After over a year of Israel’s genocidal campaign, Gaza’s universities have continued to operate even as their campuses and infrastructure have been destroyed. In response to Israeli military attacks against educational facilities during Operation Cast Lead in 2009, Karma Nabulsi coined the term scholasticide to describe the systematic destruction of Palestinian education. This process of the targeted annihilation of educational infrastructure has been ongoing since the Nakba of 1948, but has accelerated and expanded in unprecedented proportions since October 2023, with at least ninety-four faculty members and three current or former university presidents killed, and over a thousand faculty, staff, and students injured. In addition, every university, library, cultural centre, or archive has been severely damaged or destroyed.   

Under these circumstances, the question of how British academic institutions might show material and symbolic solidarity with Palestine’s universities is urgent. There is a long history of faculty building collaborations and links across borders, and lines of imperial division, to sustain each other. In their responses to scholasticide in Palestine, however, the overwhelming response from the UK’s academic institutions has failed to acknowledge that though the bricks and mortar of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed, their substance remains in the communities of scholars who continue to teach, learn, and do research in their tents, online from locations to which they have been displaced, and under extraordinary conditions of duress and perpetual risk to life. British universities’ response to calls for solidarity has been largely muted. Where material gestures have been made, they have tended towards exclusive focus on the provision of small numbers of individual scholarships. Rarely have university leaders acknowledged the destruction of Palestinian universities, and at the institutional level, there is a stark failure to establish equitable partnerships with Gaza’s universities in response to their request for support. 

In the absence of any support for Gaza’s higher education institutions, scholarship and fellowship programmes for Gaza students and faculty established and advanced without the collaboration of Gaza’s universities risks further weakening of the integrity of the higher education system. In response to the scholasticide and marginalisation of Gaza’s higher education institutions internationally, Gaza’s public universities came together to form an Emergency Committee. Their call and priorities emphasise resistance to Israel’s scholasticide, and a commitment to a future for the Palestinian people on their land. Educational institutions, they write, are “a vital pillar of our existence and a beacon of hope for the Palestinian people.” 

Oxford has, as Omar Shweiki, director of Fobzu and Oxford alumnus, pointed out, a long history of collaboration with Palestinian institutions, prominently in the medical sector. The talks at the event made these links – and the rich history of collaboration between Palestinian and British universities and scholars more generally – evident in talks by Oxford’s Nick Maynard (Medical Sciences), Dr Nazmi Masri (Islamic University of Gaza), Ahmed Nahed (Fobzu), and Professor Dina Kiwan (Birmingham), all of whom drew attention to past and ongoing projects of institutional collaboration. Dr Ahmed Abu Shaban’s (Al Azhar University) talk as a representative of the Emergency Committee focused on the need going forward, which is centrally for institutional collaboration, for instance, through twinning programmes that establish substantive structural links between institutions located in different places. In a comparable context, the UK-Ukraine Twinning Initiative has established institution-to-institution partnerships between British institutions and their Ukrainian counterparts in response to the crisis faced by the Ukrainian higher education sector. Dr Abu Shaban also made, in his talk, a call for solidarity: for British institutions to recognise and affirm the right of Palestinian universities and students to continue the work of teaching and learning on their land. 

ODID as a department has a long history of training students from the Global South and substantive collaboration with academic and other institutions in the Global South that echo, in the present moment of crisis, Palestinian scholars’ calls for solidarity. In the context of scholasticide – bolstered by schemes that seek to replace the work of Gaza’s universities through new initiatives – the Emergency Committee’s collective work to support the resilience and integrity of Gaza’s universities is ever more urgent. As a globally influential university and a leader in UK higher education, Oxford has a pivotal opportunity to take a stand – demonstrating solidarity with fellow academic communities as they fight for their very survival on their own land.

Download the Fobzu Partnerships with Palestine Guide here

Watch Fobzu’s “Our Universities Live On: Testimonials of Hope from Gaza” (6 minutes, showing student testimonials) here

Sneha Krishnan is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow in Geography at Brasenose College. She is currently a British Academy Wolfson Fellow, writing a book about transnational networks and the reimagining of domesticity at a women’s college in Southern India. She also writes on queer and femme histories, and girlhood, and is an Editor of Gender, Place and Culture. 

Omar Shweiki is Director of Fobzu (Friends of Birzeit University). He was formerly Acting Director of the Kenyon Institute, a British Academy-supported research centre in East Jerusalem, where he also served as Jerusalem Scholar. He has taught History and Politics at Al Quds University. He holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies, also from Oxford University. Together with Mandy Turner he co-edited Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).