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Education has long played an important role in Palestinian identity and struggle, serving as a means of keeping Palestinian history and culture alive despite displacement and occupation. For many Palestinians, education is a pathway to resistance and survival. Palestinians continued to build educational initiatives even after the Nakba of 1948 (meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic), when Zionist military forces forcibly displaced over 700,000 Palestinians. By the time universities began to emerge within occupied Palestine, education had become a tool for future-building in the face of ongoing dispossession.
Israel has engaged in a decades-long pattern of destroying educational institutions across Palestine, intending to erase Palestinians from history and deny them a future in their homeland. Israel’s assaults on Palestinian education have reached unprecedented heights since October 2023. Israeli authorities have carried out hundreds of strikes in Gaza on schools sheltering displaced Palestinians, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying virtually all of Gaza’s schools. All 12 of Gaza’s higher education institutions and 95.4% of its schools have been destroyed or damaged since October 2023.
This destruction has been widely recognized as “scholasticide,” a term coined by Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi to describe the deliberate destruction of educational institutions, educators, and infrastructure in Palestine to erase a community’s intellectual and cultural life.
Scholasticide in Palestine
Since the Nakba, the Israeli state has executed a policy of scholasticide across Palestine. This systematic destruction inflicts generational harm. The scale of scholasticide in Gaza has escalated even further after October 2023, with the vast majority of school buildings bombed and damaged. As scholar Christopher Iacovetti writes: “By assassinating Gaza’s scholars, burning its libraries, looting its archives, and laying waste to its schools and universities, Israel has attempted not simply to make Gaza unlivable in the present but also, no less crucially, to deprive its Palestinian population of any viable future within it.”
By the end of 2024, Israeli military operations damaged and destroyed around 534 school buildings. Israel has targeted all of Gaza’s universities, with 60 university buildings completely destroyed. Among the institutions that were directly bombed are:
- Al-Aqsa University
- Al-Azhar University
- Al-Hassan University
- Al-Isra University
- Al-Quds Open University
- The University College of Applied Sciences
- The Islamic University of Gaza
- Gaza University
- The University College of Science and Technology
- The University of Palestine
- The Palestine College of Nursing
- The Palestine Technical College
The Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education has reported that 14,784 students have been killed and 24,766 others injured since October 2023.
What Scholasticide Means for Palestinian Survival
The trauma of destruction and displacement hinders cognitive and emotional development and obstructs the ability to learn. When the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) target schools and universities, it attacks the very foundation of Palestinian cultural survival. Scholasticide not only kills teachers but also tries to annihilate the capacity to think and rebuild.
Researcher Wadee Al-Arabeed emphasizes that for many Palestinians, education is “far more than just a service or sector to be preserved; it is a bearer of national memory and history, a foundation for development and recovery, and a vital safeguard for the continuity of identity, culture and knowledge production.”
(Photo by Abedallah Alhaj via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO DEED)
Education carries memory, identity, and the continuity of self-determination. As Islamic University of Gaza student Huda Skaik also writes, “The Israeli occupation, with its systematic campaign to silence our voices, targets educated individuals and professionals. It fears those who are empowered with knowledge, for education is the key to liberation.”
Education as Resistance
Palestinians continue to rebuild learning even amid genocide. Teachers gather surviving students in improvised schools made from tents and rubble. Universities in the West Bank, such as An-Najah National University, have established an innovative e-learning system dedicated to university students in the Gaza Strip to learn remotely. Every effort to teach is an assertion of existence against a regime of erasure.
To teach during a genocide is to reclaim control over the narrative of time itself. It is to refuse the forced erasure and to insist that Palestinian life stretches forward into futurity. “In Gaza, studying is no longer a right. It is an act of resistance (…) Because no genocide, no blockade, no silence can extinguish the light of knowledge from our hearts. Because when the world forgets us, we remember who we are,” writes Palestinian University student Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi.
