Resisting Israeli Scholasticide and Academic Apartheid
Image by Arno Smit.
Israel’s genocidal war is both massacring Palestinians and destroying their physical and social infrastructure. In particular, Israel has targeted Palestinian educational institutions. In late April, UN experts concluded, “with more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’.”1 The aim of this settler-colonial project is to eradicate the physical, intellectual, and political reproduction of the Palestinian people. As Maya Wind documents in her new book Towers of Ivory and Steel, the Israeli higher education system plays a key role in this agenda. Spectre’s Ashley Smith interviews Wind about the current war, the nature of Zionist higher educational institutions, and the case for a boycott of Israeli universities.
Maya Wind is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her scholarship broadly investigates how settler societies and global systems of militarism and policing are sustained, with a particular focus on the reproduction and export of Israeli security expertise. Towers of Ivory and Steel (Verso, 2024) is her first book.
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Your book is a brilliant account of the role Israeli higher education plays in enforcing apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing. The flip side of that for the Israeli state is the destruction of Palestinian higher education, best exemplified by what activists have called “scholasticide,” that is, the complete demolition of Palestinian educational institutions. Why is Israel so intent on destroying Palestinian schools and universities?
Palestinian and Indigenous scholars of education across the world have long analyzed settler colonialism through the prism of the university. Informed by this work, I investigated the institution of the university in order to study the Israeli settler colonial project. The Zionist project has always sought to eliminate and replace indigenous Palestinians with Jews as the basis for the Jewish state. Because Israel has always regarded Palestinian education as a force behind the Palestinian liberation movement (and therefore a threat to its rule), the erasure of Palestinian knowledge production and the destruction of Palestinian centers of education—what Karma Nabulsi has called “scholasticide”— is central to this project of Palestinian elimination and dispossession.