Textbook Genocide: Why Israel Bombs Schools

In January 1937, prominent Palestinian educator Khalil Totah testified before the Palestine Royal Commission, established by the British mandatory authorities to “investigate causes of unrest” between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish settlers. Totah condemned Britain’s “shameful neglect” of education in Palestinian rural areas and went on to argue:

The major grievance of the [Palestinian] Arabs as regards [to] education is that they have no control over it. It is the right of every self-respecting community to control its own education… Arabs feel strongly that they are competent to manage their own education. They feel they have as much right to control the education of their children as the Iraqis have, as the Trans-Jordanians have.

In this testimony and in other writings, Totah remained consistently critical of British colonial censorship of educational materials on Palestinian history, geography, and culture. His own book, “History of Palestine,” written in Arabic, was banned by the British high commissioner in 1920.

Controlling education has long been a priority for colonial regimes seeking to erase Indigenous knowledge and produce subjects who serve colonial interests.

Totah's critique — articulated some 88 years ago — underscores a central objective of colonial control over Palestinian education: the denial of Palestinian self-determination. Anthropologists and sociologists have long demonstrated how schools serve as sustained, deeply formative encounters between young citizens and the state, shaping conceptions of rights, responsibilities, and national belonging. As sites for transmitting social norms and cultural values, schools are often where individuals first develop a sense of collective belonging or exclusion. This helps explain why colonial regimes have historically prioritized control over educational systems, co-opting schools and universities to erase Indigenous knowledge and, in its place, produce subjects and forms of knowledge that serve colonial interests. Britain’s infamous educational policy document, Macaulay’s Minute of 1835, suppressed vernacular education in India for Western-style schooling, with English as the language of instruction.

The genocide in Gaza, which included targeted strikes on schools and universities across the Strip, has drawn increased international attention to the phenomenon of “scholasticide.” Coined by Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi in 2009, during an earlier Israeli war on Gaza, the term refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of an education system.

While media and scholarly attention has largely centered on the most recent war on Gaza, it is important to recognize that scholasticide in Palestine is rooted in a long-standing system of control and erasure. It must be understood as a part of Israel’s unique and brutal 76-year-long settler-colonial project and war against the Palestinian people, a highly developed structure of oppression increasingly referred to as the ongoing Nakba.

Since the British left Palestine, the Israeli regime has expanded its matrix of colonial control to further repress Palestinians politically, culturally, socially, and economically. Israeli legislation banning the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from operating in Gaza and the West Bank is now part of this matrix and has sparked outrage over the ensuing humanitarian catastrophe. Just as troubling, the ban threatens UNRWA’s largest, measured by staffing and budget, and longest-running program: education. Already in effect in East Jerusalem, the ban is undermining the education of some 300,000 children and youths, whose schooling has been interrupted since October 2023, following years of repeated disruptions.

The UNRWA ban is part of a broader assault on Palestinian education in Gaza. For the past 18 months, the Israeli military has systematically targeted students, teachers, and academics. Conditions on the ground have made comprehensive assessments difficult. A recently released assessment by the World Bank, however,  found that every single educational facility in Gaza has been damaged. A total of 2,308 have been completely destroyed. The scale of this destruction, relative to Gaza’s population, could be rivaled only by the destruction of Cambodia’s education system during that country’s genocide.

School systems play a vital, if often overlooked, role not only in preparing younger generations for the workforce but also in shaping political consciousness and creating conditions for social justice. This article examines the many ways Israel has sought to dismantle and destroy Palestinian education throughout history: from bombing kindergartens, schools, libraries, and universities, to censoring teachers and textbooks, and orchestrating a global disinformation campaign. These are not isolated actions but coordinated tactics in Israel’s long-standing colonial war and its efforts to erase Palestinian peoplehood. Yet Palestinians have countered scholasticide, as they have other forms of colonial repression, with formidable resistance.

At the beginning of the Nakba in 1948, Zionist militias displaced and dispossessed the majority of Palestinians from their homes. But early Zionist militias did not only steal land and property — they also looted an estimated 70,000 books from Palestinians, including 30,000 from Jerusalem alone. Israeli state institutions later appropriated at least 6,000 books belonging to displaced Palestinians and which are now in the National Library of Israel. These and other similar acts marked the start of Israel’s pattern of targeting Palestinian education and centers of knowledge, culminating in the destruction of Gaza’s entire education system today.

