By Christopher Iacovetti

As Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has unfolded over the last 20 months, a growing number of academics, UN experts, and human rights organizations have identified Israel’s deliberate destruction of Gaza’s education sector as a central component of its exterminatory campaign. By assassinating Gaza’s scholars, burning its libraries, looting its archives, and laying waste to its schools and universities, Israel has attempted not simply to make Gaza unlivable in the present but also, no less crucially, to deprive its Palestinian population of any viable future within it.

In the scale and speed of its destructiveness, Israel’s scholasticidal campaign is without historical precedent. All 12 of Gaza’s higher education institutions and 95.4% of its schools have been destroyed or damaged since October 2023, with the vast majority of this damage occurring in the first 12 months of Israel’s campaign. More than 625,000 of Gaza’s students have been indefinitely deprived of education, and well over 10,000 have been martyred. Never before has a people’s education system been so completely destroyed within so short a timeframe. 

The enormity of Israel’s violence should not, however, lead us to overlook the extraordinary resilience that Gaza’s teachers, students, and universities have displayed over the past 20 months. Nor should it blind us to the fact that Israel’s ongoing scholasticide, while unique in scale and scope, is merely the latest and most destructive chapter in a larger history of Zionist attacks on Palestinian education. Just as Israel’s genocide in Gaza cannot be understood in abstraction from the century of Zionist violence that preceded it, so too is it impossible to understand the scholasticidal dimension of Israel’s genocide without reference to Israel’s decades-long effort to undermine the educational aspirations of occupied Palestinians.

The rise and repression of Palestinian higher education 

One formative episode in this history of educational struggle took place in the 1970s, when Palestinians first began establishing universities within occupied Palestine itself. Following Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Palestinians living in these territories found themselves largely cut off from the Arab countries in which they had previously pursued higher education. Unwilling to resign themselves to this foreclosure of educational opportunity, Palestinians set about establishing universities that would provide their children with the educational futures they could no longer pursue elsewhere. 

By the early 1980s, no less than six universities had been formed in Palestine, including the recently destroyed Islamic University of Gaza. These universities quickly proved instrumental not only in advancing Palestinian literacy and education levels, but also in fostering social cohesion and nationalist sentiment among Palestinians of varying class, gender, and ideological backgrounds.

Unsurprisingly, Israeli authorities responded to the establishment of Palestinian universities with immediate hostility. No sooner had these universities been created than Israel began enacting a range of policies designed to institutionally debilitate them and mitigate any positive sociopolitical effects they might have. These policies initially included bans on university textbooks, denials of university construction permits, restrictions on university funding, periodic closures of university campuses, and the imposition of taxes and duties on university materials. When these policies proved ineffective in undermining the growth of Palestinian universities, Israel additionally placed all university curricula, faculty appointments, and student admissions under the near-total control of the occupation’s military governor.

Educational resistance during the first intifada 

If the goal behind these Israeli policies was, in Gabi Baramki’s words, “to turn [Palestinians] into an ignorant, disorganised, fragmented and easy-to-control subject population,” they achieved something closer to the opposite. By the mid-1980s, Palestinian teachers, students, and administrators had devised a variety of means by which to resist Israel’s policies and further the educational pursuits that Israel sought to undermine. Most notably, as Israeli-imposed closures became increasingly frequent in the early 1980s, Palestinians began to form what Israel termed “cells of illegal education”: namely, secret classes held in rotating locations that allowed students to continue learning during periods of closure.

Such practices of educational resistance proved especially vital during the first intifada (1987-91), when Israel’s attacks on Palestinian education intensified to never-before-seen levels. Among Israel’s first responses to the intifada’s outbreak was to order the closure of “all educational institutions ‘until further notice’” and to crack down on any students and teachers who continued educational activities in violation of this order. All Palestinian universities remained closed for the full duration of the intifada, and Palestinian students suffered arrest and torture for such “crimes” as possessing university textbooks and participating in off-campus classes. By the time the intifada had concluded, Israel had martyred hundreds of Palestinian students and incarcerated at least 790 teachers, many of whom were additionally subjected to deportation, arbitrary dismissal, or forced retirement. 

