Israel could burn Gaza colleges, however Palestinians shall resist – INA NEWS

My faculty in Khan Younis refugee camp was one in every of my favorite locations. I had devoted academics and a deep love for studying, a lot in order that schooling grew to become my life’s work. However, past the enjoyment of studying, faculty was a spot the place we, Palestinians, might discover a connection to these we couldn’t simply encounter: the Palestinians of the occupied West Financial institution and Jerusalem, the Palestinians of our historical past, and the Palestinian writers, poets and intellectuals who informed our story in exile. Training is how we wove collectively the material of our nation.

Palestinians are famend for having one of many world’s highest literacy charges. They’re also known as the best-educated refugees on the earth. Training is each a part of our nationwide story and a strategy for imparting it.

The annual tawjihi (highschool nationwide examination) is a key second within the Palestinian calendar of liberation. Every year, the announcement of tawjihi outcomes sparks widespread celebrations broadcast throughout the land, showcasing and honouring the achievements of the top-performing college students. The euphoric second transcends particular person success, serving as a collective affirmation of our college students’ capacity to persevere and excel regardless of the relentless challenges imposed upon them.

In the summertime of 2024, for the primary time since 1967, there was no tawjihi examination in Gaza. There have been no celebrations.

Israel’s decimation of the schooling system in Gaza has precipitated immense ache and despair amongst a whole bunch of hundreds of kids and younger individuals. But, the will for schooling is so enduring amongst Palestinians that even amid genocide, they don’t cease making an attempt to study.

When considering of this indomitable spirit, I consider my cousin Jihan, a self-employed civil society employee with an MA in diplomacy and worldwide relations. She and her three daughters have been residing in a tent in al-Mawasi for the previous 10 months. Her husband, a health care provider, and their son had been forcibly disappeared by the Israeli navy within the early days of the genocide.

Whereas residing in deplorable circumstances within the displacement camp, she and her daughters determined to assist college students entry their schooling regardless of the unfolding calamity. With the assistance of a photo voltaic panel, they arrange a small charging station and a hotspot, the place anybody can cost their gadget and use the web in trade for a small charge.

Two of their common guests are kinfolk of my husband: Shahd, a multimedia scholar, and her brother Bilal, a medical scholar. They used to check at al-Azhar and Al-Aqsa universities, respectively, however the Israeli military destroyed each. Final 12 months, they joined a web based studying initiative launched by the tutorial authorities in Gaza to allow the 90,000 college college students to finish their larger schooling.

Shahd and Bilal informed me they need to stroll for hours to achieve Jihan’s charging station to allow them to entry course notes. Each time they depart their tent for the journey, they embrace their household tightly, conscious they could not return. Their dad and mom are involved, particularly for Bilal, as a result of younger males are sometimes the targets of drone strikes. To assist preserve him protected, Shahd generally makes the journey alone, carrying each her and her brother’s telephones to cost and obtain coursework.

The queues are lengthy, with a whole bunch of younger individuals ready in line to entry sufficient energy to cost a laptop computer or telephone. The web sign is weak so downloads are sluggish. The entire course of generally takes a full day.

Because the eldest daughter, Shahd desires of graduating and making her dad and mom proud, bringing a small gentle into their darkened world. Her father was just lately recognized with colon most cancers, and the household now faces one other stage of worry and loss, given the collapse of the well being system and the genocide.

Shahd informed me she clings to the hope that, ultimately, by the small victory of commencement, she may rework this harsh actuality. She is absolutely conscious of the dangers. “With every step, I’m wondering if I’ll make it again. My dream is to complete my diploma, graduate, and discover a job to assist my household,” she informed me.

“I’ve seen individuals burned, disfigured, evaporated, and even left for stray animals to search out. I’ve seen physique elements hanging from energy strains, on rooftops, or transported by animal-drawn carts or carried on shoulders. I pray this isn’t how I’ll die. I need to die in a single piece with my mom in a position to bid me farewell, and to be buried in dignity,” she added.

Anyplace, the mass killing of scholars and assaults on colleges or universities are a tragedy. However in Palestine, the place schooling is greater than a proper or a dream, such assaults additionally goal our nationwide id.