After 1948, a minority of Palestinians were granted Israeli citizenship. Although the Israeli Compulsory Education Law of 1949 allowed them access to public education, the school system Israel developed was and remains comparable to the “separate and unequal” system associated with a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that marked a turning point in the American civil rights movement. To this day, Palestinian schools are segregated and severely underfunded compared to schools serving Jewish Israelis. For nearly two decades after the Nakba, Palestinians needed permission from the Israeli military to pursue education outside their villages. The military also surveilled and intervened in the appointment of teachers, and produced textbooks aligned with the state-wide effort to Judaize and de-Arabize Palestine. Although Israel lifted military rule over Palestinian citizens in 1966, its internal security agency, the Shin Bet, has continued to interfere in teacher appointments — even after the Israeli Supreme Court formally banned the practice in 2004.

In 1948, Zionist militias looted some 70,000 Palestinian books, one of several early acts that marked the start of Israel’s pattern of targeting Palestinian education — culminating in the destruction of Gaza’s entire education system today.

The situation is especially dire in the Bedouin villages of the Naqab region, where Israel denies residents basic municipal services. Schools in these communities do not have access to running water, electricity, or internet. Unsurprisingly, there is a significant gap in the quality of education between these villages, which Israel does not legally recognize, and schools run by the Israeli Ministry of Education elsewhere.

The Palestinians displaced from Palestine in the wake of 1948 faced innumerable obstacles to accessing quality education. During the 1950s and 1960s, Palestinian students in Arab countries encountered educational systems that largely sidestepped the Palestinian cause, despite widespread rhetorics of Arab nationalism. Whether in Egypt, Iraq, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, or the West Bank, governments imposed their own state curricula on Palestinian students, including in UNRWA schools. These curricula offered little discussion of Palestinian history and culture and were not designed to meet the needs of a community resisting colonial expropriation. In Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, security forces closely monitored Palestinian teachers, arresting — and in some cases torturing — those accused of promoting Palestinian nationalism or fomenting dissent against the host state.

Faced with colonialism in their historic homeland and repression in exile, Palestinian educators consistently pushed back against systemic injustice. Covertly and defiantly, they imparted an understanding of Palestinian history, the losses of the Nakba, and the imperative of national liberation to younger generations of refugees — most of whom were born into dispossession and exile. These teachers included stalwarts of the Palestinian resistance during the 1950s and 1960s, such as the intellectual and poet Mu‘in Bseiso; his wife, the activist Sahba’ Al-Barbari, in Gaza; and the unionist and civic leader Ahmad al-Yamani in Lebanon. Education and resistance were deeply entwined. As al-Barbari wrote in her memoir, “Light the Road to Freedom”:

The time I spent as a teacher in Gaza City was one of the greatest times of my life. I consider teaching to be one of the highest professions as it deals with human beings, helps in forming their characters, and shapes future generations. It was a difficult time, and many students suffered from various kinds of problems; the anguish could be easily spotted on their faces. I believe the teacher’s role is to try to engage with students and help them manage their problems, ease their discomfort, and provide them with information, strategies, tools, knowledge, and morals like honesty and truth, in order to prepare them to deal with life—or at least try.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the ensuing occupation of Gaza and the West Bank gravely undermined Palestinian education, making clear that the Israeli regime intended to colonize all of historic Palestine. Israel initially attempted to impose a new curriculum in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, and Gaza. When Palestinians resisted through strikes and civil disobedience, the colonial regime shifted tactics, banning books and censoring the Egyptian and Jordanian curricula then used in Gaza and the West Bank, respectively. These unilateral measures undermined, and in many cases, contradicted, a UNESCO-led review of textbooks taught in UNRWA schools in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank , a review originally requested by Israel, which claimed the curricula promoted hatred and incited violence. As a result of the bans, Palestinian schoolchildren faced severe book shortages throughout the late 1960s and 1970s.

Israel’s repression of educators continued apace after 1967. The Israeli military closely surveilled and censored teachers and textbooks in the newly occupied territories, drawing on its experience repressing 1948 Palestinians. A former school supervisor in Gaza recalled that the Israeli military would arrest teachers simply for raising the Palestinian flag or singing nationalistic songs.

This repression was, and continues to be, especially pronounced in East Jerusalem, which Israel illegally annexed and severed from the West Bank. Four different service providers operate schools in Jerusalem: the Israeli Ministry of Education, UNRWA, private actors, and the waqf (a charitable Islamic endowment that runs schools in the city on behalf of the Palestinian Authority and its Jerusalem Directorate of Education). This fragmented system reflects a wider disintegration of Palestinian education across the region, aligned with the goals of the settler-colonial project. Israeli authorities, for example, do not recognize or communicate with schools operated by the waqf or UNRWA, and private schools, including those run by religious groups and NGOs, do not receive state subsidies. The Israeli municipality is also responsible for poor coordination, mismanagement, and severe underfunding of Palestinian schools. Its permit regime facilitates extreme overcrowding and teacher shortages. Israeli authorities routinely weaponize municipal funding to force Palestinians to attend better-resourced schools run by the Israeli authorities, rather than those operated by UNRWA or the Palestinian Authority.

