Erasing the future: Gaza’s educational sociocide

What makes a society? Is it merely existing as individuals, or is it the threads between them – the schools, the universities, the archives where memory lives? And what happens when those threads are being cut. Deliberately. Systematically.

In tent cities now in Gaza, students sit on dust. On rubble. In the ruins, students balance notebooks on their knees. Gaza’s universities are gone. The schools – gone. Universities, libraries, research, archives have been erased. But the professors, the teachers are still there. Teaching against erasure, teaching not just against the violence on Palestinian bodies but against the annihilation of possibility itself.

The destruction against educational systems represents the term sociocide. By definition, it is a strategic annihilation of the structures that make collective life possible. It goes hand in hand with genocide: Where genocide targets the people themselves, sociocide destroys their ability to exist as a society by stripping people of the means to sustain life, envision futures, or exist as anything beyond isolated survivors. Palestinian scholar Salim Abdul-Jawad defined sociocide in 1986 as “the gradual undermining of the communal and psychological structures of Palestinian society”. Today, the pace is anything but gradual.

Gaza’s schools and universities have been systematically targeted. Bombs and air strikes have reduced classrooms to rubble, erasing curricula as buildings collapse. Knowledge that once passed through generations, the fundamental right to education, has been violently disrupted. The scale of this educational destruction is staggering: more than 600,000 Palestinian children have missed the past two years of school. Instead of learning and socialising, they have been repeatedly displaced, fleeing air raids and shelling, often spending their days searching for water and food for their families. Lessons are sporadic; classrooms are overcrowded, sometimes with 50 students crammed onto the floor, without desks or chairs, struggling to study amid the chaos.

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Yet, at Al Hassaina school in Nuseirat, students however returned with hope, though the ruins of their education remain. Eleven-year-old Warda Radwan, who lost two years of schooling due to displacement and war, said she was looking forward to returning to her learning routine (–). These acts of learning embody the quiet pulse of a Palestinian people resisting erasure across time, refusing to let the past, present, or future of their being be annihilated. Each act resembles the testament that to exist is to remember and to assert that their life, their story, cannot be erased. They make visible what Israeli sociocide seeks to annihilate—the structures of learning, yes, but also the unseen threads in the material world that hold people together, that make a society.

In this sense, the loss extends far beyond individual students. Education, the conduit through which a society sustains itself through which memory, culture and civic life endure. When schools and universities are destroyed, so too are the bonds that hold communities together: the shared knowledge, the rituals of learning, the intergenerational dialogue. This is how a person can be assaulted without physical erasure by stripping away their capacity to learn, to grow, to imagine futures.

Despite this, Gazans persist. Teachers improvise, families protect what knowledge they can and children return to classrooms against all odds. Each lesson resembles the act of reconstruction, a testament to the resilience of social life under assault. Educational sociocide names both the violence and the resistance, it gives language to a systematic attempt to render society unthinkable whilst highlighting the courage that refuses to let it disappear.

Gaza’s future hangs between erasure and resilience to those erasure attempts. Every destroyed classroom, every lost year of schooling, is part of a deliberate strategy to dismantle Palestinian society and, by extension, to secure Israeli settler-colonial domination. Education is targeted to inflict immediate suffering, and more dangerously, to interrupt the transmission of memory and culture, eroding the very structures that sustain a people and their claim to land, to their history and the right to self-determination. To read this is to confront a reality in which knowledge itself is treated as a threat to colonial power. Teachers improvise, children return, but these acts of resistance exist within a system designed to make them fragile and incomplete, which forces us to ask: how can a society survive when its capacity to reproduce knowledge, culture and civic life is under constant siege? Gaza’s people endure, but endurance is not liberation. Settler colonialism is not passive; it thrives on the slow, methodical erasure of collective life, and the question remains: how long can resilience survive under such deliberate destruction, and what must be reclaimed before survival becomes freedom?

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