The attack on education in Gaza is a warning for the world

On January 6, 2025, the American Historical Association (AHA) overwhelmingly voted in favour of a resolution titled “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza”—a move that explicitly condemned the destruction of Palestinian education by the Israeli military.

Proposed by Historians for Peace and Democracy, the resolution passed with 428 members in favour, 88 against, and four abstentions. It underscored how Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, bolstered by over $12.5 billion in U.S. military aid from October 2023 to June 2024, had effectively obliterated Gaza’s education system.

UN experts warned as early as April 2024 that Israel’s attacks on schools, universities, teachers, and students amounted to a deliberate effort to eradicate Palestinian education—an act defined as scholasticide.

Scholasticide is often an overlooked aspect of imperial warfare, but its consequences are complex and long-lasting.

The term scholasticide refers to the systematic destruction of educational institutions, scholars, and knowledge systems as a means of suppressing a people’s cultural and intellectual future. Coined by the Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi, the concept has deep historical roots, aligning with broader frameworks of epistemic violence and cultural genocide.

In an interview with Democracy Now, Sherene Seikaly, a professor at UC Santa Barbara and editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, spoke about the AHA conference, declaring that the victory of the resolution represented a moment of resistance against the ongoing obliteration of Palestinian intellectual life.

“Since October 2023, Israel, armed, aided and abetted by the United States, has destroyed 80% of the schools in the Gaza Strip and every single university. And another thing that I think is often put to the side or marginalised, and we really have to centre as historians, is that almost every single archive, library and bookstore have been bombed and destroyed by Israel. And so, this genocide is really attempting to destroy our capacity to narrate our past and to imagine our future.”

In Gaza, reports confirmed that by December 2024 more than 230 schools had been destroyed, and at least 140,000 students had been left without access to formal education.

The statistics are staggering, with 261 teachers and 95 university professors killed, dozens of universities bombed beyond repair, and nearly half a million students displaced from their learning environments.

This is not collateral damage but an intentional war against Palestinian intellectual survival. Schools and universities are deliberately bombed under the justification that they harbour “militants,” despite being filled with students and faculty members. This mirrors historical instances of colonial and imperialist regimes targeting education as a means of eradicating resistance, identity, and intellectual autonomy.

Education has always been a battleground in imperialist warfare.

Throughout history, imperialist regimes have deliberately destroyed indigenous education systems to control, assimilate, or eliminate colonised peoples. The term ‘epistemic violence’ describes how dominant groups erase, suppress, or devalue the knowledge systems of the colonised.

British colonialism in India saw the deliberate dismantling of centuries-old learning institutions in favour of English-language education policies, a system formalised in 1835 under Thomas Macaulay’s infamous "Minute on Indian Education", a pivotal document in the history of British colonial education policy in India. Macaulay argued for the promotion of English education in India and for the systematic undermining of local languages and literatures.

Similarly, in the Americas, the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century led to the wholesale destruction of indigenous libraries, including the systematic burning of Mayan codices in 1562 by Bishop Diego de Landa, who saw them as heretical. Only a few fragments of these rich intellectual traditions survive today.

French colonial rule in Algeria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries systematically suppressed Arabic-language education, closing Islamic madrasas and replacing them with French-language schools that sought to erase Algerian identity.

Similar policies were enacted in West Africa, where France’s policy of assimilation ensured that local histories and languages were effectively erased from curricula. For example, in Senegal, the French colonial government imposed a curriculum that was entirely based on French values and history. This meant that the rich oral traditions, local folklore, and histories of the Senegalese people were excluded from education.

These historical precedents demonstrate how education is not merely a neutral institution but a deeply political one, weaponised to maintain control over subjugated peoples.

In the event of epistemic violence and culture erasure, many scholars are rejecting neutrality. Edward Said reminds us that the major task of the intellectual is to “reveal the disparity between the so-called two sides, which appear rhetorically and ideologically to be in perfect balance but are not in fact. To reveal that there is an oppressed and an oppressor, a victim and a victimiser, and unless we recognise that, we are nowhere”.

Imperial regimes have always targeted centres of knowledge production. When a people’s intellectual foundation is destroyed, so is their ability to resist, rebuild, and reclaim their autonomy.

In the face of cultural genocide and epistemic erasure, we must focus on restoring and revitalising traditional knowledge systems, which are systematically undermined by colonial powers.

This involves not only protecting local languages and cultural practices but also integrating traditional knowledge into contemporary education frameworks. Oral traditions and other community-based knowledge sharing practices should be given due appreciation and funding alongside the formal education systems that have historically marginalised them.

Leveraging modern technology also presents an opportunity for historically oppressed communities to bypass traditional barriers to education and knowledge preservation. Digital platforms can serve as modern archives for indigenous knowledge, providing access to resources that have been denied or distorted in mainstream educational systems.

Decolonising education is a critical step, which requires dismantling curricula that have long been rooted in Western, colonial ideologies. This isn’t just about adding indigenous perspectives but rethinking the very foundation of what is considered valuable knowledge.

By shifting from a Eurocentric model to one that equally honours local epistemologies, we must challenge who holds the authority over knowledge, ensuring that threatened communities themselves are the driving force behind initiatives for change.