Decolonial Feminist Praxis and the Erasure of Indigenous Knowledge in Gaza: Confronting Systemic Academic Repression and Colonial Violence

• In Event: Decolonial Theories and Pedagogies of Liberation: Resistance and Re-Existence

Abstract

This paper explores Israel’s escalated genocide in Gaza and focuses on the annihilation of intellectual and cultural sources of Indigenous knowledge through a Palestinian feminist praxis for academic freedom that foregrounds that education is liberation and anchored in rebellion as a communal process. This requires a praxis capable of addressing the unprecedented levels of institutional violence against Palestinians, including our own universities’ investments in Israel and their tactics of repression and censorship (Kirstein, 2016; Mearsheimer, 2015).
The paper examines how sophicide and scholasticide in Gaza function as mechanisms of colonial erasure and how they intersect with broader structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism (Rodriguez, 2019; Sharif et al., 2024). We integrate the works of scholars like Maria Lugones (2007) on the coloniality of gender, exploring how these mechanisms operate within the colonial/modern gender system. Decoloniality also names a school of thought that seeks to understand the architecture of the processes of dispossession, extraction, and enclosure as racialized, sexualized, and gendered processes. We deliberately choose to first discuss the people to work against the imperial ideas of property and capital over people. This work contributes to the transdisciplinary approach of decoloniality by highlighting the intellectual genealogies of decolonial and abolitionist thought within the Palestinian context. By integrating Palestinian feminist and decolonial methodologies (Atallah, 2022; Ihmoud, 2024), this work challenges and disrupts modern/colonial systems of knowledge and racialized social structures (Tuck & Yang, 2014; Betasamosake Simpson, 2017). Israel’s academic repression has extended beyond Palestine and into U.S. and Canadian education centers across Turtle Island, reflecting a systemic failure by university administrators and other authorities to protect students, educators, and staff in their communities and the pursuit of knowledge free from harm (Palestine Legal & Center for Constitutional Rights, 2015). These attacks on Indigenous knowledge carriers impact entire generations of learners, crushing their aspirations and dreams. We will then discuss Israel's intentional destruction of all physical centers of knowledge, scholasticide, which includes educational resources, infrastructures, and archives, as well as the erasure, censorship, and repression of Palestinian history, epistemology, scholarship, and subjectivity. The assaults on academic infrastructure extend beyond physical buildings, affecting the foundations that support learning and intellectual growth throughout Palestine. This essay contributes to advancing a relational and planetary perspective of colonial structures and histories, aligning with the vision of amplifying decolonial discourses and practices from regions often overlooked in mainstream academic discourse in the Global North. Through this contribution, we aim to broaden the understanding of Palestinian feminism and decolonial theories and highlight the theories and praxes emerging from distinct yet historically connected geographies. This perspective is informed by theorists like Frantz Fanon and Chela Sandoval, who have emphasized the importance of decolonial frameworks in challenging colonial structures. Additionally, Rocío Zambrana’s (2022) work on decoloniality involves material praxes of reckoning with histories of capture, dispossession, and expulsion that continue to operate in the present neoliberal terrain.

Authors

• Amanda Najib, New York University

• Lila Sharif, Arizona State University

• Amira Jamarkani, San Diego State University