“Epistemicide” in Gaza. Breaking the Chain of Knowledge. Epistemicidio en Gaza. Romper la cadena del conocimiento. ENG ESP

“Epistemicide” in Gaza: How Israel Seeks to Erase Memory by Breaking the Chain of Knowledge

Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip is not limited to mass killing or the large-scale destruction of civilian and urban infrastructure. It extends into a deeper and far more enduring assault: the systematic targeting of education, culture, collective memory, and Palestinian identity itself.

This conclusion lies at the heart of a study by American scholar Henry Giroux, titled Scholasticide: Waging War on Education from Gaza to the West, [26 March 2025] in which he introduces the concept of “epistemicide”, the deliberate destruction of knowledge systems, as a framework for understanding the war not as a temporary military campaign, but as a structural project aimed at erasing Palestinian society physically, culturally, and intellectually.

Giroux, one of the leading figures in critical pedagogy, presents this concept in his research published in the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, arguing that epistemicide represents a core dimension of the ongoing assault on Gaza.

State Terror and the Normalization of Violence
According to Giroux, what is unfolding in Gaza cannot be understood as a series of isolated military operations. Rather, it is a comprehensive project designed to reshape Palestinian reality by destroying the material and intellectual conditions necessary for survival. The target is not only human bodies, but also the institutions that preserve history, transmit knowledge, and shape the consciousness of future generations.

The study argues that state terror does not always appear in its most overt or brutal form, nor is it necessarily exercised outside the law. In many cases, it is reproduced within institutional frameworks and cloaked in legal, security, and moral rhetoric that renders violence both acceptable and necessary.

Giroux explains that Israeli violence is presented as an integral part of state logic and governance rather than as an exception or deviation. The most dangerous form of state terror, he argues, lies not in the excessive use of military force alone, but in the normalization of that force within society, transforming it into a routine practice that escapes ethical scrutiny or accountability.
When the state legalizes violence and reframes it as “self-defense” or “security,” it does more than suppress the victim, it conditions society itself to accept, internalize, and symbolically participate in that violence.

Giroux distinguishes between direct military violence and state terror, which he defines as violence carried out in the name of law and security and granted political and moral legitimacy through coordinated official and media discourse. Under this framework, the widespread bombing of civilians, the targeting of schools and hospitals, mass arrests, and home demolitions are not aberrations but components of a systematic policy embedded in the political structure of a state that works to normalize violence socially, ethically, and culturally.

He further notes that Israel is not only waging war on Gaza, but also simultaneously waging war on criticism and dissent—both inside Palestine and globally. Any attempt to describe the unfolding reality as war crimes or genocide is met with organized smear campaigns and ready-made accusations, most notably antisemitism.

From Exceptional Violence to Structural Violence
The study draws on international human rights reports indicating that Israel dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza within a few months—an amount comparable in destructive capacity to two nuclear bombs. Giroux argues that such unprecedented firepower, particularly in one of the world’s most densely populated areas, makes claims of “mistakes” or “collateral damage” untenable.

Under international humanitarian law, the repeated use of this level of destructive force in civilian areas constitutes a clear war crime, especially when directed at non-military infrastructure.

One of the study’s central findings is the deliberate targeting of educational institutions. According to United Nations data:
•Approximately 90 percent of Gaza’s schools have been damaged or destroyed.
•All 12 universities in the Strip have been bombed or vandalized.
•Around 90,000 university students have been forced to suspend their studies.
•Thousands of students and hundreds of teachers and university professors have been killed.

Giroux rejects the notion that these outcomes are accidental byproducts of war. Instead, he situates them within a broader policy aimed at severing the knowledge chain that links past, present, and future—making social recovery extraordinarily difficult.
The study highlights repeated attacks on schools that had been converted into shelters for displaced civilians, including the Al-Tabaeen School, which was struck while hundreds of civilians were inside.

Human rights investigations found no evidence of military activity in these locations, reinforcing the conclusion that the attacks were intentional.
Giroux argues that the repetition of such incidents reflects a shift in which schools are no longer protected spaces, but have been transformed into military targets—an egregious violation of international norms requiring the protection of educational facilities. s therefore a long-term strategy of domination.

