Scholasticide in Occupied Palestine: Our responsibility as intellectuals

• In Event: Education and Palestine: Defying Imposed Boundaries, Resisting Erasure, & Charting Educational Praxis Across Spaces

Proposal

The presentation will discuss the intimate relationship between the current genocide and scholasticide in Occupied Plestine. The relentless collective punishment inflicted on Palestinian intellectuals, academics and students since 1948 has been aptly described by Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi - long before the direct destruction of universities and schools - as a “slow, sadistic crushing of learning, a stifling of the life opportunities it provides” and tantamount to ‘scholasticide’. Today the scholasticide has increased in momentum and intensity.

The second section will show why the vast majority of South Africans while viscerally identifying with the struggle of Palestinians, also recognised Israel’s direct culpability in their own oppression including through higher education and research. Israel was an important arms supplier to Apartheid South Africa despite the international arms embargo and joint research and development through universities played an important role in cementing inter-racist collaboration.

The third section will begin by describing how Palestinian academics and students through the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), an essential part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS), critically studied the campaign against South Africa’s apartheid academy and developed their own guidelines.

The final section will analyse the solidarity movement in South Africa broadly but will pay particular attention to universities and relations with the South African state. It will cover the impact of the International Court of Justice case and describe various initiatives by staff and students in universities to pursue the academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions in the wake of the genocide.

Author

• Salim Vally, University of Johannesburg