The role and power of education in an occupied society is enormous. Education posits possibilities, opens horizons. Freedom of thought contrasts sharply with the apartheid wall, the shackling checkpoints, the choking prisons. … The Israelis know nothing about who we really are, while we study and study them. But deep down they know how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution. They cannot abide it and have to destroy it.
– Karma Nabulsi
Education has long played a central role in Palestinian history, identity, and struggle. Prior to Zionist colonization, Palestine was a flourishing center of culture and learning within the Arab world. The Nakba of 1948 dismembered Palestine’s sociocultural fabric and drove the majority of its population into exile, but it did not prevent Palestinians from developing educational initiatives, acquiring university degrees, and engaging in cultural production in surrounding Arab countries. By the time that Palestinians began establishing universities within occupied Palestine itself, education had become an integral arena of national self-empowerment, future-building, and steadfastness (sumud) in the face of ongoing Zionist aggression. “Education is not just a means of imparting knowledge,” wrote a group of Gaza’s academics in an open letter last May. “It is a vital pillar of our existence and a beacon of hope for the Palestinian people.”
Given its centrality to Palestinian identity and struggle, it is unsurprising that education has been a consistent target of Zionism’s settler-colonial violence. Determined to erase Palestinians from history and deny them a future on their homeland, the Israeli occupation has engaged in a decades-long pattern of looting and destroying Palestinian libraries and archives; repressing and imprisoning Palestinian academics; criminalizing Palestinian student unions; torturing student activists; and raiding, bombing, and imposing closures on Palestinian schools and universities. Israel’s assaults on Palestinian education have reached unprecedented heights since October 2023, during which it has killed more than 10,000 Palestinian students and perpetrated a campaign of scholasticide in Gaza. In the span of a year, Israel has destroyed or severely damaged all twelve of Gaza’s universities, 454 of the territory’s schools, and 69 of its cultural heritage sites. Israel has additionally conducted assassinations of Palestinian academics, mass arrests of Palestinian students, and controlled demolitions of Palestinian educational facilities. At no point in history has a people’s educational system been so comprehensively destroyed within so short a timeframe.
Notwithstanding the magnitude of Israel’s ongoing assault, Palestinians in Gaza have continued to keep educational practices and pursuits alive in a remarkable variety of ways. Refusing to surrender their hopes and futures to Zionism’s exterminatory logic, Palestinians have organized remote learning programs, converted homes and tents into makeshift classrooms, and developed initiatives to restore Gaza’s educational system and reconstruct its universities in the wake of Israel’s aggression. “My perspective on education has shifted,” wrote one student in a recent testimony. “It is no longer just a personal goal but a form of resistance — a beacon of hope to me in the midst of this Israeli genocide.”
The purpose of this project is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to provide a comprehensive record of Israel’s campaign of scholasticide in Gaza. Rather than treating this campaign in abstract isolation, we situate it within the larger history of Israeli colonial aggression toward Palestinian education, culture, and peoplehood. On the other hand, this project pays tribute to the steadfastness of Palestinian students, parents, academics, and educators. In short, the story this project tells is not simply one of Zionist destruction. It is equally a story of Palestinian resistance, resilience, and refusal to surrender in the face of overwhelming odds.