Israel is nicely conscious of that and the destruction of Gaza’s schooling system has been a part of its longstanding technique to erase Palestinian id, historical past, and mental vitality.

My technology, too, skilled an Israeli assault on schooling, albeit a lot much less lethal and damaging. From 1987 to 1993, in the course of the first Intifada, Israel imposed a blanket closure of all universities in Gaza and the West Financial institution as a type of collective punishment, depriving tens of hundreds of scholars of the correct to larger schooling. On the identical time, an Israeli navy curfew confined us to our houses each night time, from 8pm to 6am. Israeli troopers got orders to shoot any violators. Faculties had been raided, attacked, and shut down for weeks or months at a time.

Regardless of this violence and disruption, schooling grew to become an act of resistance. Just like the 18,000 different tawjihi college students in Gaza in 1989, I studied tirelessly. I obtained the excessive marks required to have the ability to pursue a prestigious diploma, which generally meant drugs or engineering.

My household was overjoyed. To have fun my achievement, my father ready an enormous pot of tea, purchased a field of Salvana candies, and rushed to the household diwan in Khan Younis camp, the place our household mukhtar served Arabic espresso. Individuals additionally got here to congratulate my mom at dwelling. But that fleeting pleasure rapidly turned to despair. With universities shuttered, I used to be compelled to attend 5 lengthy years, clutching tightly to the dream of constant my schooling.

Mahmoud Darwish was proper: Palestinians are troubled with an incurable illness known as hope. And paradoxically, the very restrictions of the occupation in the course of the first Intifada created fertile floor for activism, resistance and neighborhood work. Within the absence of formal establishments, younger individuals denied college schooling joined instructional committees fashioned by civil society throughout Palestine.

We remodeled houses, mosques, and neighborhood halls into makeshift school rooms. Usually, we needed to scale partitions and sneak by alleyways to achieve college students with out being detected by Israeli troopers imposing the curfew. Professors, too, resisted by opening their houses to college students, risking arrest and imprisonment to make sure studying continued. 1000’s enrolled, studied, and even graduated beneath these harrowing circumstances.

When universities lastly reopened in 1994, I used to be a part of the primary cohort to begin learning, together with six of my siblings. It was a second of triumph for my household, although it positioned a heavy monetary burden on my father, who needed to pay for tuition for thus many people. The reopening of universities was not only a restoration of schooling however a reclaiming of a significant a part of Palestinian id and resistance.

The time period “scholasticide”, coined by Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi in the course of the 2009 battle on Gaza, captures the fact now we have confronted for many years. Scholasticide is the deliberate obliteration of indigenous information and cultural continuity. It’s an try and sever the ties between a individuals and their collective mental and historic id.

In the present day, the fact is even graver. All of Gaza’s 12 universities lie in ruins, and not less than 88 % of all colleges in Gaza have been broken or destroyed.

The bodily destruction of infrastructure runs in parallel with efforts to obliterate the legitimacy of the establishments which offer schooling. In late October, Israel successfully banned UNRWA from working. On condition that this UN company runs 284 colleges in Gaza and 96 within the West Financial institution and East Jerusalem, this ban offers one other blow to Palestine’s mental future.

But, simply as we resisted previously, Palestinians in Gaza proceed to withstand this systematic erasure of their instructional and cultural lifelines. Training is not only a software for survival – it’s the cloth that binds our nation, the bridge to our historical past, and the muse of our hope for liberation.

After I consider the immense destruction of Gaza’s schooling system and all these college students defying all odds to proceed to check, I bear in mind the strains of Enemy of the Solar, a 1970 poem by Samih al-Qasem, often known as the “poet of Palestinian resistance”.

“Chances are you’ll plunder my heritage,
Burn my books, my poems,
Feed my flesh to the canines,

Chances are you’ll unfold an internet of terror
on the roofs of my village
O Enemy of the Solar,

However I shall not compromise,
And to the final pulse in my veins,
I shall resist.”

Palestinian college students will proceed this resistance by strolling for hours every day to entry their schooling. That is the spirit of a individuals who refuse to be erased as people, as a nation, as a historic truth, and as a future actuality.

The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.