Why the Educide is almost worse than anything.

An education is the only thing that no one can ever take from you, no matter what, once you have it.

Since nothing compares to dead babies and their parents screaming over their corpses, other aspects of the genocide in Gaza get less attention (rape in the prisons, for one).

But let’s talk about the destruction of Gaza’s universities. And how young kids have been barbarically cut off from their schooling. I want to discuss why it’s a world-class catastrophe and an inhumane tragedy.

***

To start, let’s not skirt around it: America is not deeply committed to education. I don’t have to list all of the ways this manifests. But anti-intellectualism is so deeply ingrained that even reasonable people who think kindergarten teachers and adjunct professors should not have to sleep in their cars? They just do not venerate education the way people in, or from, oppressive and/or poorer societies do. In many places in the world, education is treated like a secular religion.

There’s a whole genre of Instagram videos where a parent from India or Jamaica or Nigeria, reacts when their second-generation American kid, for example, tells them they “want a gap year.”

There is no, “I just want you to be happy, sure, become an apprentice to a pottery maker.” It’s more like, “I will skin you alive if I can’t tell my immigrant friends you’re going to become a doctor.” ¹

The reason is that an education is the only thing that no one can ever take away from you, no matter what, once you have it. Unless you never get to have it.

***

In the 1930s, my Bulgarian great-grandmother, Slavka, who was naturally brilliant, was forced to quit school after the second grade to work at the family pub, washing dishes.

Her whole life, her lack of schooling haunted her. Of course, she was a reader, but it’s not the same. She did everything to make sure my grandmother finished technical school. She hounded my Dad about studying, until getting straight A’s was a small price to pay to stop being hounded by his grandmother.

He became an engineer, of which Slavka was immensely proud, even though she’d gripe about all the electric wires lying around. “My grandson, the fancy engineer, he’ll electrocute us all,” she’d scoff.

A few months before she died, I got accepted into my dream college, and she was so ecstatic and proud she cried from happiness.

***

To back up: every decision my parents, as immigrants to the US, had made were based around my future college education. They considered having another child, but decided against it because they didn’t think they could afford to send two kids to college.

“I want pizzzzzzzaaaaaaaa for dinnnerrrrr!” I remember whining once when I was 8. “No! We have to save money for college,” my Mom replied.

When the book fair came to school, I didn’t buy anything, because I was worried about money. When I told my parents they said, “No. For books, there’s always money,” and sent me back the next day to buy any book I wanted.

The political and sociological reasons a parent from India or Jamaica or Nigeria might be obsessed with their kids’ educational attainment are, I’m sure, multifarious—as well as discussed at length with the second generation’s therapists. But I do have some insight into why that was the case in Communist Bulgaria and among immigrants who left after the regime collapsed.

First, there was a serious investment in building a higher education system, that was almost free, under Communist rule. That part is good. But, also, a lot of professions were reserved for the nomenclatura: the minority of Communist party members that had grasped power and then swiftly gave up the Socialist visions of egalitarianism to reserve privileges for themselves and their kids, and perpetuate their power, including access to jobs in the arts or “journalism” or politics. So, kids whose parents weren’t in the nomenclatura went to the Sciences.

This was encouraged by the regime. The funny thing is, if you want to get your talentless kid into acting or “journalism” through connections, that’s one thing. But, a society’s doctors, in charge of keeping you alive, or engineers, in charge of making airplanes safe, to also keep you alive? You do not want them to have gotten their job merely through connections.

So, people without party connections tended to study medicine or engineering. A few years ago, my American friend Matthew, who’d end up marrying a Bulgarian girl, asked me: “Is every Bulgarian Dad kind of terrifying, and also an engineer?”

Correct.

Well yes and no: class and geographic differences rear up everywhere, so some Bulgarian Dads are kind of terrifying, but also truck drivers. (But consistently terrifying if you’re trying to court their daughter).

Anyway, the point is, the widespread ideological consensus around education was rooted in, well: the regime can deprive you of your rights and subject you to all kinds of degradations, but they could not do anything about the elevated status and prestige that came with a good education.