Faced with colonialism in their historic homeland and repression in exile, Palestinian educators defiantly imparted an understanding of Palestinian history, the losses of the Nakba, and the imperative of national liberation to younger generations of refugees — most of whom were born into dispossession and exile.

The extreme restrictions on Palestinians’ right to live, work, and study in Jerusalem create a daily reality in which about 11 percent of Palestinian students and nearly 30 percent of teachers must cross time-consuming and humiliating military checkpoints to reach school. At these checkpoints, Israeli soldiers may strip-search, arrest, or physically assault students, and confiscate their school bags. Schoolchildren and university students have also been attacked by armed Israeli settlers. Palestinian schools in Jerusalem, as well as in the West Bank, also face a high risk of demolition by Israeli authorities.

Outside of Jerusalem, the 1967 war and Israel’s occupation marked a broader shift in the nature of both Israeli repression and Palestinian resistance. As the Palestinian national movement gained strength, particularly in Lebanon, Israel’s tactics shifted from attempts to co-opt the education system to efforts to dismantle it entirely. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Israel assassinated prominent writers and intellectuals, including Ghassan Kanafani and Kamal Nasser, and repeatedly attacked Palestinian schools, libraries, and research centers. Anis Sayigh, a scholar who led the Palestine Liberation Organization’s research center in Beirut from 1966 to 1976, was seriously injured and narrowly escaped death after Mossad agents sent him a letter bomb.

Palestinian schools witnessed increased militancy during this period. During Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, Palestinian factions used UNRWA’s Siblin Center as a militant training camp. Israel capitalized on this with intensive media coverage to deflect attention from its calamitous 1982 invasion of Lebanon, during which its forces continued to damage, destroy and occupy both Lebanese and Palestinian schools.

Less remembered from this period are the many acts of nonviolent resistance that positioned education as a tool for social justice. These acts ranged from community efforts to rebuild destroyed schools, to the creation of institutions like the publishing house Dar al-Fata al-Arabi, which sought to instill a love of Arabic culture through children’s literature. The publishing house worked closely with PLO representatives to develop materials addressing the dispossession of the Palestinian people, the rise of Arab authoritarianism, and the growth of Arab national movements. Dar al-Fata al-Arabi relocated to Cairo after the PLO withdrew from Lebanon in 1982, and shut down in the mid-1990s. Dar al-Fata is just one example of the innovative, culturally grounded educational programs and centers that Palestinians have developed over decades to address the limitations of formal schooling.

But these initiatives are not safe from attack. Over the last decade, and especially since October 2023, Israel has repeatedly and deliberately destroyed Gaza’s bookstores, libraries, and museums. Palestinian poet and writer Mosab Abu Toha shared his anguish over the destruction of the Edward Said Public Library in northern Gaza, which he founded in 2017 despite great adversity. Israel destroyed the library and killed its librarian, Do‘a’ al-Masri, during the ongoing genocide. In January, Abu Toha reaffirmed his commitment to rebuild and expand the library into southern Gaza. His resolve is emblematic of the Palestinian people’s commitment to education. Over the past 18 months, Gaza’s booksellers and librarians have responded to community demand for reading material by relocating to areas of displacement and smuggling books through the dangerous “Netzarim corridor,” established on the ruins of Palestinian neighborhoods. This insistence on education is a defining feature of Palestinian anti-colonial resistance — and a lifeline amid genocide.

After the PLO was expelled to Tunisia, the First Intifada reinvigorated Palestinian resistance and, with it, Palestinian educational efforts. In response to the unprecedented popular uprising, the Israeli military enacted a campaign of collective punishment, forcibly closing Palestinian schools and universities for months at a time. Israeli authorities also converted over 40 Palestinian schools in the West Bank and Gaza into military bases. Once again, Palestinian teachers and academics were targeted for reprisals through forced retirements, arbitrary dismissals, salary deductions, and imprisonment.

Acts of nonviolent resistance positioned education as a tool for social justice — from community efforts to rebuild destroyed schools to the creation of institutions like the publishing house Dar al-Fata al-Arabi, which sought to instill a love of Arabic culture through children’s literature.

