A new word emerged from the carnage in Gaza this week: "scholasticide"– the systematic destruction by Israeli forces of centres of educationdear to Palestinian society, as the ministry of education was bombed,the infrastructure of teaching destroyed, and schools across the Gazastrip targeted for attack by the air, sea and ground offensives."Learn, baby, learn" was a slogan of the black rights movement inAmerica's ghettoes a generation ago, but it also epitomises the ideaof education as the central pillar of Palestinian identity – atraditional premium on schooling steeled by occupation, and somethingthe Israelis "cannot abide
and seek to destroy", according to DrKarma Nabulsi, who teaches politics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. "Weknew before, and see more clearly now than ever, that Israel isseeking to annihilate an educated Palestine," she says.The Palestinians are among the most thoroughly educated people in theworld. Fo!
r decades, Palestinian society – both at home in the WestBank and Gaza, and scattered in the diaspora – has put a singularemphasis on learning. After the expulsions of 1948 and after the 1967occupation, waves of refugees created an influential Palestinianintelligentsia and a marked presence in the disciplines of medicineand engineering across the Arab world, Europe and the Americas."Education is the most important thing – it is part of the familylife, part of your identity and part of the rebellion," says Nabulsi."Everyone knows this, and in a refugee camp like Gaza, every childknows that in those same schooldesks sat your parents and yourgrandparents, whose tradition they carry on."Schooling and university studies are the fabric of life despite, notbecause of, circumstances: every university in the occupiedterritories has been closed down at some point by Israeli forces, manyof them regularly. However, the closures and arrests of students (morethan 300 at Birzeit universit!
y in Ramallah, says Nabulsi) onlystrengthens the desire to bec!
ome educated.In the current offensive, Israel began attacking Gaza's educationalinstitutions immediately. On only the second and third day of airattacks last week, Israeli planes wreaked severe damage in directstrikes on Gaza's Islamic University. The main buildings weredevastated, destroying administrative records, and, of course, endingstudies. The Ministry of Education has been hit twice by direct hitsfrom the air.The Saturday of the ground invasion was the day on which most studentsin Gaza sit their end-of-year examinations. In the majority of cases,these had to be abandoned, and it remains unclear whether they can orwill be sat again. Other schools were also attacked – most notoriouslythe UN establishment in the Jabaliya refugee camp where at least 40people were massacred on Tuesday.On Sunday, another Israeli air strike destroyed the pinnacle ofPalestinian schooling, the elite and private American InternationalSchool, to which the children of business and other leaders!
went,among them Fulbright scholars unable to take up their places in theUnited States because of the Israeli blockade. Ironically, the sameschool was attacked last year by a group called the Holy JihadBrigades, and has been repeatedly vandalised for its association withwestern-style education.The school was founded in 2000 to offer a "progressive" (and fullyco-educational) American-style curriculum, taught in English, fromkindergarten to sixth form, and was said by the Israelis to have beenthe site, or near the site, from which a rocket was fired. A nightwatchman was killed in the destruction of the building.The chairman of its board of trustees, Iyad Saraj, says: "This is themost distinguished and advanced school in Gaza, if not in Gaza and theWest Bank. I cannot swear there was no rocket fired, but if there was,you don't destroy a whole school." He adds: "This is the destructionof civilisation."The school has no connection to the US government, Saraj says, andmany of the!
250 who graduate from it each year go on to USuniversities. "They are !
very good, highly educated open-mindedstudents who can really be future leaders of Palestine."Young Palestinians playing in Daniel Barenboim's celebrated East-WestDivan Orchestra – which this week again brings Palestinian and Israelimusicians together to play a prestigious concert in Vienna – say thatmusic schools in their communities and refugee camps are "not justeducating young people, but helping them understand their identity",as Nabeel Abboud Ashkar, a violinist based in Nazareth, puts it,adding: "And the Israelis are not necessarily happy with that."Ramzi Aburedwan, who runs the Al-Kamandjati classical music school inRamallah, argues: "What the Israelis are doing is killing the lives ofthe people. Bring music, and you bring life. The children who playedhere were suddenly interested in their future".In a recent lecture, Nabulsi at St Edmund Hall recalled the traditionof learning in Palestinian history, and the recurrent character of theteacher as an icon in Palestinia!
n literature. "The role and power ofeducation in an occupied society is enormous. Education positspossibilities, opens horizons. Freedom of thought contrasts sharplywith the apartheid wall, the shackling checkpoints, the chokingprisons," she said.This week, following the bombing of schools in Gaza, she says: "Thesystematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel hascountered that tradition since the occupation of 1967," citing "thecalculated, wholesale looting of the Palestinian Research Centre inBeirut during the 1982 war and the destruction of all thosemanuscripts and archived history.""Now in Gaza," she says, "we see the policy more clearly than ever –this 'scholasticide'. The Israelis know nothing about who we reallyare, while we study and study them. But deep down they know howimportant education is to the Palestinian tradition and thePalestinian revolution. They cannot abide it and have to destroy it."