Displaced Palestinians are seeking ways to continue their education. These aspirations need to be part of the screening process, which has become too focussed on risk.

Australia’s conversation about Gaza – and indeed immigration – has become increasingly framed through the language of risk. The debate we actually need is one that both airs legitimate concerns about security, migration or social cohesion, while refusing to allow those concerns to become the sole lens through which human beings are viewed and processed.

For many Australians, Palestine is now understood almost exclusively through the imagery of war. Pictures of destruction are so pervasive that they risk reducing an entire people to victims, refugees, statistics or security concerns. Lost in this story is another reality – a society that has long placed extraordinary value on education, scholarship and intellectual achievement.

Over recent months, through my own interactions with young Palestinians whose educational journeys have been interrupted by war, I have been struck by something that rarely features in public discourse: their conversations haven’t centred on politics; they have spoken of degrees left unfinished, scholarships still being pursued, research projects abandoned, examinations that could not be sat and futures they’re reluctant to surrender. They speak of things familiar to most students everywhere – academic aspirations, professional ambitions and a determination to continue their education, despite circumstances that would overwhelm many of us.

What inspired me wasn’t a search for sympathy, but an insistence on........

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