In response, Palestinian teachers, university students, and parents resumed schooling in their homes, mosques, and other community spaces. This underground network became a model for popular education grounded in democracy, social justice, and equality. It also broke with traditional methods of rote learning and memorization, instead promoting dialogue and critical engagement — pedagogical approaches that are essential for fighting oppression. The Israeli military responded by forcibly closing these alternative schools and banning self-learning materials that many teachers tried to deliver to their students’ homes. Israel had, in effect, criminalized Palestinians’ access to education.

The end of the First Intifada and the onset of the Oslo process transformed the educational environment once again. Soon after its establishment, the Palestinian Authority asserted control over education. The creation of a Palestinian Ministry of Education meant that, for the first time in their history, Palestinians became authors of their own official curriculum. Academic Ibrahim Abu-Lughod led this process through the Palestinian Curriculum Development Center.

Abu-Lughod and his team faced an immensely challenging task. As the distinguished education theorist Michael Apple argues, curriculum is always a reflection of the society and culture in which it is produced. By legitimating a particular vision of that society, a curriculum reveals who holds power within it. The Oslo process left many key political questions unanswered: What territory constituted the future Palestinian state? How should the curriculum represent the Israeli occupation, the colonization of the West Bank and Gaza, and the annexation of Jerusalem? What was the status of the millions of Palestinian refugees within their homeland and in neighbouring countries? These were not minor questions confined to the civic curriculum. They were foundational to determining whom the new curriculum served and to imagining what kind of future the school system was meant to build.

Regardless of how Palestinians wanted to answer these questions, they had to work against Western-led geopolitical maneuvering. During this state-building process, the Palestinian Authority primarily depended on the diplomatic and financial support of Western donor states, which exerted significant influence on the process of building the Palestinian education system. These pressures were particularly pronounced in the realm of curriculum and textbooks.

Israeli and Western media outlets began to circulate baseless claims that the Palestinian Authority curricula promoted anti-Semitism. The main perpetrator of this disinformation campaign was a shadowy organization called the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), established by Itamar Marcus, an Israeli settler with close ties to the Netanyahu government. CMIP appeared to exist for the purpose of undermining Palestinian state-building efforts through the denigration of the new curriculum.

A curriculum reveals who holds power within society — and for Palestinians, foundational political questions about land, occupation, colonization, and refugees remained unanswered under Oslo.

Control over school curricula and textbooks is a powerful way to control political and historical narratives, as far-right groups in the United States have since learned. Groups like Moms for Liberty have invoked the notion of parental rights to forcefully advocate against school curricula that address race and LGBTQ+ issues. But if Democrats in the US have complained about the efforts of these conservative groups to censor school curricula, they remain silent in the case of Palestine. On the contrary, soon after the establishment of CMIP, Democratic senators like Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer amplified CMIP’s disinformation campaign against the Palestinian curriculum. It made no difference that experts had highlighted CMIP’s litany of misrepresentations and mistranslations of textbook content from Arabic, as well as — in one especially absurd case — a review of the wrong curriculum. The impact was swift and serious: the Palestinian Authority lost the financial and technical backing of major donors.

Since then, the CMIP has rebranded itself as IMPACT-Se, an “international research and policy organization that monitors and analyzes education around the world.” Its current director, Marcus Sheff, used to work for the Israel Project, a pro-Israel media advocacy group with a long history of promoting anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred. Despite its rebranding, little has changed in terms of the group’s questionable methods and agenda. In 2022, IMPACT-Se published another report on a self-learning curriculum that it falsely attributed to UNRWA. Since October 7, 2023, IMPACT-Se has participated in an expansive and audacious disinformation campaign targeting UNRWA’s education program, which includes unfounded accusations against UNRWA staff members and sweeping claims that the agency supports  “terrorism.”

IMPACT-Se’s purported concern over the role of education in promoting “peace” intentionally overlooks the profound effects of colonization, dispossession, military occupation, ethnic cleansing and, now, genocide on Palestinian education. Even before October 2023, Israel’s suffocating blockade of Gaza prevented basic education supplies — notebooks, pens, and even toys — from entering the Strip. Its nightmarish permit scheme also made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for most Palestinians in Gaza to leave. This includes preventing scholarship recipients from pursuing graduate studies abroad and denying foreign academics in the West Bank work permits, forcing them to abandon their universities and students. IMPACT-Se’s work also ignores deep structural problems in Israel’s education system, including its racist treatment of Palestinians and Arabs. Tellingly, IMPACT-Se has not expressed any outrage regarding the near total destruction of the education system in Gaza during the genocide.

Even before October 2023, Israel’s suffocating blockade of Gaza prevented basic education supplies — notebooks, pens, and even toys — from entering the Strip. Its nightmarish permit scheme also made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for most Palestinians scholarship recipients to pursue graduate studies abroad.

