There Are No Universities Left in Gaza
Montéz Jennings
April of 2024 is when I learned the word- scholasticide.
April of 2024 is when I learned there are no universities left in Gaza.
I personally believe education is a universal currency. Currently, I am a PhD student and assistant instructor in rhetoric and writing at a flagship university with extreme tradition and pride. I am not an affluent student and can contribute a great deal of my experiences to education, including getting a passport for the first time.
Regardless of your location, the things you know grant you access to conversations and spaces. Education and knowledge are like literacy. There are multiple “forms”, and they contribute to various systems and communities. Our communities are built on various forms of knowledge, literacy, and education. Within our systems of education are preservations of culture and history. Yet, in January of 2024, the last university in Gaza was destroyed by Israel with weapons donated by the US government.
I learned this while scrolling through Instagram. The entire feed has become updates about the genocide happening in Gaza. I follow Bisan, logging on to check for her existence. “It’s Bisan and I am still alive,” the young journalist and activist says in every video. Bisan then pans the camera to display her displacement and the rubble that has become the memories of her home. The fuzzy feelings of nostalgia are replaced with anger and fret as demonstrated through her documenting the new “routine” of the people. A routine that robs Gazans of necessities and autonomy. NO water. NO electricity. NO food. NO fuel.
Five months into the bombing of Gaza, I see a screenshot of the 3 month old Al Jazeera article- “How Israel has destroyed Gaza’s schools and universities.”
Gaza has been robbed.
According to Al Jazeera, “... the Israeli army has killed 94 university professors, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said. The monitor deemed the Israeli destruction of schools an ‘intentional destruction of Palestinian cultural and historical properties.’”
More than 60,000 students were displaced.
“Euro-Med said that it would be very difficult to return to academics post-war in the wake of the sheer scale of the destruction of life and properties.” Al Jazeera reports.
Universities are no longer standing.
“Palestinians have one of the highest literacy rates in the world, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in 2018. Palestinian graduates have ended up performing high in fields such as mathematics, engineering, and business,” Al Jazeera writes.
If education is currency, then Gaza has been robbed.
Scholasticide refers to the systematic killing of education by detaining or murdering educators, students, staff, and destroying educational infrastructures including schools and universities themselves.
The destruction of schools and universities alongside the desecration of an entire people and their homes creates a void of several things including the literacy and capacity of future generations. Palestinian people being subjected to unconscionable trauma. Trauma carries. Trauma is reborn. Trauma is generational. Trauma can influence future learning. Lawson et. al. (2019) write, “All such neurophysiological effects potentially influence every aspect of students’ orientations and actions in schools, hampering their ability to attend, engage, learn, and enjoy positive interactions with others.” They go on to explain that trauma can be made worse by underequipped educators who are not prepared to interact with students who have experienced severe traumas. Students who, like their families, are trying to preserve themselves, their memories, and adjust to a life. They, at some point, will be expected to relocate and throw themselves into new dominant literacies without consideration for what they've experienced. This is the world we are “building” for future scholars. A world where universities can disappear in seconds like Thanos snapping his fingers. A world where a society with one of the highest literacy rates now has to rebuild while adapting to new ways of life. Students have lost entire systems of knowledge and literacy found within the walls of schools, homes, theaters, and places of worship.
It’s ironic because just last year:
In July 2023, President Joe Biden delivered a speech promising:
“Educators have champions in the White House” (Litivinov, 2023).
In September 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a room full of first graders:
“Each and every one of you is special and equal to the other. Look at each other, be friends of one another, and be kind to one another. Study well and listen to your teachers” (TOI, 2023).
The year before that Vice President Kamala Harris said to educators:
“Again and again, you have been champions of social justice….You are not only essential to our children’s future. You, I believe, are essential to the future of our democracy” (Litivinov, 2022).
Essential. Champions. Kindness. Justice. Equal. Future.