Even though engineers didn’t make a lot more money than truck drivers, an entire system coalesced around the idea of “vishistie”—those with advanced degrees—and “ne-vishistie.”

Families were obsessed with making sure the kids did excellent in school so that they would become “vishistie.” It was a whole thing for older relatives from the villages to show up with bagfuls of pears or tomatoes to give to teachers, who, as one can imagine, were feared and revered. In pre-school, I was mortified when my great-aunt Leoni—who, younger than Slavka, had been able to get an education and worked as a teacher and then a principal in a small, rural town—would show up to class and interrogate the teachers about how I was doing. My mother’s mother, who’d also been a teacher, taught me how to read and write years before I started school.

***

In June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shared some thoughts on why U.S. pro-Palestinian protesters are deeply misguided, especially given their progressive positions on women’s rights.

“The people who protest with these killers [… ] Women for Gaza. What are women in Gaza — they’re chattel and other such absurdities.”

Every society mistreats and undermines women. But Netanyahu’s statement, rooted in Western visions of all Muslim-majority societies as utter, dehumanizing Hell for women, conveniently obfuscated a fact: Palestinian territories have the highest rates of literacy in the Arab/Muslim world. And that includes women, who are clearly encouraged — likely harangued, like my great-grandmother harangued my Dad—to get as much education, and attain as much professional advancement, as they can.

Do you notice how so many among the dead are lawyers, journalists, pharmacists, academics, tech people, engineers, doctors, nurses, first-responders? Caveat: not everyone wants to do these professions, and there is nothing wrong with that. But the people who do? They should be able to. Somehow, over decades of occupation, Palestinians built educational institutions that could pump out lawyers, journalists, pharmacists, academics, tech people, engineers, doctors, nurses, first-responders, etc. etc.

Israel has destroyed all of that.

“Since 7 October, Israel has destroyed almost all of Gaza’s universities and killed 4,327 students and 92 professors,” writes Mid-East Eye.

The people who were arbitrarily born at a time when they could get an education—if they survive, no one can take it from them. The children who haven’t been to school in a whole year? The young people studying, or who wanted to study, to work as lawyers, journalists, pharmacists, academics, tech people, engineers, doctors, nurses, first-responders?

That’s over.

Rights groups have condemned Israel’s targeting of Gaza’s academic community and infrastructure as deliberate and tantamount to a war crime.

In an open letter to the UK government, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) denounced the “systematic targeting” of universities, schools, laboratories and libraries as “part of a genocidal strategy aimed at destroying in whole or in part the Palestinian education system within the Gaza Strip”

Neve Gordon, vice president of BRISMES and professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University, described the destruction of Gaza’s education system as “educide”.

“The long-term effects on the productivity of the society, on its culture, on every aspect of it, are devastating,” he told MEE.

In a statement issued on 20 January, the rights group Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, said that Israeli forces have deliberately “targeted academic, scientific, and intellectual figures in the Strip”.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, the Israeli assault on Gaza has so far killed 4,327 students and maimed 7,819 others, while also killing 231 teachers and administrators and wounding 756.

Additionally, Israeli forces have killed 94 university professors, according to the rights group.

Many of them were internationally renowned scholars, including one of Gaza’s most prominent intellectuals, poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer who was killed on 7 December.

The scale of the deaths of students and educational staff in the region is “unprecedented," according to BRISMES.

“When you kill the intellectuals of a society, who is going to narrate…the memory of that community?” Samia al-Botmeh, an assistant professor of economics at Birzeit University, told MEE.

The decimation of Gaza’s academic community has been accompanied by the flattening of its physical educational infrastructure.

“Most of the universities in Gaza are either completely destroyed or partially targeted,” Amer said.

Full story here.

A million years ago, the whole world swoooooooned (rightly) over Malala, the little girl who got a bullet to the head because she wanted to get an education. Now we’re helping, with our tax dollars, deprive thousands of Malalas the chance to study to become lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, professors, journalists, activists, psychiatrists, anyone else who, whatever work they do, wants to study and learn. Sick inhumane shit.

1. When Russia started the war in Ukraine a reporter asked Volodomyr Zelensky’s mother how proud she is of her son. “My other son’s a doctor,” was her response.