In recent years, a lot of blame has been put on Hamas for the worsening educational and cultural conditions in the Gaza Strip. This notion fed well into Western media and was instantly, and predictably, adopted by politicians and diplomats in Israel and the West as fodder for their campaign against terrorism and Islamism.
However, Israel's own intrusions on cultural and intellectual freedoms are almost completely omitted from any discussion concerning culture and education in Gaza. This, of course, plays into the hands of Israel, which falsely depicts itself as the sole beacon of democracy in the Middle East.
What Israeli leaders seem to conveniently forget and hide from the world is that Israel's violations of Palestinian rights to education and freedom of movement inhibit cultural life not only in Gaza, but in the West Bank as well, indeed, in all of Palestine.
In fact, Israel had an embarrassing track record of assassinating Palestinian intellectuals and arresting students long before Hamas assumed power in 2006. For example, it was a Mossad recruit who assassinated the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali in London in 1987. And even after the signing of the Oslo Accords, Gaza students continued to be expelled from their universities in the West Bank, with the help of the Palestinian Authority.
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