CAUT should be commended for printing Elia Zureik's illuminating account of the myths and realities of the sorry state of higher education, indeed of education generally, for Palestinians subject to official Israeli government policies of Jewish domination and colonization.

Israeli domination of the indigenous Muslim and Christian Arabs, and Israeli colonization of all of Palestine, remain the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As long as the Israeli political leadership and its domestic and foreign supporters reject a politics of equality and inclusion (and therefore of decolonization) life prospects for Palestinian citizens of Israel, no matter what its borders, and the kind of education which helps to determine them, will continue to be inferior to those for Jews.

For Palestinians subjected to a military occupation facilitating the intensification and expansion of colonization, life prospects will be determined largely by the logic of repression and in one form or another, expulsion and coerced emigration. That "logic" is the logic of state and sub-state terror, of brutality and violent resistance.

Professor Zureik did not elaborate on that logic. He did not stress as he could have, the emotional and cognitive effects of the Israel Defense Forces' violence against Palestinian children during the first Intifada, the scale of that violence, and its impact on the current state of education in the occupied territories. Nor did he dwell on the IDF's use of torture, detentions without charge, and physical assaults on students and faculty, on elementary and high school pupils and teachers, or subjection to settler vigilantism and terror.

These are precisely what one should expect from a conqueror bent on colonization of the conquered territory. Resistance, violent and passive, is also exactly what one would expect from their victims.

Just as there were American whites who opposed segregation, and South African whites who rejected apartheid, there are Israelis who espouse a politics of equality and recognition both as a matter of principle and as the only effective strategy for Israeli Arab coexistence in the Middle East. True to our widely shared liberal values, most Canadian academics would endorse that vision if they understood what its rejection has meant in practice for Palestinians now and for the past 54 years.

Professor Zureik and the Bulletin have provided critical information which allows us to focus on the underlying issues - a politics of equality and recognition, or a politics of domination, repression and exclusion.

James A. Graff
Philosophy, University of Toronto