student Receiving Diploma

Maher Turjman studied at the university through those years and graduated in 1991. “We took risks to study,” he recalled in ONE, the magazine of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA). Dr. Jeanne Kattan, a Palestinian faculty member, explained why students kept going: “An education is something that can never be taken away.” She has said Bethlehem University “acts as a leaven in Palestinian society.”

The question students kept asking Brother Patrick was answered in October 1990, when the university’s gates opened again. After three years of closure and underground classes, 517 students came back, ready to graduate.

Bethlehem University, the first university registered in Palestine, has been educating Palestinians since 1973.