Scholasticide as Cultural Genocide

The pro-Palestine Student Movement and International Law’s Colonial Underbelly

Soledad Santana

November 21, 2024

As I approach the Welcome Tent within the Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P) encampment, a laminated letter, addressed to PERSONS UNKNOWN, warns me against this “base for unlawful activity.” The University’s paper threat has been taped around one of the black spikes that fence in the Radcliffe Camera lawn. There are hundreds of such medieval-style fences across Oxford—testament to the founders’s fear of being assassinated in a peasant uprising, and guilty of impaling quite a few trespassing students, or so a groundspeaker tells me. Here, around a prestigious domed library at the heart of Oxford, dozens of persons unknown have spent hours tying ribbons around each spike’s neck, lovingly, in the colors of Palestine.

The letter orders them to evacuate in three days if they are to avoid legal repercussions.

As one of the final encampment rallies begin, children finish making their kites in the library tent and are hoisted onto their parents’s shoulders. Through the megaphone, streams the voices of nearly a hundred Gazan academics and administrators: “From beneath the bombs of the occupation forces across Occupied Gaza…We call upon our friends and colleagues around the world to resist the ongoing campaign of scholasticide in occupied Palestine, to work alongside us in rebuilding…to refuse all plans seeking to bypass, erase, or weaken the integrity of our academic institutions.” The speaker paces, inching closer to and further from the entrance to one of the most well-funded, elite libraries in the world. “Looking up at the architectural feat towering over us, all any of us can feel is shame. The deliberate targeting of our educational infrastructure…the intellectual and cultural fabric of our society…education…a vital pillar of our existence.” The person next to me looks at his feet, shaking his head. Some begin shouting the Vice Chancellor’s name. Others hide their faces, trying not to cry. Again the voices: “We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will build them again.” With this, and a backdrop of applause, they conclude reading the call to action by the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza, and hand the megaphone to a second speaker.¹

The new speaker proclaims: “The University thinks that this encampment is our movement, that closing it down through force and threat will deprive us of our leverage in our negotiations with them. They could not be more wrong.” The organizers close the rally with the promise that, with or without the encampment, they will not rest until the University severs its support of Israeli genocide, occupation, and apartheid. This includes some of the demands we’ve come to expect from the pro-Palestine movements that have swept over hundreds of campuses over the past year in the the United Kingdom, Ireland, United States, Mexico, Colombia, Berlin, France, and Baghdad, to mention only a few. This global collective action has exerted significant financial and social pressure on university administrations, brands, local government, and in the case of the protest network, Palestine Action, even managed to get property managers to cut ties with UK-based arms providers to Israel.²

Within this wider ecosystem, student organizers at Oxford Action for Palestine have taken an additional step beyond the usual demands for financial disclosure, divestment, and boycotts. They insist that the University of Oxford must commit to the Palestinian-led rebuilding of Gaza’s education system. This demand for Palestinian agency stems from their understanding that scholasticide, or the “systematic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure,” is, as expressed by Gazan academics, intrinsic to the Israeli Occupation Forces’s (IOF) genocidal plan, and is a central part of ongoing attempts to erase the Palestinian way of life.³ Such activism has therefore been indispensable in forging a clear link between genocidal intent, as it is conceived in international human rights law, and cultural genocide through the targeting of Palestinians’s knowledge reproduction. These students therefore vehemently reject the notion of genocide as limited to only “physical destruction,” as it has been defined within international human rights law. In bolstering the calls of Gazan academics, they are also exposing the colonial biases that permeate the international legal framework on genocide.

The 1948 Genocide Convention as per the Genocidaires

The Israeli genocidaires have been killing, maiming, and imprisoning Palestinians for decades to uphold an occupation that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has since ruled illegal and constitutive of racial segregation.⁴ However, the Israeli Zionist movement also employs slower, institutionalized, albeit still deadly, violence against Palestinians in order to build over the Palestinian way of life. South Africa’s Application Instituting Proceedings at the ICJ dedicates over three pages to outlining how Israel has specifically targeted the destruction of cultural, religious, and educational sites that make up the “foundations of Palestinians life”, including hundreds of educational facilities.⁵ As such, we must remember that, in Patrick Wolfe’s words, “The question of genocide is never far from the discussions of settler colonialism,” as this is a model that destroys, in order to replace.⁶

This general truth is mirrored by Raphael Lemkin, as he worked towards defining genocide as an international crime in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation.⁷ In Axis Rule, Lemkin draws heavily from European imperialist repertoires of occupation to understand the workings of genocide, and concludes that the oppressor deems genocide successful when the victimized group’s patterns of existence—of collective opinion, language, subsistence, and education—have been bulldozed and new blueprints for collective existence drawn up and realized by the oppressor.⁸ It is therefore puzzling as to how so many international legal scholars have dismissed the fact that this same Lemkin, who served as an expert in the drafting of the 1948 Genocide Convention, was, for much of his life, an active Zionist who advocated for “colonial work” in Palestine, and the “redemption” of Palestinian land through the establishment of Jews as a “permanent national majority.”⁹ Activists and legal practitioners should therefore be wary of relying uncritically on International Human Rights Law (IHRL), or of speaking of “genocide” only as it has been conceived of by a field that, from the very drafting of the 1948 Genocide Convention, has treated Palestine as an exception.