In the Palestinian case, this logic is especially clear. Gaza, despite years of siege, maintained a vibrant educational system, active universities, and high enrollment in higher education. This reality posed a structural threat because knowledge in Gaza was inseparable from questions of identity, memory, rights, and continuity.

From this perspective, the destruction of universities, laboratories, and the killing of academics sends a political message: to break the chain of consciousness by attacking the present and devastating the future.

Children Between War and Deprivation
Giroux pays particular attention to children as both direct victims of bombardment and the group most affected by the simultaneous collapse of education and psychological stability. War, he argues, is not measured only by death tolls, but by the depth of the wound it inflicts on future generations.

Schools are not merely places of learning, but spaces of safety, routine, social connection, and meaning. When they are destroyed, children are left in an existential void where violence becomes the primary framework for understanding the world.
The accumulation of trauma, bombing, loss, displacement, hunger, combined with educational deprivation produces deep psychological scars. Children raised without stable education and a clear horizon face heightened risks of depression, anxiety disorders, cognitive decline, and the erosion of trust in the future.

Most dangerously, Giroux argues, this outcome is not accidental. A generation deprived of education is less capable of demanding rights and rebuilding society after war.

The Violence That Goes Unseen
In one of the study’s most forceful arguments, Giroux describes epistemicide as a form of slow violence, a process that dismantles a society’s intellectual and cultural foundations over years or decades. Unlike airstrikes, it receives less media attention, yet it is more devastating in the long term.

Ignoring this dimension, he warns, means accepting a crime whose consequences will surface later, when society finds itself unable to recover, not due to lack of resources, but because its intellectual capital has been destroyed.

From this standpoint, rebuilding schools after the war, if it happens at all, is insufficient unless accompanied by protecting knowledge, supporting educators, and restoring faith in education as a path to life.

Giroux concludes that what is happening in Gaza is not merely a local tragedy, but a global test of whether education truly matters as a non-negotiable human right. When schools are destroyed, memory erased, and children denied learning, it is not only one people under attack, but the very idea of justice.

Defending education, he insists, is an act of moral resistance against raw power. Silence in the face of epistemicide is complicity in an ongoing crime, and acceptance of a future built on ignorance and oppression.
In a world that claims to uphold human rights, Giroux poses a final question: What value do those rights hold if education becomes the first casualty when they are put to the test? 

In the Palestinian case, this logic is especially clear. Gaza, despite years of siege, maintained a vibrant educational system, active universities, and high enrollment in higher education. This reality posed a structural threat because knowledge in Gaza was inseparable from questions of identity, memory, rights, and continuity.

From this perspective, the destruction of universities, laboratories, and the killing of academics sends a political message: to break the chain of consciousness by attacking the present and devastating the future.

In a world that claims to uphold human rights, Giroux poses a final question: What value do those rights hold if education becomes the first casualty when they are put to the test?

The Epistemicide of the Palestinians: Israel Destroys Pillars of Knowledge
Feb 02 2024
Abdulla Moaswes

On Nov. 6, 2023, an Israeli airstrike destroyed Gaza's Al-Azhar University, one of the largest educational institutions in the occupied territory. Far from being the sole university targeted during Israel's recent escalation of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and indeed throughout Palestine, a short video published by the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Scientific Research on the same day as the attack pointed out that a total of nine university buildings (at the time of the video's publication) in Gaza and two in the West Bank had been either “completely or partially damaged.” According to the video, at least 227,335 Palestinian students, including 555 Palestinians in Gaza with scholarships abroad, had faced severe disruptions to their higher education at the time.

In the weeks since, Israel's assault on Palestinian schools and universities has only intensified. On Jan. 18, Israel destroyed Al-Israa University with 315 mines — it was the last university standing. Every university in Gaza had been destroyed, in full or in part, along with over 350 schools, educational institutions, and public libraries during the ongoing genocidal campaign.