Countless Western politicians and donor agency representatives have propagated disinformation about Palestinian education. The outgoing administrator of USAID, Samantha Power, known for outspoken advocacy against genocide, has remained silent on Gaza and uncritically regurgitates Israeli propaganda that militants were hiding among the civilian population. Similarly, Sweden’s aid minister attempted to justify his country’s defunding of UNRWA by citing debunked allegations that UNRWA uses anti-Semitic textbooks.

IMPACT-Se’s propaganda and Western governments’ selective outrage over the situation in Gaza serve not only as smokescreen for Israel’s scholasticide and genocide but as a mechanism of justification. As Palestinian scholar Edward Said famously argued, colonialism does not only operate through brute force and coercive power; it is also made possible through narratives and discourses that position entire populations as inferior, or as somehow deserving of repression and subjugation. The unfounded and baseless claims about Palestinian education have helped create a permissive environment in which Israel can destroy Gaza’s education system with impunity, undermining a crucial source of hope for a more just and liberated future. 

After 18 months of unfathomable death and destruction, Gaza’s education system lies in ruins. The most recent assessment conducted by the World Bank in February 2025 found that every single educational facility in Gaza has been destroyed or damaged. At least 539 teachers and 11,000 students have been killed by the Israeli military and more than 745,000 school- and college-aged children and youth have been denied access to formal schooling since October 2023. Yet Israel’s deliberate targeting of education still meets resistance in the form of a persistent commitment to learning. Palestinians are widely recognized as the “best educated refugees” in the world. For decades, UNRWA students have consistently performed at the highest levels of their host countries’ education systems. One former UNRWA student from Gaza, Louay Elbasyouni, now works as an electrical engineer at NASA, where he has contributed to major scientific innovations.

It will take decades to rebuild Gaza’s kindergartens, schools, universities, libraries, and other centers of learning. The World Bank estimates that $3.8 billion will be needed over five years to rebuild the Strip’s educational infrastructure, and to address the physical, cognitive, and emotional needs of children who have been disabled, malnourished, and affected by toxic stress and trauma of Israel’s genocidal war. Rebuilding must also account for the loss of two academic years and its long-term impact on children’s development and academic performance. Research shows that the effects of learning loss far exceed the time students spend out of school: children don’t just stop learning, they also forget much of what they previously learned when lessons are not reinforced or built upon. A report published in September 2024 estimated that students in Gaza are now five years behind their peers. But no statistics can fully capture the enormity of the challenges that lie ahead. The conditions in Gaza require a radical rethinking of the role of education. As poet and writer Mosab Abu Toha reflected on the destruction of his library: “My only two concerns now are whether I can get books into Gaza, and also whether I will find children who are convinced that it is safe and important to visit the library, especially after all the trauma and losses each of us experienced.”

Despite devastation, displacement, and loss, Palestinians everywhere continue to resist scholasticide with the very tool it seeks to destroy: education.

As if all this weren’t enough, the Israeli government’s decision to ban UNRWA is likely to prevent the largest education provider from operating. The UN agency runs 183 schools in Gaza and 96 schools in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. For nearly eight decades, UNRWA schools — including those in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria — have provided education, created employment, facilitated mass vaccinations, and offered shelter to Palestinians displaced by the seemingly endless cycle of war. In Gaza, UNRWA’s expertise and breadth of operations are irreplaceable. As it stands, Israel’s ban will deny education to 345,000 children across Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem — an atrocity, even by Israel’s standards. Educators attempting to keep schools and training centers open will have to confront the Israeli military and armed settlers, who are already using violence to close down centers of learning.

Despite devastation, displacement, and loss, Palestinians everywhere continue to resist scholasticide with the very tool it seeks to destroy: education. Community-led learning initiatives have emerged across Gaza and the West Bank. Universities in the West Bank and further afield have launched programs to give Gazans access to learning, while student and faculty teach-ins and protests around the world have highlighted the vital role of education and educators in resisting colonial regimes and the oppression of Palestinians.

What follows scholasticide? Without minimizing the enormous present-day losses and challenges, it is worth recalling the work of educators and activists like Paulo Freire and bell hooks whose legacies highlight the importance of critical pedagogy, solidarity, and praxis. Both Freire and hooks underscored the urgent need for education that speaks directly to the struggles of oppressed peoples and works to disentangle learning from systems of oppression, notably through pedagogies that position teachers and students as co-creators of knowledge. Their ideas echo what Palestinians have long understood and practiced: that the purpose of education cannot be reduced to securing employment or financial stability, but to help build societies capable of realizing collective liberation.