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The post-October 7 “Israel-Hamas War” has devastated the Palestinian educational system. Since the beginning of Israel’s military assault on the Gaza Strip, schools in the territory have been forced to cease operation, depriving all Palestinian youth of educational access. Israeli aerial attacks have resulted in the full or partial destruction of 370 elementary and secondary schools, as well as all 12 of Gaza’s universities. These conditions are neither accidental acts of violence nor incidental consequences of war. Rather, as Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi has aptly noted, they reveal the Israeli nation-state’s commitment to scholasticide, or “the systematic destruction of Palestinian education.” Since Nabulsi first coined the term in 2009, scholasticide has been increasingly used by scholars, activists, and journalists as a means of spotlighting the specific tactics and measurable impact of Israeli state violence within Gaza.
While compelling in its descriptive power, the concept of scholasticide remains analytically under-examined. Academic and media framings of scholasticide, which have largely and uncritically echoed Nabulsi initial definition, have focused almost exclusively on the physical impact of Israeli military violence on the operational capacity and physical integrity of K-16 schools and universities in the Gaza Strip. While both urgent and necessary, this narrow analytic focus has come at the expense of the wide range of informal, unofficial, and counter-public educational spaces within Palestinian society that have been equally compromised by Israeli state violence. This focus on the formal and the material has also circumscribed our pedagogical imaginations, prompting us to neglect the diverse array of contexts, practices, and texts that shape our individual and collective understandings of the world.
In this conceptual article, I offer a more expansive and nuanced conceptualization of scholasticide. Drawing from nearly ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in historic Palestine, as well as a wide range of archival and media sources, I spotlight several distinct but practices Israeli scholasticide: the repurposing and/or destruction of built educational environments; the reorganization and/or elimination of sites of public pedagogy; the re-inscription, erasure, or counter-narration of collective memory; and the surveillance, criminalization, and targeted violence against radical education workers and communities.
Based on this analysis, I argue scholasticide is not merely an outgrowth nor an index of the extraordinary material violence that has accompanied Israel’s ongoing post-2006 siege on Gaza. Instead, scholasticide represents a form of settler-colonial praxis -marked by processes of erasure, extraction, destruction, removal, and death- that is foundational to the political Zionist project. In addition to offering new units of empirical analysis for educational researchers and scholars of the Middle East, such insights are critical for expanding our understandings of the relationship between educational processes and various practices of settler-colonialism, genocide, nationalism, and violence.