The life of a Palestinian Researcher - Part 2: Working through adversity
In the second part of the article I wanted to delve deeper into the challenges Palestinians researchers face, some are common some quite unique.
Hello, my good human. I am Lefteris and in this newsletter, I try to give a platform to academics who don’t get as many chances to showcase their work as I believe they should. I try to understand their lives, their work and what affects their everyday routine. If that sounds like something you'd be interested feel free to subscribe.
“Doing research is kind of a way to not think about what’s happening. Do something else”
We all face problems in our day-to-day lives but some challenges are unique when you live in some parts of the world. So far in the series, I've introduced you to the individuals I interviewed—Ali, Bayan, Duha, Omar—each sharing personal aspirations within the academic world. Despite our differences, we share similar ages. Through these interviews, I discovered both the commonalities and distinctions in our experiences. Every researcher will complain about the lack of funding or the bureaucracy they face. Not everyone though will have to think twice before stepping out of their house.
Omar and Ali, both mathematicians, face distinct challenges within their academic pursuits. Omar, balances family responsibilities and a daily job alongside his master's research, aiming to support his family. He works with an Israeli startup that outsources some work to contractors in the West Bank. Initially, I was very surprised to hear that this was happening, but a little digging showed that this wasn’t something new. We discussed that technology and innovation were once thought to be the starting point for peace. What was surprising to me was that the relationship between the workers and contractors between Palestine and Israel didn’t change much after the events of October 7th. “At the end of the day, it is work and you should do your stuff.”
Balancing family commitments, Omar dedicates 3-4 focused hours daily to his research project, often communicating with supervisors for feedback and guidance. He would write down thoughts, and send emails to his supervisors who would provide feedback and offer more guidance. It was an interesting experience for him since he had to immerse himself in the problem in a discrete way.
While things have become stricter since the war, he wasn’t too much affected psychologically after the war started because things have been this way all of his life. The difference now is that things showed up in the news around the world. His energy changed a little bit when we started talking about it. “Sometimes, you don’t want to discuss anything about it because it’s really…” he scoffed and gave a tired smile. “What would talking do? Doing research is kind of a way to not think about what’s happening. Do something else.”
I am familiar with the challenges of working while pursuing a master’s degree, having experienced it myself in Athens. In my interview with Ali, I realised that it’s not uncommon for people in the West Bank to work at the same time as they’re doing their master's studies. Think about it. For this period of his life, Ali is pursuing a master’s degree, doing a research project with a professor from MIT and at the same time working as a programmer, which is close to the field of what he’s studying. I admire that resolve especially in that area of the world. The focus and passion that a person like that must have is amazing to me. No wonder he has noticeable dark circles under his eyes.
One common theme mentioned by all the interviewees was the presence of checkpoints in their daily lives. Israeli checkpoints are barriers set up by the Israeli Security Forces in the West Bank. Officially, these checkpoints are established to enhance Israel's security and are manned by various military personnel. One thing that Ali mentions is that the effects of the checkpoints in daily life have become routine. Sure sometimes it’s nothing more than a 5 minute delay. Some other times though you spend 2-3 hours in checkpoint. And when that happens “people are understanding - you don’t get into too much trouble if you are late”. After the war started, the checkpoints became more aggressive, so he started going back to his hometown less and less.
These problems are faced by all Palestinians living in the West Bank. Checkpoints have become part of their daily lives and they have become even more intense since the start of the war in October 2023. Ali and Omar have been dealing with these checkpoints, but when it comes to research, mathematicians just need paper and a pen to dive into their work. Sure they might need to consult a book or a paper, but the grand majority of their w ork can happen on a desk. What happens when you have to go to the lab often?
Bayan's experience sheds light on the challenges faced by researchers who require frequent travel between cities in the West Bank. She pursued her bachelor's studies at the Arab American University in Jenin, near her hometown. She decided to do her master’s thesis when she finished at An-Najah National University in Nablus which is less than 50 kilometers away. Back then, the checkpoints between Jenin and Nablus weren’t too troublesome, so Bayan could easily commute between the two. That has changed since the war.
