Community engagement from the margin : zionism and the case of the Palestinian student movement in the Israeli Universities

Abstract

The recently emerging concept of community engagement is better conceived as a context dependent concept. However, when examining the case of native communities living in colonial situations, community engagement by universities of the colonial authorities fail to capture the level of grassroots organizing among students of the colonized communities as a form of community engagement, albeit community engagement from the margin. The Palestinian community in Israel, lives in a colonial situation in its own homeland where the Israeli universities have been established as an integral part of the Zionist colonial project in Palestine. As the Palestinian formal educational system, hegemonic and identity blurring, the Palestinian Student Movement in the Israeli universities is conceived as a grassroots form of community engagement intending to reconstruct and reassert a shared sense of collective-national identity among the Palestinian students within the Israel campuses. Furthermore, Palestinian student activists are involved in community grassroots organizing and action within their own home communities and places of residence. This form of grassroots organizing and political action by members of colonized communities, calls our attention to re-conceptualization of the conventional understanding of the concept of university-community engagement.