Gaza's education system is suffering. Impose an academic boycott on Israel

On October 11, the Israeli Air Force proudly released a video of its attack against the Islamic University of Gaza, the area's oldest higher education institution, created in 1978.

The bombardment resulted in the destruction of four of the buildings on campus and extensive damage to university equipment, laboratories and furniture. The message was clear from the beginning of Israel’s attack on Gaza: Palestinian education institutions must be destroyed.

On this International Education Day, we should think about tangible measures and actions we must take to counter Israel’s aggression against the Palestinian education system–an aggression without precedent in the history of the region.

At the beginning of November, air attacks targeted Al Azhar University, the second largest university in Gaza, followed by the destruction of Al Quds University later that month.

Israel justified these attacks by saying they were in response to the alleged use of civilian infrastructures by Palestinian armed groups to shield "military training camps." This is an excuse it has used without supporting evidence to also legitimise the devastation of hospitals, schools, civilian buildings, and other infrastructure in Gaza.

But since the beginning of December, the shielding lie about the education sector was further exposed. In fact, Israeli ground troops started occupying and using Palestinian university buildings as military positions, before filling them with hundreds of mines and carrying out controlled detonations of the universities in front of cameras.

There was no military threat emerging from the buildings, thus the army’s intent was pure elimination for the sake of elimination.

Israeli soldiers would then share the videos of themselves committing these crimes and pulverising Palestinian higher education infrastructures online.

For example, the case of the Faculty of Medicine at the Islamic University in December, and more recently the destruction of Israa University in Gaza City. The building of Israa, which also hosted 3,000 rare artefacts that were looted by Israeli soldiers, was used as an interrogation and sniping centre to target civilians in the adjacent areas, before being blown up.

The systematic destruction of Palestinian education centres (a process Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi has called "scholasticide") and the attacks on Palestinian spaces of knowledge and culture production and circulation (what scholars call "epistemicide") is a structural feature of Israel’s regime of settler colonial dispossession.

In the occupied West Bank, Israel has been repressing Palestinian education and attacking students, educational personnel, schools and universities for decades. Schools, universities, students and personnel in Gaza have also been subjected to the same treatment until the 2005 "disengagement," to be then bombarded in all the rounds of Israeli aggression which followed the beginning of the siege of Gaza in 2007.

However, these most recent attacks have passed the threshold of imagination. The figures are horrifying. According to Euro Med Human Rights Monitor and the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education, 94 academics, 4,327 students, 231 teachers and administrators have been killed since Oct. 7.

All university buildings in Gaza have been completely or partially destroyed. Some 281-run public schools and 65 United Nations schools have been completely destroyed or damaged. In other words, the Palestinian space of education in Gaza has been obliterated, to such an extent that when the genocide will be over, there will not be an education system to return to.

In an open call, Palestinian academics have invited their colleagues abroad to take action against the genocide and the destruction of education institutions.

But how has Israeli academia responded to the extermination of their colleagues and the unprecedented destruction of education infrastructures? So far, we have not heard any institutional condemnation of Palestinian scholasticide and epistemicide.

On the contrary, this deafening silence has been accompanied by systematic attacks within Israeli academic institutions, mainly against Palestinian students and staff, but also against internal Jewish Israeli dissenters, for their solidarity with Gaza.

The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) has reported how since the beginning of the attacks in October, Israeli academic institutions have suppressed academic freedom and freedom of speech by suspending, investigating and expelling students for expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people.

In addition, Hebrew University has issued a public letter potentially inciting verbal and physical violence against Nadera Shalhoub-Kovorkian, a Palestinian professor who signed a petition in support of a ceasefire in Gaza.

Meanwhile, the David Yellin Academic College suspended Nurit Peled Elhanan, a Jewish professor and Sakharov Prize laureate, for criticising a comparison between Hamas and the Nazis in a colleagues’ Whatsapp chat.

This picture is part of a historical trend of complicity of Israeli academic institutions with the repression and dispossession of Palestinians, both within Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Universities in Israel collaborate on the development of weapons, military doctrines and ideological discourses which facilitate and normalise the settler colonial ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.

Just to mention a recent example closely related to ongoing events in Gaza, Joel Roskin, a geographer at the Hebrew University and a "geolocation expert" who works with the Israeli military, penned an opinion article in the Jerusalem Post advocating for the depopulation of Gaza and the expulsion of Palestinians to Sinai as a "humanitarian solution."

One of his colleagues, Meir Masri, who according to his Twitter bio teaches politics and international relations at Hebrew University, recently posted that Gaza must be destroyed and "razed to the ground."

This is really an unprecedented situation in which we have to understand that the epistemicide and scholasticide in Gaza are not a metaphor. They are part of the destruction of Palestinian collective life and they are ultimately genocidal acts which require our immediate action and mobilisation.

So what can be done?

At the international institutional level, UNESCO should honour this International Education Day by taking concrete measures to protect the human right to education of Palestinian students and staff, and more broadly the existence of the Palestinian education sector which is under existential threat in Gaza.

It should also immediately exclude Israel from its member states. This step was indeed taken by UNESCO’s regional groups in 1974, in the same year in which the organisation issued the “Recommendation concerning Education for International Understanding, Cooperation and Peace and Education relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms,” a key document that inspires today’s celebrations. However, it was rescinded a few years later.

At the individual and academic institutional level, we should honour the call of our Palestinian colleagues for a full academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions by intensifying existing boycott efforts.

This is the only concrete tool we have to act immediately as responsible colleagues who care for those who are being eliminated with their education system, in Israel’s settler colonial effort to erase the conditions of possibility of transmission of Palestinian culture, memory and presence in Gaza.

We should ask our universities to break the silence and terminate all forms of complicity with what is going on in Gaza by rescinding their institutional collaborations with Israeli universities and their investments in companies complicit with Israel’s regime of dispossession.

We should organise and ask our academic associations, societies and unions to vote for a boycott and join the many national and international associations and societies which have decided to suspend their relationship with Israel’s universities. The boycott is institutional and is not directed towards individuals, and signifies a concrete commitment to anti-racism, anticolonialism and the human rights of our Palestinian colleagues.