“I know what an incredible teacher can mean to a child…A good teacher holds the power to influence, inspire, and shape a young person’s life for the better. They represent the key to real change in this world,” These are the words of one Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, said via video link at the second annual Global Teacher award ceremony in Dubai in 2016. The winner of the “Nobel-style” award worth $1 million at that time was a Palestinian named Hanan al-Hroub.
Hanan, who grew up in a refugee camp near Bethlehem, won the award for her work supporting children traumatized by violence, a violence she knew all too well when her 9-year-old twins and 6-year-old son were shot at by IDF soldiers during the second Intifada. Only around 10 years earlier had her husband, a chemist, been released by Israeli authorities after a decade-long incarceration.
Violence targeting and affecting the educational infrastructure of the Palestinian State, specifically inside of the Gaza Strip concentration camp, is no outlier when it comes to the strategy of the zionist military. On the 10th of October, 2023, the IOF bombed the first university established in the strip, the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), destroying multiple buildings and disrupting the lives of thousands of students and faculty. Around the same time, Palestine Technical College announced two of their students had been killed in airstrikes, while a PhD student and his family on vacation in the strip were also victims of zionist air-to-surface missiles. What Palestinian students and teachers have been subjected to what can only be described as scholasticide, with most having not attended school for over a year under the relentless destruction caused by the invading forces of the zionist entity.
A Brief History of Higher Education in the Gaza Strip
Before 1967, no universities existed in either the occupied West Bank nor the Gaza Strip. Palestinian students, however, enjoyed free access to numerous Arab universities across the Middle East. Due to the fact that people in the West Bank were considered Jordanian citizens, most had direct access to the University of Jordan. Likewise, those in the strip could go to Egypt to complete their degrees.
This access was curbed when the zionists, after their crushing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, enforced their occupation, stiffening border security and harassing those leaving and reentering alike, making a trip abroad almost completely impossible. It was around this time that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) started to heavily consider independent higher education inside Palestine itself. By 1978, a few existing junior colleges had been expanded and two universities, the An-Najah National University in the West Bank and the aforementioned IUG, had been founded.
The zionists, of course, could not handle what it saw as an attempt to subvert their authority, and began to burden the schools with numerous obstacles. Licensing was time consuming and strictly enforced on an annual basis, building permits were stalled and fought tooth-and-nail all the way to the Supreme Court, and military authorities illegally withheld tax exemptions on construction, materials, and books. Censorship of books and other written material on school campuses was regular under the pretence of “security reasons,” as was withholding work permits for international faculty and Palestinians with Jordanian citizenship. Yet more, this battle of red tape paled in comparison to the military-enforced shutdowns that schools were regularly subjected to, a sinister prelude to the scholasticide we see happening today.
The State of Education in Gaza Today
Since the zionist onslaught on the Gaza Strip renewed in October, 2023, access to education has been reduced to nearly zero. What remains of structured education has been limited to rudimentary study groups within tents turned makeshift classrooms. Even this, as bare bones as it sounds, is regularly uprooted by constant “evacuation orders” and random airstrikes. The destruction of more than 378 schools and universities across the strip led to these conditions, and the pariah state of “israel” sees no reason to stop their crimes against humanity.
It is estimated that, at the very least, 11,500 students below the age of 18 have been murdered, along with 750 of their teachers as of September. Because of the lack of resources, finding a true body count is impossible at this stage, leaving the Ministry of Health and international organizations alike in the dark about any sort of real estimate. This inability to properly count casualties, of course, plays into the narrative that ANY number given is false and created by “Hamas” to discredit “israel”, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and also suggests that any official count is a vast underestimate. We can easily transfer this logic of an undercount to the official number of teachers and students who have been made victims in the year-long massacre, showing the extent of pure devastation that has been wrought on the education system of Gaza. There is a clear line between the targeted military shutdowns of the past to the genocide by air we see being committed today; it is clear that the zionist entity sees education, not only of the higher variety but of elementary and secondary as well, as a form of independence for Palestinian people that it just cannot let live, and a direct threat to the legitimacy of the ethno-state occupying Palestinian lands.