With this in mind, the bombing of university buildings in Gaza cannot be simply understood as attacks on bricks and mortar but also as assaults on archives, student and staff records, and the intellectual labor of the university's community. Indeed, the attack upon Al-Israa University also included the demolition of a nearby museum — a clear attempt by the Israeli military to cover up and dispose of the evidence of their looting of the over three thousand rare artifacts that it housed. Attacks that obliterate universities such as Al-Azhar and Al-Israa equate to the erasure of the accomplishments of Palestinian knowledge producers and contribute to Israel's ongoing epistemicide of the Palestinian people — a process intertwined with their summary genocide.

Epistemicide can be broadly defined as the destruction of knowledge systems and the knowledge that they generate. The Latin American sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel explains how epistemicide played a crucial role in Europe's colonization of the rest of the world, including the settler colonization of the Americas. It granted European philosophy an “epistemic privilege,” allowing it to become the “new foundation of knowledge in the modern/colonial world.”

In other words, it created a world in which only knowledge produced by European colonists and settlers was deemed legitimate, while colonized societies were compelled to construct new systems from scratch — often mirroring those of their colonizers — because their own systems had been destroyed. As a result, the structural conditions of knowledge production that facilitated the mechanisms of their colonialization also imposed constraints on their liberation.

Israeli efforts to discredit and sabotage Palestinian knowledge production, along with its literal and material attacks on Palestinian institutions of learning and their respective communities, serve as evidence of this.

The British Mandate and the Hebrew University

An early example of epistemicide in Palestine dates back to the British Mandate's attempts to thwart the development of a Palestinian system of higher education while enabling the establishment of Zionist Jewish universities. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, established as a public university in 1925, is the most notable example of this. In response to the absence of a comparable Arab Palestinian institution, the eminent historian Ilan Pappé argues that the failure to open an Arab university in Jerusalem can be attributed to a combination of British colonialism, Zionist lobbying, anti-Arab racism, and an overall underestimation by both British officials and some Palestinian leaders of the scope and ambition of the settler colonial project of Zionism.

Furthermore, according to Pappé, the British Mandate afforded Zionist institutions a level of autonomy that “enabled it to build itself up as part of an independent infrastructure for a state within a state,” thus allowing it to become foundational to the future Israeli state. At the same time, he describes the Mandate as micromanaging Palestinian education in an attempt to keep it apolitical and under the control of British colonial officials. As Pappé explains, the British “deemed the Palestinians yet another colonized people who had to be oppressed, while regarding the Zionist settlers as fellow colonialists.” A Palestinian university, according to Pappé, “would have empowered the anti-colonial narrative, helping to counter the project of the Hebrew University that provided scholarly scaffolding to the Zionist ideology.” In practice, this colonial sabotaging of Palestinian attempts at building knowledge systems laid the foundation for Israeli epistemicide.

The Nakba and Oral History

Nur Masalha describes the Nakba as causing the destruction of Palestinian society, and this would include their knowledge systems. Needless to say, the dispossession of Palestinian land and resources, along with the majority of the Palestinian population's new status as exiles and refugees, posed significant challenges to attempts to reestablish Palestinian systems of knowledge production. It is, therefore, unsurprising that oral history and memory accounts of the experiences of those who survived the 1948 expulsions are, in Masalha's words, “central to Palestinian history and the Palestinian society of today.”

Palestinian oral histories, however, are routinely discredited and delegitimized by the Israeli government, its knowledge institutions, and those who participate within them. As the Tantura affair demonstrated over two decades ago, even attempts by Israeli researchers to construct knowledge on Palestinian history, and specifically Palestinian villages, using Palestinian sources and memory accounts (as well as an equal number of Israeli ones in this case) can be dismissed as illegitimate. Although Teddy Katz's work as the man at the center of the affair has since been vindicated by the publicizing of the recorded confessions of the perpetrators of the Tantura massacre as part of the 2022 documentary film carrying the village's name, the accounts of the massacre's Palestinian survivors remain sidelined.

Unlike Katz, however, there is a countless number of Palestinian knowledge producers whose work is yet to be, and may never be within their lifetimes, similarly vindicated. In 2019, the Israeli Ministry of Defense created a department known as Malmab, tasked with concealing and locking away previously declassified archival materials related to the Nakba, among other topics. Former Malmab head Yehiel Horev explained that this was due to the possibility of such materials generating “unrest” among Palestinians. Coupled with the systematic discrediting of Palestinian oral accounts, Malmab's locking away of Israeli written sources further sabotages Palestinian knowledge production.

