FEATURES-EDU | For Palestinians in Indonesia, education is an act of survival
Transposed poetry: Palestinian poet Haya Abu Nasser speaks about her journey from Palestine to Indonesia through Egypt and Malaysia on Sept. 22, 2024, during an interview with The Jakarta Post at the Empu Sendok Arts Station (ESAS) in Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta. (JP/Radhiyya Indra)
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Displaced by war and scattered across the archipelago, Palestinian students are pressing on for themselves; as well as those they left behind.
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E ven after moving to Jakarta, Samaa Mwafaq carries a mark of war on her face: a small scar beneath her eyebrow, possibly left by a piece of shrapnel from an Israeli bombardment in 2023 on a hospital in the Gaza Strip where she was volunteering.
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“I didn’t even notice it. Only later, after the bombings subsided, a fellow doctor told me that there was blood on my face. I thought it was from a patient I was tending to,” Samaa, 22, told The Jakarta Post by phone in March.
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Samaa is one among a growing number of Palestinians residing in Indonesia, many of who fled Gaza after the Israeli military’s retaliatory strikes began in late October 2023, an action that a United Nations commission concluded in 2025 was a genocide.
Success isn’t at the top of the corporate ladder anymore
My generation watched our parents give everything to a company.
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We decided to give it to ourselves instead. But it’s more complicated than that.
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Born and raised in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza, she enrolled in 2024 as a medical student at YARSI University, a private Islamic university in Central Jakarta.
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“We have around 70 Palestinian students across Indonesia, scattered across Jakarta, Maluku, Bandung, Makassar and cities in Sumatra,” said Samaa, citing data from the General Union of Palestinian Students in Indonesia (PMPI), where she chairs an academic committee.
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For many of these students, continuing their education has become a way of preserving a sense of continuity while living in exile.
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Radhiyya Indra
The Jakarta Post- PREMIUM
Jakarta
Mon, May 25, 2026
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