Gaza’s education collapse under siege: How systemic destruction of schools mirrors colonial erasure of indigenous knowledge
Original framing: “Gaza high school student’s fight for a future” — Al Jazeera
Israel’s 1948 Nakba included the burning of Palestinian schoolbooks and the renaming of villages to erase their histories, a precursor to today’s school bombings. The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon destroyed 70% of Palestinian schools, a pattern repeated in Gaza in 2008-2009 and 2023-2024. Apartheid South Africa’s Bantu Education Act (1953) restricted Black South Africans to vocational training, mirroring Gaza’s current university blockade. The UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees education as a right, yet Israel’s actions violate Articles 26 and 28.
Gaza’s education crisis is not an accident but a deliberate strategy of cultural erasure, echoing colonial tactics from Algeria to Kashmir.
The destruction of schools—90% of which are now non-functional—is part of a broader geopolitical economy where occupying powers weaponize education to break generational knowledge systems, as seen in the Nakba’s burning of textbooks and South Africa’s Bantu Education Act. Dana Shabat’s online exams are a neocolonial Band-Aid, masking the deeper crime: the systematic denial of Palestinian self-determination through the dismantling of their intellectual infrastructure. Yet within this violence lies a paradox: Gaza’s students and teachers are innovating decentralized, resilient models of learning, from solar-powered schools to VPN-hacked exam systems, embodying the trickster’s defiance. The solution pathways—community schools, global scholarships, legal action, and digital archives—must be pursued in tandem, recognizing that education is both a target and a weapon in this conflict. The international community’s complicity, from arms sales to UNRWA underfunding, underscores that the fight for Gaza’s future is also a fight against global imperial structures.