Over the weekend of November 18 and 19, Israeli airstrikes killed at least eighty-two Palestinians in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, including victims at multiple United Nations schools. Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has already killed more than 14,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 5,600 children, with Gaza’s Health Ministry reporting that one Palestinian child is killed every ten minutes. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres described the carnage as turning Gaza into a “graveyard for children.”
The grim reality is that not even the schools have been saved from being turned into cemeteries.
“People in Gaza, sadly, are used to wars, and they’re used to sheltering in United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools, because this is where they feel that there’s sanctity, a U.N. and a global understanding that when someone is in the protection of the United Nations, that these buildings will not be targeted,” said Tamara Alrifai, spokesperson for UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, in an interview on Democracy Now! “Sadly, this is not the case.”
Since October 7, the 625,000 children enrolled in schools across Gaza have been deprived of education because of Israel’s relentless bombardment that has damaged 221 schools, comprising over 40 percent of all educational institutions in Gaza.
In addition to targeting schools for destruction, Israel is actively pursuing the destruction of historical knowledge and education. That’s because it is difficult to perpetuate ethnic cleansing—while simultaneously purporting to be a democracy—without also controlling the population’s collective memory and whitewashing the brutality from the historical record.
The destruction of ways of knowing and understanding the world is a practice that sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called “epistemicide.” This includes attempting to destroy cultural knowledge, antiracist ideas, and frameworks for understanding how to challenge oppression and colonization. Israel clearly has studied the long and violent history of the U.S. government attacking not only the bodies of colonized people, but also bodies of knowledge that can help oppressed populations in their struggles for freedom.
There are many examples of epistemicide in the United States, from the anti-literacy laws imposed on enslaved African people; to the boarding schools for Native American children designed to strip them of their culture and deny them the truth of how they were dispossessed of their land; to the laws banning anti-racist education today that impact almost half of all U.S. students. In Florida, for example, the Advanced Placement African American Studies course was banned, and the official state curriculum now declares slavery to have been of “personal benefit” to Black people. Teachers can now be charged with a felony (that carries an up to five year jail sentence) for being caught with a contraband book about race, gender, or sexuality.
Israel has taken notes on this strategy, and is working to camouflage their settler-colonial origin. The colonial refrain of Israeli settlers that Palestine was a “land without people for a people without land,” mirrors the delusion of Manifest Destiny, where American settlers claimed that God gave them the right to steal land for their own project of colonization. These master narratives, which have informed much of the colonial education in both nations, are the frameworks that allow so many people to accept the ongoing occupation of Indigenous land and the brutal violence against its inhabitants.
In 2009, Israel’s education ministry ordered the removal from textbooks for Arab schoolchildren of the word nakba—Arabic for the “catastrophe” inflicted on Palestinians in 1947 and 1948 during the establishment of the nation state of Israel that resulted in the displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians and the death of some 1,434 Palestinians, including more than 400 children.
In 2011, Israel passed the “Nakba law,” which allows the Israeli government to cut funding to any public institution that teaches about the event. “The purpose of the bill is to prevent members of the Arab minority in Israel from exercising their democratic right to commemorate a seminal event in their history,” wrote Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, as the bill was being debated. “This legislation will cause harm to cultural and educational institutions that teach about the Nakba by cutting their funding and will further entrench inequality and discrimination. The bill is both anti-democratic and discriminatory.”
On November 9, Israeli police arrested Meir Baruchin, a Jerusalem history and civics teacher, following his post on Facebook expressing opposition to the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians. Upon his arrest, authorities confiscated his phone and two laptops, interrogating him on suspicions of treason and intent to disrupt the public order. After spending four days in jail, Baruchin was released, but he was fired from his teaching position, had his teaching certificate revoked, and continues to face legal charges.
“These days Israeli citizens who are showing the slightest sentiment for the people of Gaza, opposing killing of innocent civilians, they are being politically persecuted, they go through public shaming, they lose their jobs, they are being put in jail,” Baruchin said in an interview on Democracy Now!. He added that he believes if he were Palestinian, the consequences would have been more severe.
Educators in the United States who believe students should have the right to grapple with multiple perspectives on the founding of Israel and the relentless bombardment of Gaza—including lessons that provide the perspectives of Palestinians—have faced harsh censure for many years. These attacks have dramatically intensified in recent weeks.
Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, which defends the free speech rights of advocates for Palestine, revealed the alarming escalation in these attacks in recent weeks: “We’ve had an exponential surge in requests for legal help. It has been like nothing we’ve seen before.” Since October 8, the organization has responded to nearly 200 reports of “suppression of Palestinian rights advocacy”—almost as many incidents as they had addressed in all of the previous year.