Bayan pursued her PhD with theoretical studies at An-Najah National University and practical work at Forschungszentrum University in Jülich, Germany. This PhD setup is essential in Palestine due to limited access to advanced instruments and challenges in acquiring necessary chemicals and reagents for lab work. The Israeli occupation is afraid of chemicals being used for purposes other than research, making it hard to receive reagents. Physical research in the country stopped during the war and COVID-19 due to difficulties in obtaining chemicals in the West Bank.
In Palestine, conducting research requires a significant amount of cooperation. If someone has an idea for a research project, they will need to work with others to complete the entire process. This is because it can be very challenging to finish a research project from start to finish without cooperation in Palestine. So for people like Bayan, the project begins with sample collection or synthesis in Palestine, and chemical characterisation in another country. If there is no need for advanced instruments and if you’re lucky that all of the chemicals are already in your university then you can do the project in Palestine.
For her daily routine, Bayan explains that if she knows it’s a day where she has to do teaching or supervise students she keeps that day free from anything else and she focuses on that. She wants to give her full attention to one thing at a time so she doesn’t want research distracting her from teaching and vice versa. After the events of October 7th, they have gone to online teaching and she mentions that this is true for most universities in the West Bank. She resides in Jenin, which is reportedly less safe than Ramallah. There have been many people that were killed in the last years in Jenin, so if you live there, you have to live with that inside your mind.
“People in Palestine might be smiling in their day-to-day lives, but you know that there is a lot of sadness in their minds.”
One thing that I wasn’t aware of happening, was also what people called raids within cities in the West Bank. That’s when the Israeli military will enter cities in the West Bank for security reasons. So on any given day, there are many parameters they have to think about and plan their day. If Bayan wants to go to the university in Ramallah for example, she will wake up before 5 am to prepare because it is a three-hour drive for 98 kilometers. But there is a possibility that the occupation army is in town at that time so she has to wait until they leave before she leaves her house. Sometimes it’s because officially they told them they aren’t allowed to go out but sometimes it’s because they feel unsafe. Locals are afraid and not sure what’s going to happen to them if they get stopped for questioning. She tells me about stories she has heard of people opening the windows of their homes and ending up being shot. There is no fixed time when the occupation army will come to the city. Sometimes she tells me that they will come while she’s at work so she will choose to stay there and wait until it’s safe for her to go back home to her parents. Even if sometimes you say that you don’t care because you have something important to do outside your loved ones will try to prevent you. This is especially true for men since they’re seen as more of a threat.
“Even if you want to go out your family will prevent you” - Bayan
So if the army leaves after 8 or 9 am she might not go to the university that day. Then even if she manages to go, there are checkpoints between the cities. On a good day, you will be in Ramallah after 3 hours but sometimes people have to wait six hours depending on the checkpoints. She says that it depends on the mood of the person at the checkpoint. If it’s an excellent day and there are no checkpoints you’ll be there in 2 hours. In the checkpoints they sometimes even check your phones and pictures you have taken, things you’ve liked on Facebook and group chats you have on Telegram. She told me that if someone drives from Jenin to Ramallah, it could be very dangerous. If they happen to get lost and accidentally take a road that goes through a settlement, the consequences could be deadly.
When the war started in October, she was working at the University in Ramallah. I asked how has her routine changed due to the war starting and she told me that she hadn’t renewed her contract for the next semester because the commute just became impossible. When she's in Palestine, she values being close to her parents. Even though the situation became more tiresome she continued to go back from Ramallah to Jenin every week. However, she hated just staying on the road for such a long time doing nothing.
This dead time on the road makes people think and focus a lot on the things happening next to them and on the things they see written in the media. More than 30,000 people have been killed during this conflict. Bayan is annoyed because this is just lightly being reported by the media. She’s wondering what would the people say if this was happening in another city somewhere in Europe. In Palestine, they feel there are double standards. And she wants to mention that this isn’t something they see only from Western countries, but from their neighbours as well. “There are no actual actions to end this situation”
Some people were discussing that something similar had happened in 1948, but people back then didn’t have social media, it wasn’t so easy to share the news so far and wide. So that’s why it was hard to get the international community to do something and help with actions to change the situation. Now there is news, there are images, there are videos but she still sees that nothing is changing.