Scholasticide as an Imperial strategy
What we see in Gaza is an extension of imperial science; no cultural institution may get in the way of empire’s ambitions. If the institution, or even the subjects within the institution, start to fall out of line with said strategy, certain advantages once enjoyed by said institution can be readily taken away. An example of this is the spring and summer of 2024, when students across the United States and Canada rose up, occupying campuses and buildings alike in an attempt to force these imperial entities to stop supporting what the zionists’ genocide of Palestinians. What should have been accepted as a show of our great “first amendment rights” turned into a state crackdown, supported by both parties in the U.S. government and spurred on by President Joe Biden. What these crackdowns show is how easily the privileged status of colleges and universities can be revoked when the students and faculty take even one step out of the bounds set by the imperial masters, the status quo that reinforces the norm of violence unto those in the peripheries.
The zionists did not invent this strategy. The attacks being inflicted on vital Palestinian educational infrastructure is an age-old colonial tactic, one that must be combatted at all costs, with vehement opposition from those in the imperial core being used to amplify the voices of those within the periphery. Palestine must be free, and its education must be allowed to flourish to nourish a vibrant national identity. We in the metropole must do our part in aiding them in their valiant attempt to throw off their oppressors.
Education and National Identity
The removal of education – already established as a fundamental strategy of the IOF in Gaza – can be seen as an extension of the goal the entity has had since even before the Nakba of 1948: the total elimination of a Palestinian nationality. Strong national ties to a state’s higher institutions have helped cultivate the culture and language of any one given region, giving certain peoples a “permission to narrate” their own story as said by Edward Said. Imagine England without Oxford, Germany sans Heidelberg, and the United States itself without its precious prodigious Ivy League schools. To have these is to have a certain authority, one which, despite the myriad mistakes and problems within them as they exist at present, lends a certain credence to the people associated. Criticisms aside, academia has the unique ability to assist the progression of a group, especially when academics stay within their locales. Cuba, despite crushing sanctions on the tiny island, has produced, beyond its limits, world-class doctors. These doctors have, to the chagrin of many Western nations (specifically the U.S.) elevated the status of the country. If a region does not suffer a brain drain, these college educated people can lead to a drastically more self-sufficient society.
The zionists know this, and they may have discovered it after they created their own so-called “problem.” As noted before, Palestinians were only able to leave to get any higher education. The West Bank alone was Jordanian territory. Israel itself created the conditions that led to the establishment of universities after their 1967 victory, isolating Palestinians to the Gaza Strip and the aforementioned West Bank, which no longer fell under Jordanian jurisdiction. Only after this isolation from other Arab states forced upon them by the occupation did the PLO even consider the need for higher learning within Palestinian territory. A reliance on Arab nationalism may have stifled any ideas for this before, but now there was a necessity.
The establishment of universities in 1978 coincided with the slow movement of the Palestinians away from strict Arab nationalism and into a homegrown identity of those still within the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. By the late 80’s and the First Intifada, most of the leadership of the PLO had not stepped foot into Palestine proper in decades. The rise and subsequent popularity of Hamas thereafter shows a clear split from those abroad and those within the territories actively under occupation by Israel.
Doctors and researchers were not absent; in fact the lack of mobility actually led to the majority of educated people in Palestine to stay there, to foster their skills and use them to full effect. This has led to highly skilled, highly motivated, and, to the zionists’ dissatisfaction, a highly homogenous populace. Those in Gaza and the West Bank aren’t, for a lack of a better word, stupid, nor are they confused, unfocused, helpless refugees. Palestinians have, despite everything stacked against them, fostered a deep academic tradition that has ushered them out of the PLO years where they relied heavily on their Arab siblings. When that reliance failed, they, undeterred, set out to carve their own path. Resolutely and unabashedly, the people within Palestine did what zionism could not bear; they chose to take back their permission to narrate, their ability to tell their own story with their own words, and become self-reliant within and despite the structures of occupation that hang over their heads decade after decade.
Zionism cannot let such things persist, because if they do, if a single school still stands, that means, with their settler-colonial mindset, Palestine as a people, as a nation, still has hope. For zionism to survive, this hope must be snuffed out at all costs. Zionism must block the light that is a Palestinian tomorrow.
Leave a Reply