Scholasticide and resilience: The Gaza Genocide and the struggle for Palestinian higher education
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we examine the concept of scholasticide, its historical evolution, and its contemporary relevance with specific reference to Palestine. Focusing on Israel’s attempt to annihilate higher education during the ongoing Gaza Genocide, we situate scholasticide in the broader context of the Israeli settler-colonial continuum and argue that scholasticide is a pillar of genocide. We examine five central themes: the theoretical underpinnings of scholasticide; the empirical conditions that have shaped the concept’s development; the emergence of Palestinian universities under colonialism; universities’ historical and contemporary survival strategies throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories, both in Gaza and the West Bank; and the global higher education sector’s recent solidarity efforts with Palestinian academia in Gaza, as well as the limitations of such efforts. We discuss the crucial work of the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza and the ISNAD program, established in 2024 mid-genocide. Launched by Gaza’s largest universities and their affiliated colleges, these initiatives aim to preserve non-profit academic institutions in the territory despite the physical destruction of their campuses, to refuse colonial and neoliberal reconstruction models, and to articulate principles of international solidarity with Gaza’s higher education sector. Throughout, the article emphasizes the importance of centering Palestinian universities, and especially those in Gaza, in all discussions of and responses to scholasticide in Palestine. Finally, the article highlights Palestinian educational practices as forms of resistance, self-determination, and collective survival, and attends to the unimaginable ways in which Gaza’s educators and students are keeping higher education alive in the territory amidst genocide.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it