Earlier this month, the United Nations special rapporteur, Farida Shaheed, confirmed that more than 90% of schools — and every single university — in Gaza had “been completely or partially destroyed, rendering them inoperable”. She described the situation as “scholasticide”, a term first invoked by the UN in April 2024 when another special rapporteur, Francesca P. Albanese, suggested that Israel was undertaking “an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system”. By this point, six months into the genocide, 80% of Gaza’s schools and universities had been damaged or destroyed.
Israel’s wilful destruction of educational institutions — and more broadly, of archives, art, literature, and entire libraries — was first described by the Palestinian political theorist, Karma Nabulsi, as “scholasticide” in 2009. “Deep down,” she suggested at the time, Israel “know[s] how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution. They cannot abide it and have to destroy it.”
Education has long been central to the Palestinian identity, with literacy rates today among the highest in the world, higher even than Israel’s. This intellectual life emerged in the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods around print culture, literary and political salons, producing a multilingual intelligentsia. During the Mandate period, critical debates emerged in earnest, engaging with both modernist and anti-colonial strands of thought, as well as new institutions like the Arab College in Jerusalem training the generation that would form the backbone of the nationalist movement.
But the Nakba in 1948, in which 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes, dispersed many of these intellectuals across the region, producing a cohort of journalists, teachers, and writers operating from exile. It was in this context that refugee camps began to function as classrooms and an anti-colonial literary culture prospered, featuring poet-activists like Tawfiq Ziad and Samih al-Qasim.
It was with the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1960s that revolutionary culture truly began to flourish, with some of Palestine’s most recognisable writers making their mark: among them were the poet, Mahmoud Darwish, the novelist, Ghassan Kanafani, the political scientist, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, and many others. All of these thinkers straddled the line among teachers, writers, and activists, some going into formal politics, others turning to guerrilla struggle. Throughout this period, the PLO supported cultural centres and research institutes, both in refugee camps and among exiled communities abroad.
Political militancy and intellectual activity became truly indistinguishable in this period, forming the backbone of the Palestinian national identity. During the First Intifada, Palestinian universities continued to flourish despite consistent crackdowns by Israel’s occupation forces. Admittedly, some of these intellectuals turned from universities to donor-funded think tanks, yielding a new technocratic elite that would subsequently go on to run the Palestinian Authority. But this period was equally marked by resurgent anti-colonial thought that included figures like the anthropologist, Lila Abu-Lughod, the sociologist, Sari Hanafi, and, of course, the literary critic, Edward Said.
Today, diaspora intellectuals emphasise the role of Palestine in global debates on colonialism, empire, and resistance. But we would be remiss to think of Palestinian intellectual life as only operating from exile. Until Israel’s ongoing genocide began, universities in the occupied territories were centres of precisely this tradition: what Kanafani, Said, and others used to call “resistance culture”, synthesising a deep scholarly sensibility with political militancy and national identity.
But since October 7, 2023, this intellectual life has been utterly decimated: hence the repeated invocation of scholasticide, or what we might even describe as ‘epistemicide’ — the destruction of an entire tradition, an entire system, of knowledge. By the most conservative estimates, Israel has now targeted three university presidents, over a hundred professors, and a countless number of students — easily in the many thousands, and likely much higher. They are all dead, and more than 600,000 students remain unable to attend school. Every single university in Gaza remains inoperable.
In April, the Associated Press
described scenes from the main auditorium at Gaza’s Islamic University, which Israel had bombed beyond recognition. This “gutted, burned-out wreck,” as the AP described it, is now the site of an impromptu refugee camp, with hundreds of families huddled in tents in the hopes that they may survive the genocide. Without any access to fuel, they have no choice but to start cooking fires with books from the university’s library, their last resort.
This scene is not unique, though it is often Israeli soldiers burning the books, as they were photographed doing at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City. These book-burnings were not captured by independent journalists who are effectively banned from entering Gaza by the Israeli State. (And indeed, Israel has killed more journalists in Gaza since October 7 than any nation-state has in any conflict in modern history.) Rather, it was Israeli soldiers gleefully filming themselves carrying out these acts, posting videos of themselves posing in front of flaming libraries on social media.
The scholasticide Israel is still carrying out in Gaza is not collateral damage; it is the entire point, the systematic destruction of the intellectual life that forms the backbone of the Palestinian national identity. I am reminded of Raphael Lemkin’s discussion of genocide, first introduced in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Lemkin was clear: “Genocide does not mean the immediate destruction of a nation… It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.” He went on to specify what he meant by these “essential foundations”, highlighting “the suppression of national education and culture” as being at the core of any genocide. The erasure of a people’s ability to transmit knowledge and memory, he insisted, was just as destructive as physical killing.
Despite Lemkin’s efforts, when his term was enshrined by the UN in the 1948 Genocide Convention, both the US and the USSR made sure that the destruction of education and culture was removed from early drafts — fearful that they too might qualify as committing genocide by such a definition.
But as we see today, with Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, scholasticide is a central component of the erasure of a people. Beyond physical elimination, genocide entails the murder of a national tradition. And it is that tradition — that past — that sets the bar for how Gaza must be rebuilt — not as a dream world of neoliberalism but as a worthy embodiment of the multilingual, multiethnic, cosmopolitan vision at the heart of this rich cultural, intellectual, and political tradition.
Zachary Levenson teaches sociology at Florida International University and is the author of Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City. He is an editor of the journal, Spectre
