Scholasticide: Israel's Systematic Destruction of Palestinian Education as Genocidal Strategy

The Deliberate Annihilation of Gaza’s Educational Infrastructure

The term “scholasticide” - coined by Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi in 2009 - has found its most brutal manifestation in Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza’s education system. The facts are staggering and documented: every single school and university in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed since October 2023. Hundreds of educators, including senior professors, administrators, and internationally respected scholars, have been systematically killed. During just the first three months of the assault, Israel eliminated the President, former President, and several deans of the Islamic University of Gaza, the Strip’s largest university.

The physical destruction represents only one dimension of this coordinated attack. Hundreds of thousands of children and young people have endured repeated displacement, severe hunger, dehydration, and the complete absence of basic educational tools. Dr. Ahmed Kamal Junina, head of the English Department at Al-Aqsa University, described the bodily cost of attempting academic work under famine conditions: “Some days, my stomach cramps as I try to revise a single paragraph… Hunger is loud. I read, but hunger is shouting in my ear. I write, but the maw snaps with every keystroke.”

This devastation is not accidental collateral damage but represents a deliberate, systematic strategy that meets the definitional criteria of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Scholasticide includes the physical obliteration of educational infrastructure; the killing, starvation, and displacement of teachers and students; the imprisonment of educators; the obstruction of scholarly mobility; and the prevention of access to books, equipment, and international academic exchange.

Historical Context: A Settler-Colonial Pattern

The current assault represents an intensification rather than a rupture in Israel’s decades-long pattern of targeting Palestinian education. Since the Nakba of 1948, Israel has systematically undermined Palestinian knowledge systems. Israeli forces looted, confiscated, and destroyed Palestinian libraries and archives during the 1948 expulsions, again during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and repeatedly after the 1967 occupation.

Throughout the First and Second Intifadas, Israel closed Palestinian educational institutions for prolonged periods and regularly invaded university campuses, arresting students and damaging property. In 2022, Israel introduced new visa restrictions that effectively prevented most international scholars from teaching or conducting academic exchange with Palestinian universities. The pattern is clear and consistent: targeting education constitutes a fundamental strategy of settler-colonial elimination.

The assault extends beyond Gaza. Israeli forces forcibly shut down three UNRWA schools in East Jerusalem in May 2025 after the Knesset designated UNRWA a “terrorist organization.” They raided the Educational Bookshop, a major Palestinian cultural institution, arresting its owners and confiscating books containing the word “Palestine.” This systematic targeting violates international humanitarian law, which unequivocally protects cultural and educational institutions as civilian objects.

Scholasticide as Genocidal Modality

The intentional destruction of education constitutes a distinct modality of genocide that targets the conditions for social and cultural continuity. South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice in January 2024 detailed the destruction of schools, universities, libraries and other historical centres of learning, in addition to the killing of academics and educators, as part of the destruction of Palestinian life.

Scholasticide directly targets the “conditions of life” upon which collective survival depends. The levelling of universities, the killing of educators, the destruction of archives, and the disruption of access to education for children and youth create long-term societal harms that will shape Palestinian intellectual, cultural, and scientific life for decades to come. This represents what scholar Rob Nixon terms “slow violence” - structural violence that unfolds through the steady dismantling of institutions that enable intergenerational survival.

Genocide is not simply the elimination of bodies; it is the elimination of the possibility of collective continuity. Destroying education is therefore not collateral damage but a strategic attempt to annihilate Palestinian futures. This systematic erasure of educational capacity represents a calculated assault on Palestinian identity, memory, and future potential.

Western Complicity and Academic Hypocrisy

The response of Western universities - institutions that claim to champion critical inquiry, academic freedom, and global citizenship - has been strikingly inadequate. Most universities in the UK, US, and Europe have offered little more than silence, often justified through claims to “neutrality.” This silence constitutes complicity in genocide.

Western universities are materially complicit in two distinct ways. First, many institutions invest substantial sums in companies directly implicated in Israeli violations of international law. Research shows that UK universities collectively hold hundreds of millions of pounds in shares across corporations enabling Israel’s military occupation and genocidal assault on Gaza, including arms manufacturers and technology firms supporting occupation infrastructure.

Second, universities receive extensive research funding from the arms industry itself. UK universities have taken almost £100 million from major defence companies whose weapons, surveillance systems, and military technologies are currently deployed in Gaza. This funding shapes research agendas, deepens institutional entanglement with militarism, and normalises collaboration with corporations directly involved in ongoing mass violence.

This material entanglement is reinforced by the suppression of campus solidarity. In the US, police were repeatedly deployed to dismantle student encampments opposing Israel’s assault. In the UK, universities threatened students with costly legal action for occupying campus spaces, while disciplinary procedures proliferated. Students have been surveilled, materials displaying solidarity with Palestinians have been removed, and academic events have been cancelled.

These actions reveal what scholars Basma Hajir and Mezna Qato term the “scholasticidal tendencies” of Western universities: institutions whose actions undermine Palestinian educational survival by upholding the structures that destroy it. The failure to act in solidarity with Gaza’s academic institutions reflects a deeper, systemic racism in which Palestinian scholars are rendered intellectually disposable.

The Imperative of Solidarity and Resistance

Despite unimaginable hardship, Palestinian educators and students continue to teach, study, and create. Universities in Gaza have offered online instruction since summer 2024. Teachers conduct classes in tents and makeshift spaces. Students persist in preparing for exams and completing coursework. Their determination testifies to the centrality of education in sustaining collective life and resisting eradication.

What Palestinian scholars demand from the international academic community is not charity but solidarity. Across campuses globally, students and staff have mobilized to demand that their universities divest from arms manufacturers, technology firms, and corporations complicit in Israel’s occupation, apartheid, and genocide. These campaigns insist that institutions must align their financial practices with the ethical values they publicly proclaim.

Supporting Palestinian education means supporting the people within our own institutions who resist scholasticide. It means standing with students and staff who are penalized for rejecting the myth of neutrality, defending academic freedom when it is exercised on behalf of the colonized rather than the powerful, and recognizing that campaigns for divestment are integral to academic responsibility.

Universities are not neutral spaces; they are political and economic institutions embedded in systems of power. When those systems enable colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, neutrality and silence becomes complicity. Academic responsibility today requires more than producing knowledge - it requires asking what that knowledge is for, who it serves, and whether we are willing to confront our own institutions’ entanglement in systems of violence.

If we claim to teach “global justice,” “decolonization,” or “critical inquiry,” then confronting scholasticide is not optional - it is a test of the very values we profess. To remain silent is to side with power over justice. To defend students and staff who speak out, to join campaigns for divestment, and to stand in solidarity with Palestinian scholars is to affirm that education itself is a site of resistance.

The systematic destruction of Palestinian education represents not only an attack on Palestinian society but on the very concept of education as a human right and collective good. The international academic community must recognize that our silence and complicity enable this genocide. We must choose sides: either we stand with the oppressed fighting for their right to learn and exist, or we stand with the oppressors seeking to eliminate them. There is no neutral ground in the face of scholasticide - only complicity or resistance.