“This is injustice. To just feel that your life has no value. It’s okay to be killed and you are just a number. This is the situation here.” - Bayan
This quote just kills me every time I read it.
One big question I have for people living there is how they work. How do researchers in Palestine navigate work amidst a neighbouring war, hearing about violent incidents like shootings and forced evictions due to new settlements? They try to go on with their lives but I find it hard to focus with far less intense things happening in my community.
She started laughing… obviously as a defence mechanism.
“When I have a day of teaching or a day in the lab. I stop looking at the news, I close my phone so that I don’t get any news messages”. Exactly because if you know that these things happen you can’t focus on your work and your research. After 3-4 hours of work, then she opens her phone to see if “the coast is clear” and it’s safe for her to go home.
This fear people in Palstine have with the raids was also mentioned by Duha. She told me that raids could happen at any time during the day or night. Once, she had students in the hospital who were forced to stay the whole day because of a midday raid that caused the hospital to be locked down. “We were really afraid about them. We couldn’t do anything”.
Duha, an active researcher and former student activist, founded 'The Researchist,' an NGO supporting early career researchers. They are providing researchers opportunities for career development, training and even exchange programs and networking with people outside Palestine.
We will talk more about the Researchist in the last article of this series when we look into the future of research in Palestine. Duha has a lot of experience with various projects through the Researchist, which helps students take their first steps in research. Due to this experience, she can identify the issues researchers face in the country. The first issue she mentioned is the culture of the country. There is a lack of support for the importance of scientific research and its ability to bring about changes in practices.
Then, similarly to probably any other researcher in the world she talked about the lack of funding and the lack of resources and equipment. “We have to go abroad to do research, but what about our needs in the Palestinian Community? What about our problems? How are we going to solve them?”.
And to top it all off, she mentions the extra paperwork and permissions they have to take in order to do their research. But she says she really doesn’t mind that. “I don’t quit because I believe in what I’m doing.” and that’s the reason she mentioned that people were choosing to stay in Palestine and help their community.
The paperwork isn’t only coming from one side of the table. We have established earlier that most of the things going in and out of the West Bank are controlled by Israel. But it’s not only Israel that creates bureaucratic hurdles for researchers in Palestine. Some of the hurdles come from the Palestinian Authority because as she says people think “you need to be like the US or the UK to do research”. But that’s not true. In her message, she tries to say that research is the way to change and establish a really good system.
She once tried to ask for support from the education ministry for her organisation, and their response was “Go build yourself up and your organisation, and when something is ready then come to us”. And she was just there for help and support. And I have to commend her for actually sticking with her plan after hearing something like this, especially at this young age.
Another limitation that she mentioned had to do with environmental research. If you want to do research on water supplies in Palestine, they have restrictions on movement, so they can’t go to all the areas that are needed for the work. They’re not allowed to have maps that show the water resources. They are not allowed to have any information about “shared” or occupied land.
When she is focused on research, a lot of her work relies on collaboration. Since it’s not easy to move from city to city in the West Bank, she collaborates with people from different cities and gathers data all together. So when she does research work she will go to the hospital in the morning and do her data collection all morning, sometimes well into the afternoon. Afterwards, she takes her laptop and goes to a coffee shop or to the local library to do work. Also, meet friends and take breaks from work. But she won’t stay out until too late because raids happen especially at night so it’s not too safe to stay out at night.
When she said this during the interview I said: “Yeah, of course”. I immediately hated myself for just agreeing that military raids are something logical to be expecting…
“My laptop is my best friend. Everything is in there.” She also likes writing things on pen and paper. She has an agenda with her appointments as part of her work with the Researchist and another agenda to write down all her thoughts. She continues to work at home sometimes. And generally, when she gets some free time between tasks she’ll try to do some work on her laptop. But generally speaking, she tries to maximise her time in the lab. She loves the environment.
While navigating significant challenges, the individuals I interviewed exhibit unwavering determination in pursuing their academic goals while considering the impact they’ll have in their community. While this article explores challenges, there's a compelling resilience and determination I find inspiring. Even though these people try to excel in their own careers, they always have their community in mind. How are they trying to help their community, and how would they like to help in the future? Find out in the third and final part of the article where we explore the future as these people see it.