[DEBATE] : Scholasticide - Israel destroying Palestinian education in Gaza (Guardian)

[Salim Vally]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/10/gaza-schools




Gaza, the schools are dying too


 

*	

	*	Ameer Ahmad in Gaza and Ed Vulliamy
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/edvulliamy>  
	*	guardian.co.uk <http://www.guardian.co.uk/> , Saturday
10 January 2009 19.43 GMT 

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/10/gaza-schools#history-byline
>  

A new word emerged from the carnage in Gaza
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gaza>  this week: "scholasticide" - the
systematic destruction by Israeli forces of centres of education dear to
Palestinian society, as the ministry of education was bombed, the
infrastructure of teaching destroyed, and schools across the Gaza strip
targeted for attack by the air, sea and ground offensives.

"Learn, baby, learn" was a slogan of the black rights movement in
America's ghettoes a generation ago, but it also epitomises the idea of
education as the central pillar of Palestinian identity - a traditional
premium on schooling steeled by occupation, and something the Israelis
"cannot abide... and seek to destroy", according to Dr Karma Nabulsi,
who teaches politics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. "We knew before, and see
more clearly now than ever, that Israel is seeking to annihilate an
educated Palestine," she says.

The Palestinians are among the most thoroughly educated people in the
world. For decades, Palestinian society - both at home in the West Bank
and Gaza, and scattered in the diaspora - has put a singular emphasis on
learning. After the expulsions of 1948 and after the 1967 occupation,
waves of refugees created an influential Palestinian intelligentsia and
a marked presence in the disciplines of medicine and engineering across
the Arab world, Europe and the Americas.

"Education is the most important thing - it is part of the family life,
part of your identity and part of the rebellion," says Nabulsi.
"Everyone knows this, and in a refugee camp like Gaza, every child knows
that in those same schooldesks sat your parents and your grandparents,
whose tradition they carry on."

Schooling and university studies are the fabric of life despite, not
because of, circumstances: every university in the occupied territories
has been closed down at some point by Israeli forces, many of them
regularly. However, the closures and arrests of students (more than 300
at Birzeit university in Ramallah, says Nabulsi) only strengthens the
desire to become educated.

In the current offensive, Israel began attacking Gaza's educational
institutions immediately. On only the second and third day of air
attacks last week, Israeli planes wreaked severe damage in direct
strikes on Gaza's Islamic University. The main buildings were
devastated, destroying administrative records, and, of course, ending
studies. The Ministry of Education has been hit twice by direct hits
from the air.

The Saturday of the ground invasion was the day on which most students
in Gaza sit their end-of-year examinations. In the majority of cases,
these had to be abandoned, and it remains unclear whether they can or
will be sat again. Other schools were also attacked - most notoriously
the UN establishment in the Jabaliya refugee camp where at least 40
people were massacred on Tuesday.

On Sunday, another Israeli air strike destroyed the pinnacle of
Palestinian schooling, the elite and private American International
School, to which the children of business and other leaders went, among
them Fulbright scholars unable to take up their places in the United
States because of the Israeli blockade. Ironically, the same school was
attacked last year by a group called the Holy Jihad Brigades, and has
been repeatedly vandalised for its association with western-style
education.

The school was founded in 2000 to offer a "progressive" (and fully
co-educational) American-style curriculum, taught in English, from
kindergarten to sixth form, and was said by the Israelis to have been
the site, or near the site, from which a rocket was fired. A night
watchman was killed in the destruction of the building.

The chairman of its board of trustees, Iyad Saraj, says: "This is the
most distinguished and advanced school in Gaza, if not in Gaza and the
West Bank. I cannot swear there was no rocket fired, but if there was,
you don't destroy a whole school." He adds: "This is the destruction of
civilisation."

The school has no connection to the US government, Saraj says, and many
of the 250 who graduate from it each year go on to US universities.
"They are very good, highly educated open-minded students who can really
be future leaders of Palestine."

Young Palestinians playing in Daniel Barenboim's celebrated East-West
Divan Orchestra - which this week again brings Palestinian and Israeli
musicians together to play a prestigious concert in Vienna - say that
music schools in their communities and refugee camps are "not just
educating young people, but helping them understand their identity", as
Nabeel Abboud Ashkar, a violinist based in Nazareth, puts it, adding:
"And the Israelis are not necessarily happy with that."

Ramzi Aburedwan, who runs the Al-Kamandjati classical music school in
Ramallah, argues: "What the Israelis are doing is killing the lives of
the people. Bring music, and you bring life. The children who played
here were suddenly interested in their future".

In a recent lecture, Nabulsi at St Edmund Hall recalled the tradition of
learning in Palestinian history, and the recurrent character of the
teacher as an icon in Palestinian literature. "The role and power of
education in an occupied society is enormous. Education posits
possibilities, opens horizons. Freedom of thought contrasts sharply with
the apartheid wall, the shackling checkpoints, the choking prisons," she
said.

This week, following the bombing of schools in Gaza, she says: "The
systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel has countered
that tradition since the occupation of 1967," citing "the calculated,
wholesale looting of the Palestinian Research Centre in Beirut during
the 1982 war and the destruction of all those manuscripts and archived
history."

"Now in Gaza," she says, "we see the policy more clearly than ever -
this 'scholasticide'. The Israelis know nothing about who we really are,
while we study and study them. But deep down they know how important
education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian
revolution. They cannot abide it and have to destroy it."
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/10/gaza-schools/print> 



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