The great rift between Hamas supporters and those who favor Arafat and the PA may have become less of an issue at Birzeit but politics still influence every aspect of university life. Loud debates, between the large majority of students who support the peace process and the strong minority who refuse to accept anything less than a Palestinian state from the Mediterranean Sea to Jordan, can be heard throughout the campus halls. Because Birzeit is attended by students seeking a secular education it does not have the religious Islamic element that calls for jihad and conversion of all to Islam. These students are more easily found at the Islamic University in Gaza. Most students at Birzeit agree that the peace process has brought several changes to the university.
Students are proud that their own people now have some control over the land where they study.
We now have much hope that our dream of studying in Palestine will be realized. Nigel Parry, an Irish student who works in public relations at the university, disagrees. He claims that the Oslo agreements brought only disappointment and decline to the university. Parry explains that after the bus bombings in January and February of this year, Israel unnecessarily shut down the university by closing the intersection between the nearby settler road and the university road. After a bus bombing in March, over 280 Birzeit students were arrested in a single day, a greater number of arrests than in any one year.