Canadian Universities’ Close Ties with Israel
Despite the continued scholasticide in Palestine, Canadian universities, such as the University of British Columbia (UBC) and McGill, have maintained close ties with Israeli institutions, Most often through collaborations with Israeli universities such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
These connections go beyond academic cooperation. By partnering with Israeli universities deeply implicated in military research and Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), Canadian universities help strengthen Israel’s military sectors — the same forces responsible for committing scholasticide in Palestine.
University endowments and research funds also invest in companies linked to Israel’s military technology industry. While Canadian higher education institutions often frame these relationships as opportunities for “innovation,” they, in fact, deepen Canadian institutions’ involvement in the infrastructure of settler colonialism.
Privileging the Israeli Occupation Forces on Canadian Campuses
Canadian law, through the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, authorizes the investigation and prosecution of citizens and non-citizens who commit genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity. Despite this, universities welcome IOF soldiers on campus without question.
The presence of current and former Israeli military personnel in Canadian academic spaces (as students, faculty, or invited speakers) raises questions about institutional complicity and selectivity in the application of academic values. Those aligned with state or military power are afforded institutional protection, while those who protest are met with administrative sanction. Put simply, universities create environments that shelter individuals implicated in violence while punishing those who challenge it.
Palestinian and allied students report that this double standard breeds fear. At UBC, students and faculty launched petitions demanding that administrators keep the IOF off campus. Instead of responding, administrators disciplined and surveilled organizers. Protesters were continuously framed as a threat. In April 2024, the McGill administration requested “police assistance” to remove and dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus.
(Photo by Mori-Bund-Brat via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
Across the country, universities have also suspended and even arrested students and faculty who protest the ongoing genocide in Palestine and IOF events. In November 2025, a former IOF soldier physically assaulted protestors at the Toronto Metropolitan University during the “Triggered: From Combat to Campus” tour. As a result, police arrested and charged six protesters, while the IOF soldier did not face any charges. The event even branded the soldier as a model of resilience and leadership, turning militarism into a personal growth narrative.
History of Divestment
It is important to note that Canadian universities have previously divested and cut ties with institutions implicated in human rights abuses. Many Canadian universities, for example, withdrew investments from companies involved in apartheid South Africa. After years of protesting, McGill became the first Canadian university to divest from businesses with connections to apartheid South Africa in 1985, with York University and Dalhousie University following suit soon after.
Many Canadian universities have also divested from fossil fuels. In December 2019, UBC committed to fully divesting its endowment from fossil fuel companies. Following sustained activism from the Divest McGill campaign and its allies, the McGill Board of Governors also pledged to divest from fossil fuels in December 2023.
While these divestments were largely the result of student-led activism and sustained pressure on university administrators, they demonstrate that Canadian universities can also divest from Israeli institutions. There can be no excuses.
Demands for Canadian Universities
Ultimately, Canadian universities must be held accountable for their complicity in the scholasticide in Palestine. Canadian universities cannot disclaim responsibility while accepting partnerships and investments tied to Israel’s apartheid and military systems. Such contradictions transform education into complicity.
Students and faculty across Canada have demanded accountability. University groups such as UBC Divest, as well as faculty from UBC, University of Toronto, McGill, University of Montreal, and Wilfrid Laurier, have urged their administrators to cut ties with Israeli universities. Their demands align with the global academic boycott campaign calling on universities to end complicity in Israel’s system of apartheid and violence.
Since 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has called for a boycott of Israeli institutions. Following the academic boycott’s demands, Canadian universities must commit to a thorough, transparent audit and divestment of all financial and institutional ties to Israeli state bodies and complicit corporations.
This includes endowment investments in arms manufacturers, surveillance technology firms, and banks that finance settlement expansion, as well as formal partnerships with Israeli universities that host military research programs or collaborate directly with the IOF. Anything less than divestment enables the culture of secrecy that allows violence to operate at a distance.
Canadian universities must either defend the principle of education as a universal right or continue to legitimize those who destroy it. Solidarity here is not charity; it is a recognition that the universities’ professed commitment to academic freedom and global learning demands a stance when learning itself comes under violent attacks.
Edited by Khushi Mehta
