Resisting Erasure: Scholasticide during the Gaza Genocide

• In Event: Grief as Remembrance: An Antidote to Institutional Trauma Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

This narrative inquiry project (Ladson Billings & Tate, 1995) argues that scholasticide (Nabulsi, 2009) in Palestine has “shifted from systematic destruction to the systematic annihilation of education” (Takriti and Desai, 2024) since the onset of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, becoming a central pillar of the genocide in Gaza. Since October 2023, Israel has obliterated all twelve universities in Gaza,
destroyed 95% of schools, and decimated most higher education institutions (Palestinian Ministry of Education, 2025). More than 222 academics and thousands of students have been killed (Palestinian
Ministry of Education), while Palestinian archives, libraries, bookstores, cultural heritage sites, and knowledge infrastructures have been bombed and erased (Desai, 2024). These attacks aim to eliminate the very conditions of Palestinian futurity by targeting the means of social continuity and the infrastructures through which Palestinians narrate, teach, learn, theorize, and remember their own history. This presentation draws from my research on the unprecedented scale of scholasticide in Gaza, an assault without historical parallel situating it as integral to the Israeli Zionist settler colonial project (Fayez, 1965). Scholasticide is not only about the elimination of Palestinian life and land but also about the erasure of memory and the capacity to remember (Desai, Hammad, Abu Shaban & Takriti, 2025). By targeting scholars, knowledge systems, and cultural heritage, Israel seeks to extinguish Palestinian intellectual and cultural continuity. Yet, under the most extreme conditions of colonial violence, Palestinian academics and students in Gaza have kept their non-profit public universities alive despite the infrastructural collapse, resisting this erasure through acts of educational steadfastness. Their resilience and persistence to teach and learn amidst ongoing bombardment, systematic starvation, and ongoing displacement and profound loss, is redefining what education and pedagogy mean in times of genocide, embodying a profound refusal to surrender memory, knowledge, and Palestine’s future.

Author

• Chandni Desai, University of Toronto