Scholasticide and resilience: The Gaza Genocide and the struggle for Palestinian higher education
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".