Epistemicide and Palestinian Institutions Today

Another facet of Israel's epistemicide of Palestinians is the interventions that the Israeli Occupation makes into the operations and academic freedom of homegrown Palestinian knowledge institutions.

Beyond the standard pattern of Israeli border control routinely denying exiled Palestinian researchers access to their homeland to conduct research, participate in conferences, or even join the faculty at Palestinian institutions, Israel, in 2022, extended the powers of the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) authority to determine the terms within which foreign academics, including Palestinian citizens of foreign countries, may conduct their work in the West Bank.

As well as being a clear attack on Palestinian academic freedom, this narrowing of the field of supposed “acceptable knowledge production” maintains the Israeli state's epistemic privilege over that of Palestinians. The COGAT's ability to intervene in Palestinian knowledge production in such a patrimonial and patronizing manner — reaching the point where it is tasked with deciding what counts as a “necessary field” in which a Palestinian institution may hire a foreign citizen — further delegitimizes Palestinians not only as knowledge producers but as the sovereigns of their own knowledge production. This amounts to an extermination of the very Palestinian epistemic imperatives that outline the relationship between knowledge and existence, both around the world and in Palestine.

Knowledge and Genocide

It is not only Israel and its institutions that have participated in the silencing, attacking, discrediting, and undermining of Palestinian knowledge production. Powerful institutions within the “blancosphere” (also popularly referred to as “The West”), including governments, news organizations, and academic institutions, also contribute to further enabling the epistemicide of Palestinians.

A brazen example of this would be U.S. President Joe Biden unilaterally passing judgment regarding who was culpable for the attack upon the Al Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, accepting Israel's claims of innocence uncritically while wholly dismissing the accounts of Palestinian eyewitnesses. Similar roles are played by references from the BBC and many other mainstream media houses to the Gaza Ministry of Health as a “Hamas-run Ministry” — an attempt to delegitimize its reporting of casualties.

Not all examples are so brazen, however. Little has changed since Edward Said argued, in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, that Palestinians have been denied the “permission to narrate.” According to him, the privileging of a “Western master narrative, highlighting Jewish alienation and redemption” erases the Palestinian understanding of reality, where the struggle for liberation is far from over. In this sense, the epistemic privilege accorded to the Israeli state and its institutions through its epistemicide of Palestinians plays a role in legitimizing it in the eyes of those more powerful than it.

Therefore, in attempting to resist the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and across the entirety of historic Palestine, it is absolutely vital to recognize and push back against epistemicide in all of its forms. Rana Barakat asserts the importance of centering Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty, resistance, and endurance within analyses of Israel's settler colonial project. It is crucial to add here that recognizing Palestinians not just as narrators of history but as producers of knowledge within the context of the land of Historic Palestine and the experiences of Palestinian people all over the world pushes back against the Israeli state's attempts to solidify its epistemic privilege through escalating its epistemicide.

To conclude, Israel's attempts to destroy Palestinian knowledge and systems of knowledge production form an essential component of its protracted genocide of the Palestinian people. Yet, as my late grandfather, who was expelled from his home in Jerusalem in 1948, said to me throughout my life: “You will always protect your wealth, but your knowledge will always protect you.”

7 March 2026

Israel continues to commit scholasticide in the Gaza Strip, 28 months after its military attack through systematic and deliberate policies aimed at preventing the population from restoring education. More than 780,000 students have been deprived of regular education across 3 academic years. The Israeli military assault has killed 18,911 school pupils and 1,362 university students, while 2,931 university students were injured. Additionally, 794 teachers and 246 university faculty members were killed, with 3,261 faculty injured and 1,491 others hurt. The attacks left 668 school buildings bombed, 179 completely destroyed, and 118 severely damaged; 100 UNRWA schools were bombed. At least 63 university buildings were completely destroyed, with the remaining institutions severely damaged. In total, 95% of schools suffered material damage, with over 90% requiring full reconstruction.