You must drive up a hill to get to Birzeit University, which is just outside Ramallah (West Bank, Occupied Palestine Territory or OPT). It is a beautiful campus, established in 1924 as a school for girls by the remarkable Nabiha Nasir, 1891-1951, and then converted in 1975 into a university. I spent an afternoon talking with students there about their classes and their ambitions, most of them fiercely committed to both their academic work and their political hope for a free Palestine.
Politics is not far from the minds of the students. Israel had occupied and shut down Birzeit University between 1988 and 1992, and since 2002 has raided the campus over 30 times. The most recent raid was on September 3, 2024, when Israeli forces focused their attention on the Student Council and the offices of the student organizations. The Israeli soldiers “[confiscated] flags, flyers, and materials belonging to the student movement,” complained Birzeit’s Right to Education Campaign. This invasion of the campus, illegal by the agreements made between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government, follows a pattern set by the Israeli occupation forces: to come onto the campus with a great display of force and then target the student leaders of political organizations either through arrest or intimidation. This is precisely what happened on the campus in early September.
It is clear to the students that what happened to them is part of a broad policy pushed by the Israeli government to inflict immense pain on the Palestinian population, cause Palestinians to flee their land, and then annex all of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. Indeed, in one of his recent presentations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed a map of the region with Israel encompassing these areas. Netanyahu later demurred and said that the West Bank was not demarcated because the presentation was about Gaza, seemingly designed to mollify the United States government.
Part of this immense pain has been to attack the basis of Palestinian life in the OPT, with the destruction of homes, hospitals, and educational institutions a feature of the attacks on the Palestinians for decades. This is why the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury calls Israeli policy the “permanent Nakba,” the Arabic word referring to the “catastrophe” of 1948 when at least 700,000 Palestinians were cleansed to make way for the new Israeli state.
Following the 2008-09 Israeli bombing of the Ministry of Education in Gaza and then the bombing of a range of educational institutions (including the prestigious American International School), Oxford University Professor Karma Nabulsi coined the term “scholasticide.” The term refers to the systematic destruction of educational institutions and an educated population. In 2009, Nabulsi said that the Israelis conducted scholasticide because “deep down they know how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution. They cannot abide it and have to destroy it.” When I asked Nabulsi what she now thinks of the genocidal war in Gaza, she responded: “Today’s vicious and unconscionable destruction of our beloved universities, schools, museums, libraries, ancient churches and mosques, along with other cultural landmarks in Gaza all form part of scholasticide. It is a clear intent to remove our capacities and abilities to study, to learn, to read and think, to stay united. Of course, it will not succeed.”
In April 2024, a group of UN special rapporteurs and other experts known as the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council accused the Israelis of “scholasticide.” They reported that the destruction of most of Gaza’s schools and universities constituted “persistent, callous attacks on educational infrastructure in Gaza.” “These attacks are not isolated incidents,” they wrote, “[t]hey present a systematic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society.” “When schools are destroyed,” the experts noted, “so too are hopes and dreams.” Two respected professors at Birzeit University—Ibrahim Rabaia (assistant professor of Political Science) and Lourdes Habash (Director of the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies)—went through the same evidence and suggested that what is happening is “educide.” Whether scholasticide or educide, the phenomenon is ghastly; it is nothing less than the attempt to erase the culture of Palestinians, “to erase the collective memory, cultural heritage, intellectual growth of the Palestinian people.”
Sundos Hammad, the coordinator of the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University, reflects on her commitment to education. When she was nine years old in Al-Bireh (north of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank), she “came to understand the profound connection between education and survival under occupation.” This was in 2000, during the Second Intifada. Getting to her primary school was not easy since there were Israeli tanks near the school gate and little children would be harassed by the Israeli soldiers. Inspired by the uprising, children like Sundos would throw stones at the tanks. The Israelis shot at them with live fire. Sundos would run back home and tell her mother what had happened and wondered aloud if she should continue to go to school. Her mother was firm. “Education is not an option,” she recounts her mother having said. “It’s your future and the future of your generation.”
Since October 2023, Israel has been trying to erase that future. It has killed two university presidents in Gaza—Professor Sufian Tayeh (Islamic University of Gaza) and Professor Said Alzebda (University College of Applied Sciences)—and several deans and over 100 professors. Many of these teachers were under the age of 50, such as Professor Nesma Abu Shaira (age 36). Professor Abu Sharia was from Gaza and taught visual arts at Al-Aqsa University. I met Professor Abu Sharia a few years after she won a prize at the Gaza Contemporary Art Festival in 2011. A common friend told me that she was interested in illustrations and design and wanted to do a project that she later called “Documenting Palestine.” All that I remember of our meeting is that she was very happy about teaching her students, particularly the young women who came to learn how to draw. “We must tell Palestinian stories,” she told me. On October 28, 2023, an Israeli aircraft bombed her home. She died along with her family. Her Instagram account is her gallery. After her death, one of her students, Zeinab, remembered her teacher for the “sparkle in her eyes and her pride in her [students].”