Despite the ferocity of Israel’s repression, Palestinians remained firmly committed to defending and furthering their educational pursuits as the intifada progressed. Indeed, such educational resistance was understood by many Palestinians as an integral dimension of the intifada itself. In a communiqué issued in March 1988, for example – just one month after Israel’s indefinite closure of schools and universities – the intifada’s Unified National Leadership called on Palestinian students and teachers to defy Israel’s orders and thereby “thwart the [Zionist] policy of miseducation”:

“One of the main pillars of Zionist policy is making our people ignorant and depriving them of the most basic rights stipulated in international conventions, the right to education. As such, the occupation’s authorities have proceeded with closing all our educational institutions, including universities, higher institutes, and schools. Through this, it has deprived approximately three million students from receiving education. The Intifada’s Unified National Leadership has decided to confront the occupation’s racist policies by breaking these decisions. It invites students, teachers, and the administrators of educational institutions […] to defy the decision of the occupation’s authorities by organizing an educational process on a national basis, to thwart the policy of miseducation enacted on our people” (UNLU Communiqué no. 10, March 1988)

This call was heeded in a variety of ways. University administrators, for example, organized off-campus classes, experimented with distance learning pedagogies, and reorganized their semester system to enable students to advance in their studies with as little disruption as possible. Private and UNRWA-affiliated schoolteachers similarly arranged off-campus classes for their pupils, while also designing and distributing home-study kits based on existing school curricula. 

Other educators took a more radical approach. More than simply finding ways to sustain existing educational programs in the face of Israeli repression, this group of educators created “popular teaching” projects that creatively integrated student learning with community support, national culture, and the unfolding intifada. The goal of these community-based projects, as Yamila Hussein puts it, was “to Palestinianize the curriculum with a vision of national identity and the national struggle.” To this end, educators tailored their lessons to the needs of their communities and utilized political leaflets, Palestinian poetry, and even intifada graffiti as materials for history- and language-learning. Rather than allowing Israeli policies to create a dichotomy between study and struggle – education and intifada – these and other Palestinian educators found ways to pursue both.

From the first intifada to the Gaza scholasticide

Brutal though they were, the Israeli policies that Palestinian students and teachers confronted during the first intifada were considerably less severe than those facing present-day Gaza. Where Israel once imposed closures on Gaza’s universities, today it bombs them. Where it once arrested Gaza’s professors, today it assassinates them. Where it once sought to debilitate Gaza’s education system, today it seeks to annihilate it. In short, Israel’s 1980s policies of educational repression have given way to a systematic campaign of educidal destruction.

The fact that Israel’s war on Palestinian education has escalated in this way should give us pause before conflating the educational struggles of previous generations with the one being waged in present-day Gaza. What it should not do, however, is lead us to exceptionalize the Gaza scholasticide in a manner that abstracts it from the decades of colonial violence and educational resistance that preceded it. While Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s education system is certainly unprecedented in scale, it exists on the same continuum of Zionist violence as Israel’s 1980s attacks on Palestinian schools, universities, and “cells of illegal education.” And while Gaza’s students and teachers certainly face challenges greater than those of their predecessors, their efforts to to sustain education via remote learning programs, makeshift classrooms, and temporary learning spaces draw on the same tradition of educational resistance that the first intifada exemplified.

The forms of violence have intensified with time, and the forms of resistance have grown more desperate, but the underlying struggle remains the same: Zionism against the Palestinians, colonial erasure against indigenous survivance. It is not a struggle that will last forever. The Palestinians will outlive, and one day triumph over, Israel’s efforts to steal their lands and eliminate their futures. When that day comes, however near or far it may be, the same Palestinian people that built universities for its children under Zionist occupation will build them anew, and better, in Zionism’s absence. “We built these universities from tents,” wrote a group of Gaza-based academics in a letter published last year. “And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.”