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Coming of age and settler colonialism: Laura Soderberg, ‘Coming-of-age Outside the Settler State: Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe and Native Sovereignty’, in Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo (ed.), The Post-Bildungsroman: Coming of Age at the Margins, Bloomsbury, 2025 »

The (attempted) elimination of the native intellect: Avi Shlaim, ‘Scholasticide in Gaza’, Journal of the British Academy, 13, 1, 2025, #a16

02Oct25

Excerpt: Scholasticide is the deliberate destruction of an educational system and its institutions. The term was first coined by Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian Professor of Politics at Oxford University and an expert on the laws of war. The immediate context was Operation Cast Lead of December 2008, the first major Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip after the unilateral disengagement of August 2005. The broader context was Zionist settler-colonialism and its attacks on Palestinian scholars, students, and educational institutions since the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. The term combines the Latin prefix schola, meaning school, and the Latin suffix ‘cide’, meaning killing. Nabulsi used it to describe the ‘systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel’ and the tradition of Palestinian learning. That tradition, Nabulsi observed, revolves round the pivotal ‘role and power of education in an occupied society’ in which freedom of thought ‘posits possibilities, opens horizons’, in sharp contrast with ‘the apartheid wall, the shackling checkpoints, and the choking prisons’. Recognising ‘how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution’, Nabulsi noted that Israeli colonial policymakers ‘cannot abide it and have to destroy it’. 


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