From the report’s introduction:
In what has been defined by a wide range of UN experts and academics as a ‘scholasticide’ or ‘educide,’ Israel’s military campaign targeted all academic institutions in the Gaza Strip. According to UNESCO, the Israeli military had destroyed or damaged 79% of higher education campuses in Gaza, and 88,000 Gazan students lost access to higher education. When conditions allowed, a few of the displaced managed to continue their studies and academic work from inside the tent camps. Thousands of students and scholars, as well as university presidents and deans, were killed by the Israeli military. According to several reports, dozens of libraries, archives, museums, monuments, archaeological sites, and other buildings of historical or artistic significance have been damaged or destroyed.
The destruction of the Palestinian academia in Gaza by the Israeli military is a distorted mirror image of the state of academia in Israel, which reflects the accelerated process of hyper-militarization that characterised the Israeli society as a whole since October 2023. This process has also led to the shrinking of the already small pockets of resistance. For example, the majority of journalists and media outlets in Israel also enlisted in the war effort and betrayed basic journalistic integrity by adopting a militant and sometimes genocidal discourse, by providing the Israeli public with a partial and distorted picture, and often by fuelling attacks on any voices within the civil society that attempted to challenge such positions. In this atmosphere, Israeli academic institutions remained silent as the Israeli state has been committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the destruction of the higher education system in Gaza. Worse, the Israeli academia often adopted militaristic rhetoric and continued to cooperate in various ways with the military, Israel’s security establishment, and the arms industry, including in the research and development of military technology and weapons, and training soldiers.
As detailed in a report by Academia for Equality, Israeli academic institutions actively collaborated with the growing trend of political persecution, including suspension and dismissal without a hearing, of those who spoke out against Israeli policy or expressed solidarity with the besieged and bombed residents of Gaza. This persecution was enacted most intensely against Palestinian citizens of Israel. The mindset enabling this persecution was constructed, cultivated, and amplified over many years of subordinating academia to continuous militarization processes in the name of so-called national security. This mindset, alongside the current military violence, only emphasizes how important and vital it is to expose the extensive and dangerous connections between Israeli academia and the entire security establishment, with the military at its core. Understanding these connections is essential for the liberation of academia, as a physical and intellectual space, from the militaristic mindset, for the sake of protecting critical spaces and freedom of expression and toward creating a new political culture of dialogue and reconciliation.
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