Birzeit’s Memorial Was Not an Empty Plot

Israeli soldiers demolished Birzeit University’s stone memorial near Ramallah at dawn on Monday, October 5, Al Jazeera reports. Soldiers entered the West Bank campus with 10 military vehicles, a bulldozer demolished the pillar, and soldiers took away the marble stone. In the monument’s place, they left a planter containing a fig sapling with the inscription “Water it twice.”

The Martyrs’ Monument was erected between 1994 and 1996 to commemorate students and alumni killed by Israeli forces. Its names began with Sharaf al-Tayyibi, killed on campus in 1984. University media officer Nardeen al-Memi told Al Jazeera that the most recent inscription honored Omar al-Naasan, killed in September. The monument connected different years of loss to one place where the university community could encounter the names together.

For Rania Washaha, that place included her brother Fadi, whom an Israeli soldier killed near el-Bireh in May 2021, according to the report. Al Jazeera describes the demolition as renewing her bereavement. Her account gives the material loss a scale that a description of campus landscaping cannot: a named relative had a place in a public record of belonging, and soldiers removed its physical form.

Al Jazeera frames the destruction as an attempt to crush Palestinian memory. The university administration condemned the raid as an attack on education and national memory and described it as a violation of international law. Those are attributed interpretations and claims, not a documented military statement of purpose or a judicial finding. The supplied account offers no military explanation. It does, however, describe soldiers removing the university’s chosen memorial without the university’s consent. The replacement came with watering instructions, not an answer about who may decide what the campus commemorates.

A monument preserves more than information. Names carved together allow a visitor to read an individual death within the history of a community. A shared site also makes remembrance publicly available rather than dependent on knowing which family to ask or which file to open. The supplied reporting does not document particular ceremonies at the pillar, so those rituals should not be invented. The destruction of the gathering place is substantial enough without adding an unverified scene.

Yet destroying a commemorative object is not the same as destroying every record attached to it. The report itself preserves several names and dates. It does not establish that university archives, photographs, or inscription records were destroyed, nor does it establish the condition or destination of the removed marble. Claims of complete erasure would obscure both the genuine loss and the evidence that may remain.

Birzeit can still seek to preserve a verified inscription list, collect photographs, and record family testimony while documenting what happened to the site. Those are preservation options, not completed measures established by this account. The unanswered question is where the removed stone went and whether it can be recovered. Until that is known, keeping the names accessible would preserve something the sapling cannot replace.