Established only a decade ago, all that is now left of Israa University in Gaza are the pages on the university’s website.
Before it was bombed at the start of the year, the university boasted a faculty of 350 and over 4,000 students, studying engineering, law, accounting, humanities and medical sciences. In the university’s mission statement, one reads that its goal was “to contribute to the development of the Palestinian society by encouraging scientific research through innovative continuing education offerings”.
On 17 January, numerous television outlets picked up footage showing the demolition of Israa University shared by Israeli soldiers on their social media.
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One officer tweeted the demolition clip with a note that the “student union at Israa University in Khan Yunis would like to provide an update that terrorism and modern Nazism studies will not proceed due to the destruction of the faculty, sending apologies”.
The demolition of Israa was no outlier. The Islamic University and the University College of Applied Sciences were bombed on 11 and 19 October, respectively. On 4 November, Israeli forces bombed Al Azhar University, the second largest university in Gaza, and this was followed by the destruction of Al Quds University on 15 November.
The medical school in the Islamic University was bombed on 10 December, while Al-Aqsa University and the Palestine Technical College have also been severely damaged.
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Destruction of intellectual infrastructure
In addition to hundreds of university students, Israel has killed about 100 academics, including numerous internationally respected scholars, deans and presidents, thus serving a harsh blow not only to the physical infrastructure of higher education in the Gaza Strip, but also to its intellectual infrastructure.
By targeting all the universities in the Gaza Strip, Israel has effectively wiped out whole fields of study for the foreseeable future. At a time when the Palestinian population in Gaza needs them most, it will take years to rebuild university programmes in social work, physiotherapy and medicine, but also in engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, literature, law and history.
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The attacks on higher education are but one manifestation of Israel’s wholesale destruction of the education system in Gaza, which was made up of over 625,000 students and about 23,000 teachers and professors. From data gathered a month ago, Israel had killed 4,327 students and 231 teachers and administrators, and injured 8,109 and 756 respectively.
During the war’s first 16 weeks, 345 out of Gaza’s 737 schools were destroyed or damaged, and as we write about 30% of school buildings will be out of service even after a ceasefire is implemented. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of school children who have already been deprived of education for several months will not have a school to return to once the Israeli forces’ attacks subside.
Taken together, the massive destruction of schools as well as Israel’s assault on higher education is a form of educide, which, following the language of the Genocide Convention, can be understood as the destruction in whole or in part of the education system.
De-development strategy
As it has done before, but now on a much deeper and wider scale, Israel is targeting the intellectual infrastructure of Palestinian society as part of its long-term strategy of de-development: “a process which undermines or weakens the ability of an economy [and society] to grow and expand by preventing it from accessing and utilising critical inputs needed to promote internal growth beyond a specific structural level”.
In other words, these attacks on Palestinians are – to borrow Rutgers University Professor Jasbir Puar’s terminology – systematically maiming Palestinian society.
Shamefully, and in sharp contrast to the university sector’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been very few statements of condemnation, calls for ceasefires, promises of scholarships and fellowships for Palestinian students and staff.
Nor have we seen the establishment of research partnerships with Palestinian academics and universities – even as Palestinian academic institutions are being deliberately and systematically targeted for destruction, and even as the education of over 90,000 university students in Gaza has been entirely suspended.
We need to swiftly change our universities’ approaches and challenge their silences.
Double-standards
Staff must expose the double standards towards Palestinians and demand their management allocate scholarships and fellowships to Palestinians from Gaza, while also calling upon universities to review partnerships with Israeli universities – which have been shown to be complicit with Israel’s subjugation of Palestinians – as well as research collaborations with private or public partners who are similarly complicit.
We must also demand that university endowments and our pension funds divest from companies that are complicit in the attacks on Palestinians.
Professional associations, many of which have been just as quiet as universities, need to quickly find their voices. We need professional associations that take a public stand against the killing of our colleagues in Palestine, and against the destruction of its education sector.
Simultaneously, professional associations can create or revitalise their committees on academic freedom and play a much-needed role defending those students and staff who have been targeted for speaking out about the atrocities in Palestine.
Finally, and crucially, we need to lobby governments, particularly those that are Israel’s international allies, to suspend all military export licences with Israel, to ensure the organisations providing Palestinians with life-saving support – such as UNRWA – are fully funded, and to bring about an immediate and permanent ceasefire. As academics, we have an obligation to help stop the educide in Gaza.
Neve Gordon is a professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University of London, UK, and the vice-president of the British Society for Middle East Studies. Lewis Turner is a lecturer in international politics at Newcastle University, UK, and a trustee of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies.
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