What do these words mean when the students, staff, and educators of Gaza have been so easily dismissed and disregarded? What does it mean when educators are essential to the future, yet they are killed, displaced, and their sites of knowledge production diminished? How could students possibly befriend each other or remember that they too deserve equality while they are surrounded by the sounds of bombs?
Surely, we shouldn’t only appreciate American universities and their traditions? As I stated above, I attend a flagship football school with deep seated pride. Imagine if crowds of gleeful undergrads and robust alum could not gather on a Friday in September to watch the boys throw the ole’ pigskin. Afterwards, whether they win or lose, they’ll grab an “American” beer to celebrate a good ole’ American college football game. The fear of the institution being destroyed never enters their minds.
I wonder what students in Gaza did on weekend nights in September.
At my university, the thought of the football stadium as pure ash and rubble is never a consideration. Yet, the university strongly counteracted student protests by calling state troopers and neighboring police departments. They rode on campus atop horses- John Wayne style. They patrolled the perimeter of the protests, pushing sweaty bodies into each other. As people are pressed closer together, bodies were pressed against the old buildings that sat behind the empty plaques that once housed confederates. They look smugly at the crowd of educators, students, and staff who chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The horses drop waste as they walk through campus and eventually are used to violently rip through the crowd of students, staff, and educators. A student is trampled by police, and they force students off campus onto the sidewalks and streets. They needed room for their grand exit.
Students take to the streets watching cops ride away on horses. The scene is a remnant of the ending of an old western. The “heroes''- the police believed they did “good.” They believed they protected and served. Students applaud the police ride down the street. They are proud for protesting the university’s investment in genocide while schools in Gaza are graveyards of rubble, possibilities, and bomb remnants.
There is a hashtag that tries to redefine or remind students of the value and ingenuity of our university. It’s like when people say things like “this isn’t the America I know.” Somehow, it is America that so many other people know. There is no way to reshape this. This is the only version of the university I’ve known just as there are children who will only know the shell, the ghost of Palestine.
As a human who belongs to many communities (including those devastated by colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and classism), the devastation to Gaza has been disturbing for me to watch. The damage to current and future generations is disheartening. As students and educators, we know that education is essential to the development of society and those who educate are necessary to sites of knowledge production.
So, if education is paramount to a successful society and educators are essential to that society, then why are there no universities left in Gaza?
Image by Ahmed Akacha.
References
Al Jazeera. (2024, January 24). How Israel has destroyed Gaza’s schools and universities. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/24/how-israel-has-destroyed-gazas-schools-and-universities
Lawson, H. A., Caringi, J. C., Gottfried, R., Bride, B. E., & Hydon, S. P. (2019). Educators’ secondary traumatic stress, children’s trauma, and the need for trauma literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 89(3), 421–447. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-89.3.421
Litvinov, A., & Maiers, S. (2022, July 5). Vice president Kamala Harris to educators: “You are essential to our democracy.” NEA. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/vice-president-kamala-harris-educators-you-are-essential-our-democracy
Litvinov, A. (2023, July 4). Joe and Jill Biden, champions of Public Education, cheer on educators at NEA RA. NEA. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/joe-and-jill-biden-champions-public-education-cheer-educators-nea-ra
Shurafa, W., & Mednick, S. (2024, May 17). In Gaza, war means no formal education for hundreds of thousands of students. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/in-gaza-war-means-no-formal-education-for-hundreds-of-thousands-of-students
TOI Staff. (2023, September 1). Netanyahu tells first-graders to “be kind,” as 2.5 million students return to class. The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-tells-first-graders-to-be-kind-as-2-5-million-students-return-to-class/
UN experts deeply concerned over “scholasticide” in Gaza. (2024, April 18). Retrieved from https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza#:~:text=Israa University, the last remaining, including gender-based violence
Montéz Jennings is a writer, assistant instructor, cat mom, and PhD student studying rhetoric and writing. She has an MA in English and an MFA in creative writing from Chapman University. Montéz was born in Baltimore, Maryland where she discovered her love of storytelling and its power. She writes creatively under the name Montéz Louria (Lor-ee). Read her work here.
