Kate Khair's journey from the West Bank to West Sands

To a packed hall largely comprising the elderly segment of St Andrews, Kate Khair, a Palestinian former STEPS (St Andrews Education for Palestinian Students) scholar, spoke of the realities of living under an apartheid. We often view these horrors, which seem so far away from the serenity of St Andrews, as another world. Here, our concerns seem to range from deadlines to whether we should really go to the Union on a Wednesday night. As we know too well, nothing is as it seems. Though our first thought of Bethlehem may be an idyllic Christmas Card scene, as Khair told me when we sat down together on a rare sunny day in St Mary’s Quad, the reality is quite the opposite.

“It’s not something that is happening at another place in the planet, that they are not connected with,” said Khair, emphasising the detachment between the comfortable bubble of St Andrews and the wars raging across the world.

“I think the world would be better for everyone if there was no injustice in it,” said Khair. To her, injustice is not something which affects anyone singularly — its effects  “will come back to you,” she explained. “It will affect everyone. It’s one planet. We need to act as if we are living in one place.”

Khair is from Beit Sahour, a small town east of Bethlehem. The city is renowned for being the birthplace of Jesus Christ, and Khair can see and hear the bells of the Church of the Nativity from her house. Now it's also known for being one of the most visible indicators of apartheid. It has a 30-foot-high ‘separation wall’ running through it, determining where Palestinians and Israelis live.  

“We were surrounded by the wall,” Khair explained. “We had the apartheid wall all around. We had settlements all around. We didn’t have many places to go.”

Khair reminisced on her life there before the events of 7 October, 2023. “It was really, really nice. It was busy, active, [and had] lots of international volunteers, tourists. She was even part of a youth group, she said, as well as having been involved in organisations which ran cultural events.

“It was fine,” Khair said. “But it was an open-air prison as well.”

In the West Bank, it is difficult to travel to other places. There are different roads for Palestinians and Israelis. Palestinians are forced to take roads which bypass settlements and have military checkpoints, which can take hours to go through.

Freedoms we take for granted in the UK are not freedoms which extend to the Palestinian people: Freedom to move, freedom to build, freedom to protest. These do not exist for Palestinians, because they live under military law. In contrast, Israeli citizens live under civil law, where rights are protected in ways we would expect in the West. While it is possible for an Israeli citizen to visit Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and even the West Bank (although this is deeply discouraged), all Palestinian movements are controlled by the Israeli army and are usually restricted to the region in which they were born.

Khair describes being unable to visit cities like Nazareth and Haifa — lands controlled by Israel since 1948. “I had a lot of international friends, and they would go to Jerusalem, Haifa, and I was just not [able to],” she explained. Khair’s ability to visit these cities is severely restricted under military law. She said she had only been to one of them once on a school trip, organised with permits. “You feel trapped,” she said.

Bethlehem before 7 October was bustling with pilgrims, tourists, and many international activists. After 7 October, “everything just stopped,” said Khair. “Everything completely shut down. All my international friends left without a chance to see me and say goodbye.” 

Khair’s life in the West Bank was completely reversed: “All of our attention was on Gaza.”

“We knew that Gaza would be [in] a very devastating war, and it even surpassed our expectations,” said Khair. “It is now the most horrendous genocide I have ever witnessed in my whole life.” 

Khair’s father grew up in Gaza and describes it as “the most beautiful Palestinian city.” Khair has never had the chance to visit herself, as it is impossible for Palestinians to get a permit.

Yet Khair does have some friends in Gaza: “It’s very hard. Some of them escaped to Egypt. Some of them are still in Gaza, just trying to survive,” she said. “I feel helpless. I call them, and I don’t know what to do or what to say.”

While we sat overlooking the great oak tree of St Mary’s Quad, Khair spoke of a green area near her, Makhrour, where she would go every week to walk. It is now being taken over by settlers. While the world keeps its eyes on Gaza and regional war, illegal settlements in the West Bank have intensified their campaign.

Israeli settlers live in lands that were designated for Palestinians, often expelling Palestinians from their homes and villages to do so. As documented by human rights organisations like B'Tselem and Amnesty International, these settlers destroy the homes of Palestinians, who are refused permits to rebuild their homes. If Palestinians rebuild without a permit, their new homes will be destroyed. Israeli settlers, however, are permitted by the Israeli government to build homes in the West Bank, despite these settlements being illegal under international law.

These illegal settlements have dramatically altered the landscape of Khair’s city. 

“The city and the West Bank are full of buildings because people don’t have any place to live,” she explained. “The Makhrour area was one of the most beautiful places, because in Bethlehem we don’t have parks like this, [it] is a luxury for us.” 

The Makhrour area, once beautiful green land and, according to Khair, “a very nice area to walk,” is now under threat. “There are settlers around. It is dangerous to go there,” she explained. “They are planning to annex it to build more settlements.” Khair explained that it is part of a wider plan, approved by the Israeli government to connect illegal settlements between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. 

Before the war started, Khair was already applying to universities overseas, hoping to further her study of history. After being accepted as a STEPS scholar, Khair made it to St Andrews.

“When I arrived in St Andrews, I was very happy. I was like, ‘Finally, I made it. Finally, I left Palestine,’” she recalled. “I was thanking everyone, like, ‘Thank you so much, thank you STEPS, thank you St Andrews, thank you.’” She remembers being dropped off at her accommodation: “I felt like a survivor, and I had to thank this place for taking me in.”

The University offers a scholarship for usually two students from Palestine to study a postgraduate programme with waived fees. STEPS is a charity which pays for the students' other costs. The charity and scholarship were created in 2011, after St Andrews students called for the creation of a Palestinian scholarship through an organised protest in 2009. The protest saw 60 students occupying Lower College Hall. 

“The activism is what [created] scholarships for Palestinian students to come here,” Khair explained. “It’s all a result of activism — not of universities being so generous and the administration being so generous.” 

She attributes it to pressure: “Pressure [creates] an effect, but it takes a lot of time,” she said. “You have to battle with them to make them care about Palestine, about justice, and about human beings not being killed.”

After two years of genocide in Gaza, the University was unable to accept more STEPS Scholars onto the programme because the visa facilities in Gaza were destroyed. The British government would not allow them in without an official visa application — which was impossible to obtain. Fortunately, the British government resolved this bureaucratic difficulty, and we now have six more students from Palestine, including four from Gaza, studying at St Andrews.

When I asked Khair if she has hope, she replied, “It does feel hopeless, but I also look for hope in everything.” She reflected on her studies of Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, who focuses on the unsustainability of apartheid and colonial regimes: “I hope that it’s going to happen — that I am going to see the fall of an apartheid colonial state and the creation of a democratic state in Palestine for all its inhabitants, that we live with our civil and human rights.”

“This is the only thing that gives me hope — that something is changing,” Khair said. “And hopefully it will happen before all of us are annihilated.”

Photo by Manraj Gill