Education under colonial occupation: The Palestinian right to learn as target and resistance

Abstract

This paper examines the right to education in Palestine under conditions of settler colonialism, prolonged occupation, blockade, and structural violence, with Gaza treated as the most acute contemporary expression of these dynamics. The study adopts a critical and interdisciplinary approach, bringing together legal, historical, political, educational, economic, and epistemological perspectives. The main purpose is to examine how Palestinian education has been targeted through practices of control, punishment, dispossession, and cultural eradication. The discussion offers insights into the economic implications of this destruction and go beyond to help understand the socio-economic challenges amidst the right to exist. The paper traces the evolution of imposed educational policies from the British Mandate through the Israeli occupation beginning in 1967 and the transformations of the control regime over Gaza since 2005. The discussion also considers education as a space through which Palestinian society has sustained social resistance in response to education and classrooms being placed under siege and under fire. The targeting of schools is examined as a serious violation of international humanitarian law (IHL) and United Nations conventions. The notion of scholasticide is revived as an analytical category to describe the systematic destruction of the Palestinian education system and the conditions that sustain it -material, human, institutional, and epistemic- as part of a project of social, cultural and identitarian annihilation. The study concludes that education in this context cannot be reduced to a basic service or addressed through a technocratic-humanitarian lens but must be understood as a collective right closely linked to self-determination, justice, and decolonisation.