The genocidal violence unleashed by Israel since October 7, 2023 is an acceleration of longer processes of elimination common to settler colonial societies. It is a process that we have seen in the United States towards the Indigenous peoples there, in Australia towards the Aboriginal peoples, and a process that has been ongoing by Israel since its creation in the ethnic cleansing of 1948. One particular aspect of this genocidal violence is that of “scholasticide”.

The term scholasticide was coined by the Palestinian political theorist Karma Nabulsi in 2009, based on a pattern observed during the 2008-2009 Gaza War – known as the First Gaza War, as it has been followed by subsequent wars in 2012, 2014 and the present one. Nabulsi observed the extrajudicial assassinations by Israel of Palestinian academics and students, as well as the systematic destruction of educational institutions — including schools, universities and libraries — and noted that this process had been ongoing since the Nakba of 1948. The term has been since applied to other places, most notably during the American occupation of Iraq, where the occupiers oversaw wholesale looting of Iraqi cultural artefacts, assassinations of intellectuals and academics, and the introduction of a pro-US curriculum.

During this existing genocidal war, Israel has systematically destroyed much of Gaza’s educational resources. Of Gaza’s schools, at least 65 per cent have been either destroyed or converted into emergency shelters. The Israeli military has also occupied schools or related institutions and converted them into military bases for their forces.

All of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed. Israeli forces have also demolished education adjacent institutions such as libraries. Academics and intellectuals have been targeted, particularly medical professionals. Schooling basically ended after Israel unleashed its genocidal violence in October 2023, and little to no formal schooling has been able to occur since — even if makeshift schools have been established in emergency shelters when possible.

For the third year in a row, Palestinian children have been denied the right to an education. At least 15,000 schoolchildren, hundreds of university students, and close to 1,000 teachers, principals and education supervisors have died from Israeli bombs and bullets. Importantly, these figures are underestimates, based solely on those whose deaths have been medically certified; huge numbers of dead are not counted, entombed in rubble.

In total, approximately 95 per cent of Gaza’s education infrastructure is out of service, including ministry headquarters, district offices, warehouses, book centres, training facilities and schools.

In addition to the loss of physical infrastructure and the loss of students, teachers and other workers, there is the psychological toll from the trauma of the equivalent of more than two nuclear bombs being dropped on one of the most densely populated strips of land on the planet — resulting in mass killings of families, relatives, neighbours and friends, as well as the trauma of displacement. Even designated safe zones are frequent targets of Israeli attacks, and aid centres have become sites of massacres by Israeli forces.

Hannah Arendt, in her The Origins of Totalitarianism, draws on the work of Aimé Césaire to explore what she described as an imperial boomerang — where methods of colonial oppression are subsequently used within the imperial heartland itself. We can see this in both Israel and the wider West, most spectacularly in the US today. No, schools and such are not suffering from a campaign of systematic physical destruction in Israel or the US. However, the academy is still subject to a systematic attack all the same.

In Israel, power has been used to censor academics, intellectuals and students who dare question the logic of Zionism, or demonstrate limited solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide or Apartheid. While this has been the case for decades, the genocidal campaign in Gaza has seen it accelerate. Perhaps one of the most prominent such examples is that of professor Nadera Shalloub-Kervokian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In April 2024, she was arrested for her criticism of Zionism and genocidal violence. Before her arrest, she was subject to an incessant smear campaign which sought to portray her criticism as “incitement to violence” against the Israeli state. The leadership of her university initiated a campaign of harassment against her for signing a petition in October 2023 calling for an immediate ceasefire and the need for a political solution to the conflict. In March 2024, the professor, in a TV interview, dared to suggest that the supremacist ideology of Zionism should be abolished, leading to her suspension from the university.

The harassment of this one professor is but one example of such campaigns to silence critical voices within the academy. Palestinian students have faced concerted campaigns of intimidation, including having their addresses widely shared, mobs of Zionists threatening them in their houses, and any expression of solidarity with Palestine in the face of genocidal violence reported as incitement of violence against Israel, resulting in arrests and worse.

Elsewhere, especially in the US, the issue of Palestine has ushered in a new era of McCarthyism and violent repression. Students demonstrating solidarity with Palestine in the face of genocide have found themselves subject to doxxing, their academic careers in jeopardy — including expulsions — or subject to blacklisting. Student protests have been brutally suppressed by security forces — and, at times, such as the April 30 attack in UCLA, by violent Zionist mobs (in this case the security forces were curiously delayed in responding, while others that were present left the scene, facilitating the violent mob). Professors, too, have been subject to blacklisting, doxxing and violence, all for participating in peaceful protests against genocide.

While this began under Joe Biden, under Donald Trump it has accelerated, with the administration seizing on this as a tool to subjugate universities. They have sought to crush the independence of key universities, most notably Colombia and Harvard, and introduce censorship and ideological control over them – primarily around Palestine, but also on other areas such as gender, race and climate change. We are also seeing attempts to purge academic disciplines, concepts and books — not just from the universities, but also in schools generally, particularly by book bans.

Quite frankly, the war on education in Gaza has direct parallels in the ongoing assault on education throughout the West, especially the US. We are seeing today a frontal assault on intellectual freedom and historical truth, which poses a direct threat not only to academic freedom, but also to free speech and democracy itself.

It is our collective responsibility to act in solidarity, not only against the genocide, but also to educate ourselves to defend against these threats to democracy. To quote Edward Said: “We cannot fight for our rights and our history, as well as future, until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”

• Jonathan Starling is a socialist writer with an MSc in Ecological Economics from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in Urban and Regional Planning from Heriot-Watt University