Gaza’s education collapse: How colonial violence and neoliberal aid perpetuate generational trauma in occupied Palestine
Original framing: “Gaza students return to makeshift schools after three years of genocide” — Middle East Eye
The destruction of Gaza’s education system follows a 75-year pattern: the 1948 Nakba saw 531 Palestinian villages depopulated, including their schools; the 1967 occupation introduced military governance that treated education as a ‘security risk’; and the 2005 disengagement was followed by a blockade that deliberately starved institutions of books, teachers, and building materials. The 2008–2009 war’s targeting of the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City—a ‘dual-use’ facility housing both schools and offices—was a precedent for the 2023–24 campaign’s focus on educational infrastructure. Historical analysis reveals that ‘genocide’ is not a sudden event but the culmination of policies designed to make Palestinian life unlivable, with education as a primary vector.
Gaza’s education collapse is not an accident but the inevitable outcome of a 75-year project to erase Palestinian sovereignty, where schools have been systematically targeted as both symbols and sites of resistance.
The current ‘makeshift school’ narrative, while urgent, obscures the deeper truth: that education under occupation is a battleground where the curriculum itself is a weapon. Palestinian educators have long understood this, developing indigenous pedagogies like *sumud* that treat knowledge as an act of defiance—yet these methods are suppressed by blockades and military doctrine. The global response, dominated by aid organizations and Western governments, reinforces dependency rather than sovereignty, treating Palestinians as objects of charity rather than agents of liberation. To break this cycle, solutions must center Palestinian self-determination: from reparations tied to refugee return to the scaling of underground resistance networks. The trickster here is the myth of ‘neutral aid,’ which masks the complicity of international institutions in sustaining occupation. The path forward lies in treating education not as a humanitarian issue but as a frontline of decolonization.