US and Europe bear direct blame for Israel’s war on Palestinian education
Displaced Palestinian children attend a class recently opened in a school used as a temporary shelter in Beit Lahya in the northern Gaza Strip on 4 May 2024
Hamid Dabashi writes in Middle East Eye on 9 May 2024:
While the world’s attention is rightly focused on a massive student uprising in the US and to a smaller scale in Europe, triggered by Columbia University students in New York, there has been less focus on the ongoing devastation of the Palestinian educational system, a process known as “scholasticide”.
The vicious onslaught that Israel has staged for the whole world to see in Gaza, with the enthusiastic participation of the US and Europe, has a particularly sinister aspect in the destruction of the education, learning, culture, humanity and civilisation at the heart of the Palestinian national liberation movement.
Israel’s targeting of Palestinian educational infrastructure is not accidental. It has hit institutions, students, parents and teachers, along with the very air they breathe and the food they need, as part of an attempt to eradicate Palestinians and destroy their resistance. While this plot is ultimately futile, the immediate results are cataclysmic.
To be sure, the US currently faces scholasticide of a different sort, where notorious opportunist politicians are busy seeking to debone the critical apparatuses of American university campuses.
As seats of higher learning, American universities are under systematic assault by reactionary politicians, who are deeply troubled by the crescendo of critical judgment definitive to an entire generation of scholars and their students that is exposing the unabashed savagery at the roots of American and European history.
From Native American and African American studies, to queer studies, to intersectional feminism, to postcolonial studies and more, politicians and their Zionist donors are up in arms to put an end to it all. They are too late.
Scholasticide can assume many forms. At least since the publication of the late American historian Richard Hofstadter’s classic book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and long before that, the critical assessment of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, the unabashed charlatanism at the foundation of American politics has feared any sign of critical intelligence in this country.
‘Grave concern’
The ongoing scholasticide in Palestine, however, is of an entirely different vintage. Independent UN human rights authorities have warned of the “systematic destruction” of the Palestinian education system in the Gaza Strip. The very word “Palestine” frightens genocidal Zionists.
“The persistent, callous attacks on educational infrastructure in Gaza have a devastating long-term impact on the fundamental rights of people to learn and freely express themselves, depriving yet another generation of Palestinians of their future,” the UN warned last month.