‘scholasticide’: meaning and origin

The noun scholasticide designates the systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel.

This noun occurs, for example, in the following, by Shree Paradkar, published in the Toronto Star (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) of Saturday 20th January 2024 [page A15, column 1]:

Places of learning reduced to rubble
Destruction of educational infrastructure denies Palestinians their past, present and future

On Wednesday, shocking drone footage from Gaza appeared to show the Israeli military destroying the University of Palestine. By all accounts, it was Gaza’s last standing university. In total, six others have been destroyed or severely damaged. The Islamic University of Gaza, the area’s most prominent, was bombed on Oct. 11. Al Azhar University, another notable institution, reduced to rubble on Nov. 6.
Israeli strikes have also killed leading scholars in Gaza. The scientist Sufyan Tayeh, a prominent researcher in theoretical physics and applied mathematics, who was president of the Islamic university, was killed Dec. 2 along with his family.
Refaat Alareer, a renowned professor, poet and writer, was killed in another airstrike on Dec. 7, along with his siblings.
Gaza’s universities, more than 350 schools and its public library, all felled.
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.

The noun scholasticide is from:
scholastic, referring to schools, universities, or education in general;
-cide, a suffix forming nouns with the sense: the killing of [the person, animal, etc., indicated by the initial element].—However, cf. the curious case of the noun bullycide.

The text containing the earliest occurrence of scholasticide that I have found seems to indicate that this noun was coined in 2009 by Karma Nabulsi, Fellow in Politics at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, England—this text, by Ameera Ahmad, in Gaza, and Ed Vulliamy, was published in The Guardian (London and Manchester, England) of Saturday 10th January 2009:

In Gaza, the schools are dying too

A new word emerged from the carnage in Gaza this week: “scholasticide”—the systematic destruction by Israeli forces of centres of education dear to Palestinian society, as the ministry of education was bombed, the infrastructure of teaching destroyed, and schools across the Gaza strip targeted for attack by the air, sea and ground offensives.
“Learn, baby, learn” was a slogan of the black rights movement in America’s ghettoes a generation ago, but it also epitomises the idea of education as the central pillar of Palestinian identity—a traditional premium on schooling steeled by occupation, and something the Israelis “cannot abide… and seek to destroy”, according to Dr Karma Nabulsi, who teaches politics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. “We knew before, and see more clearly now than ever, that Israel is seeking to annihilate an educated Palestine,” she says.
[…]
In a recent lecture, Nabulsi at St Edmund Hall recalled the tradition of learning in Palestinian history, and the recurrent character of the teacher as an icon in Palestinian literature. “The role and power of education in an occupied society is enormous. Education posits possibilities, opens horizons. Freedom of thought contrasts sharply with the apartheid wall, the shackling checkpoints, the choking prisons,” she said.
This week, following the bombing of schools in Gaza, she says: “The systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel has countered that tradition since the occupation of 1967,” citing “the calculated, wholesale looting of the Palestinian Research Centre in Beirut during the 1982 war and the destruction of all those manuscripts and archived history.”
“Now in Gaza,” she says, “we see the policy more clearly than ever—this ‘scholasticide’. The Israelis know nothing about who we really are, while we study and study them. But deep down they know how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution. They cannot abide it and have to destroy it.”

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.