The educational system in Israel and Palestine is shaped by the daily violence of a system of apartheid, followed by the intermittent outbreak of devastating wars. During the 2014 military assault on Gaza known as “Operation Protective Edge,” 412 students were killed and fourteen higher education facilities suffered damage. Even before the recent hostilities, children in Gaza were grappling with profound mental health challenges inflicted by the enduring blockade and attacks on their schools. A report published in June 2022 by Save the Children revealed that 80 percent of Gazan children suffer from being in a perpetual state of worry, sadness, and grief, with more than three quarters of children bedwetting from fear, and a growing number exhibiting reactive mutism.
Palestinian schools have been subjected to attacks and severe restrictions imposed on “Area C” of the occupied West Bank. This area constitutes 61 percent of the territory and has faced continuous limitations on school construction. According to a report released on May 3, 2023, by the Office of the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, the Palestinian population has witnessed a 2.4 percent growth, necessitating the establishment of 600 new schools by 2025.
But the actual progress in constructing new schools has been significantly hindered. Challenges related to funding and bureaucratic obstacles have resulted in the construction of only sixty-eight schools since 2020. The U.N. report also explained that since 2010, Israel has conducted thirty-six demolitions, affecting twenty schools in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In September 2017, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) issued a joint statement with Save the Children decrying Israel’s recent demolition of three elementary schools and stated that, “Many children have to study in schools with little protection from the heat or the cold; some face long journeys, delays at military checkpoints, harassment and violence, military activity in or around the school, or have to cross military areas and firing zones.”
Israel—apparently inspired by the American system of schooling and policing that has contributed to more Black people being incarcerated or under the jurisdiction of the legal system today than were enslaved on plantations in 1850—has created its own particularly vicious form of the school-to-prison pipeline. Between 500 and 700 Palestinian children, on average, are prosecuted in the military court system every year. Since 2000, more than 12,000 youth have been detained. And since August 2019, there has been an escalation in Palestinian students being subjected to prolonged and arbitrary military detention. Students are routinely detained for exercising their rights to assembly, association, and expression.
Palestinian students and teachers encounter daily hardships; they’re forced to navigate checkpoints and endure delays, detentions, and harassment by Israeli soldiers and settlers. The imposed separation of East Jerusalem from other occupied Palestinian territories further hinders Palestinians’ access to educational resources and cultural centers.
What’s more, travel bans on students and academics, introduced by Israel since 2000 and exacerbated by the 2007 blockade, have prevented Palestinians in Gaza from pursuing education in the West Bank and from attending universities established for their benefit.
Christopher Rufo, one of the primary instigators of the attack on critical race theory and antiracist curriculum in the United States, laid out his colonial strategy for using education to help maintain Israeli and U.S. military power: “Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, [Black Lives Matter], [Democratic Socialists of America], and academic ‘decolonization’ in the public mind. Connect the dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left disavow them. Make them political untouchables.”
Yet despite this strategy, a growing mass movement has coalesced in the United States and around the world to demand an immediate end to the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians. People across the globe have flooded the streets chanting “Ceasefire Now,” and students and educators have played an important role in this struggle. Students for Justice in Palestine have been an important part of the movement. Many teachers union locals around the United States have voted for a ceasefire and marched in support of Palestine along with the organization Black Lives Matter at School.
Young Jewish people have also played an important role in the movement, including organizing acts of mass civil disobedience to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. As author Dave Zirin, who is Jewish, wrote, “An entire generation of young Jews, to paraphrase Peter Beinert a decade ago, are feeling forced to choose between their progressive principles and support for Israel’s total war—and they are choosing their principles. Through organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now, Jewish youth are looking at Israel’s human rights violations and saying clearly, ‘Not in our name.’ ”
These allies are supporting young Palestinians across the diaspora who are leading the movement for a free Palestine. On November 7, a group of children held a press conference outside the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City to implore the world to intervene to stop Israel’s relentless bombing campaign.
“Since October 7, we’ve faced extermination, killing, bombing over our heads—all of this in front of the world,” one young spokesperson for the group implored in English. “They lied to the world that they kill the fighters, but they kill the people of Gaza, their dreams and their future. Kids of Gaza run out of their hopes and wants.”
Sporting a shirt with a panda bear and gripping a sheet of note paper in his left hand, he continued, “We came to Al-Shifa Hospital to seek shelter from the bombing, but we suddenly faced death again when they targeted the hospital. The occupation is starving us. We don’t find water, food, and we drink from the unusable water. We come now to shout and invite you to protect us.”
Standing shoulder to shoulder with his peers, and near a hospital bed with injured children on his right, he concluded with these demands: “We want to live, we want peace, we want to judge the killers of children. We want medicine, food, and education. We want to live as the other children live.”
Every child deserves medicine, food, and an education that respects their culture and empowers them with the historical lessons they need to challenge war, racism, and oppression today.
We must call for a permanent ceasefire—not just a temporary pause—to end the bombing of Gaza and a ceasefire to end the attempts to obliterate the lessons of history that young people need as they struggle to attain social justice as a basis for a lasting peace.
Free Palestine and free Palestine Pedagogy.
Jesse Hagopian is a teacher, co-editor of Teaching for Black Lives, and a member of Black for Palestine.
I AM AN EDUCATOR 
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