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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”
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It’s not about Hamas, nor the Palestinian resistance hiding its weapons or any other excuse to attack Palestinian schools and universities, it’s a plot to destroy the Palestinian people. The Israeli government is deliberately targeting all educational institutions of Palestine whether they are in the Gaza strip or in the West Bank and beyond. So why would they do such a thing?
If the Palestinians don’t have educational institutions to train doctors, engineers, lawyers, historians, mathematicians, religious scholars, lawyers, and every other profession that is essential for a nation to survive and thrive, then what kind of society would they have?
Trained doctors and nurses won’t be able to treat and cure their patients. Engineers and architects won’t be able to build critical infrastructure such as buildings, roads, water and sewer systems, railways and airports. An uneducated people won’t be able to maintain or compete with other countries in terms of finance and international trade with skilled accountants, economists, financial planners, and investment bankers. Professors, teachers, and school administrators won’t be able to teach their students reading and writing, math, history, religion and the sciences such as biology, chemistry and physics. Newspapers and media won’t have trained journalists, researchers, and radio broadcasters and so on. In other words, a nation without knowledge is doomed for failure and the Israelis are well aware of it.
Destroy the education of the Palestinians, you destroy a nation of people. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that “the Israeli army has killed 94 university professors, along with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students, as part of its genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Israel has killed many professors along with their family members in the Gaza Strip, “the Israeli army has targeted academic, scientific, and intellectual figures in the Strip in deliberate and specific air raids on their homes without prior notice. Those targeted have been crushed to death beneath the rubble, along with members of their families and other displaced families.” The number of Palestinian professors, teachers, administrators, and students killed is a sign that those involved in education is a legitimate target for the Israelis:
According to preliminary estimates, the ongoing Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of university students, reported Euro-Med Monitor. The rights group pointed out that destroying universities and killing academics and students will make it more difficult to resume university and academic life when the genocide ends, saying it may take years for studies to be resumed in an environment that has been completely destroyed.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, 4,327 students have been killed and 7,819 others injured, while 231 teachers and administrators have been killed and 756 injured during the ongoing attacks. Meanwhile, 281 state-run schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools in the Gaza Strip have been completely or partially destroyed
Israel is targeting the cultural and historical properties of the Palestinian people to erase their history, but also to destroy any knowledge they have to rebuild their society:
Israel’s widespread and intentional destruction of Palestinian cultural and historical properties, including universities, schools, libraries, and archives, demonstrates its apparent policy of rendering the Gaza Strip uninhabitable, Euro-Med Monitor warned. The attacks are creating an environment devoid of basic services and necessities and may eventually force the Strip’s population to emigrate.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor stressed that the targeting of civilian objects by armed forces, particularly those that are historical or cultural artifacts protected by special laws, is not only a serious breach of international humanitarian law and a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, but falls under the purview of the crime of genocide
There is an indication that there is an agenda behind the mass killings of people involved in education.
The Toronto Star had an interesting article titled, ‘How Israel’s ‘scholasticide’ denies Palestinians their past, present and future’ said that “Academics raising concerns about this particular type of destruction call it “scholasticide,” and point to three related phenomena: the destruction of Gaza’s educational infrastructure, assaults on universities in Gaza and West Bank, as well as serious harassment and attacks on senior faculty and students supporting Palestine within the Israeli university system.” “Scholasticide’ is a term that shows how Israel’s destruction of the education system in Gaza directly impacts the past, present and future of the Palestinian people:
The destruction risks erasing Gaza’s past. For instance, the university that was blasted on Wednesday also housed a national museum containing rare artifacts. Whether those artifacts were destroyed or, as West Bank’s Birzeit University is accusing, stolen by Israel, they are lost to Palestinians. With archives and architecture destroyed, it’s as if Palestinians never lived there.
If the current situation continues, Gaza is also likely to be denied to its people in future. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his long-standing opposition to Palestinian statehood saying Thursday, “In the future, the state of Israel has to control the entire area from the river to the sea”
According to Abdel Razzaq Takriti, an associate professor of history at Rice University in Texas who is also the chair of the Arab American Educational Foundation said that “as scholars, we cannot fathom how it is possible that we’re supposed to stay silent while our colleagues are being bombed with bombs supplied by our countries” he also said that “this is an attack on the enlightenment in society” he continued“and it’s going to cause ignorance. It’s going to cause lack of opportunity. And it’s designed to do that. Scholasticide is a very dangerous aspect of genocide.”
It’s not just in Gaza, its all of Palestine’s educational institutions that are being targeted by the IDF forces. The Norwegian Refugee Council conducted a report from January 2018 until June 2020 and found that “Palestinian children in the West Bank contended with a deluge of attacks on education, at a crushing pace of 10 attacks per month, on average.” The research was based on a 30-month period and it “found that 296 attacks against education by Israeli forces or settlers and settlement private security guards took place during 235 separate incidents.”
Israel’s actions is nothing less than a diabolical plot to destroy a nation’s people. It gives the Israelis the excuse it needs to call the Palestinians animals who don’t even know how to read or write and that the Palestinians don’t know how to make a living and that’s why they are dependent on foreign aid. A report by Amnesty International said that “Palestinians across all areas under Israel’s control have fewer opportunities to earn a living and engage in business than Jewish Israelis” and that “They experience discriminatory limitations on access to and use of farmland, water, gas and oil amongst other natural resources, as well as restrictions on the provision of health, education and basic services.”
With no educational institutions to train and educate its people, the Palestinians will face a collapse of their society. Zionist warmongers want nothing more but to eradicate any hope for a better future for the Palestinian people by erasing all forms of education that would allow them to advance their society and that is something that the Israelis don’t want to see happen.
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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: The UN says nearly 1.9 million people have now been displaced in Gaza. [AbdelHakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]