By insisting on scholasticide as intrinsic to the wider genocide, academics in Gaza and the student movement are contesting the ugly, imperialist fabric of international law. Activist-scholars are ensuring that we do not forget that the Genocide Convention was molded according to the interests of settler-colonial states, who worked tirelessly to strip the Convention of its decolonial and antigenocidal efficacy. For example, the first, 1947 draft originally provided examples of crimes of cultural genocide such as the “prohibition of the use of the national language even in private intercourse,” the “systematic destruction of books printed in the national language or of religious works or prohibition of new publications,” and the “systematic destruction of historical or religious monuments or their diversion to alien uses, destruction or dispersion of documents and objects of historical, artistic, or religious value and of objects used in religious worship.”¹⁰ The systematic destruction of language, tradition, history, and beliefs that differentiates a particular group was understood as genocidal. However, these provisions, which evidently encompass many of the acts that would also constitute scholasticide, changed drastically following efforts by the United States, and other contracting parties, to gut the legal definition of genocide in the lead up to the 1948 Convention.

By insisting on scholasticide as intrinsic to the wider genocide, academics in Gaza and the student movement are contesting the ugly, imperialist fabric of international law.

Acting as chair to the Ad Hoc Committee on Genocide, and backed by a bloc of European colonizing states, the United States successfully argued that such acts, listed under “cultural genocide” were not sufficiently barbarous to be labelled under the extreme language of “genocide.” The Netherlands agreed, going further in suggesting that cultural genocide should be excused, if the processes are meant to assimilate or “civilise” a barbarous group.¹¹ This meant that, by the time the final draft was passed around for signing, these colonial states had ensured there was absolutely no mention of cultural genocide in the Convention, and that their campaigns of cultural erasure, both within their territories and in their colonies, could not be identified as part of a genocidal plan.¹² It is worth highlighting that, by some accounts, had the Convention been passed in its original 1947 form, the United States could have been found legally guilty of committing genocidal acts prior to, during, and after the signing of the Convention.¹³ But, nullum crimen sine lege, right?¹⁴ As it stands, Article II of the current Genocide Convention limits the legal definition of genocide as purely “physical destruction”, such as killing, injuring, and the prevention of births of the protected group. There is essentially nothing in the Convention that points to scholasticide or cultural genocide.

The relevance of the above for Palestine cannot be understated. First, by having painted a reductionist picture of genocide as somehow separate from imperialist, settler-colonial projects, colonial states successfully reduced the preventative efficacy of the document, so that genocide, or genocidal intent, could only be identified at what is often the final step of a genocidal agenda.¹⁵ Second, even if the ICJ finds that there is “conclusive evidence of the deliberate destruction of the historical, cultural, and religious heritage” of Palestinians in Gaza, it is likely that it cannot be considered in the ICJ’s evaluation of whether genocide took place, as it does not meet the “categories of acts…set out in Article II of the Convention.”¹⁶ Today, this may reduce South Africa’s ability to make the crucial link between the extreme mens rea of genocidal intent and genocidal acts, like wider attempts to destroy the Palestinian way of life through the elimination of educational infrastructure and legacies.

We therefore should not be deceived: the Genocide Convention is a colonial document. Article XII was included in response to the United Kingdom’s argument that its colonial territories could not be nonconsensually bound to the obligations under the Genocide Convention!¹⁷ It is a document and now the legal basis in which the voice of the genocidaires prevailed (at least as it concerns cultural genocide).

This makes the work of amplifying the calls of Gazan academics and administrators all the more crucial. Unlike many IHRL scholars, the pro-Palestine student movement has not relied on legal remedies designed by imperialist powers to be jolted awake and to offer a satisfying, decolonial solution. South Africa’s case at the ICJ represents a truly commendable commitment to holding Israel accountable and has, thus far, served to challenge the status quo in IHRL that has too often treated Palestinians as de facto exceptions to the universal nature of human rights.

As Israel expands its genocidal operations into the West Bank, however, we are seeing how time is a weapon that institutions can rely on to protect the status quo. Though we can applaud the recent decision of the International Court of Justice to finally declare the situation in Palestine to be apartheid, for example, we must also ask ourselves how it could have taken this long, when Palestine submitted evidence of apartheid to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination five years before the genocide started.¹⁸ Like academia, IHRL is a field that specializes in looking back, and deconstructing past gross human rights violations, and often in a way that is dissociated from the “political.” When academia and IHRL finally deliver their carefully crafted answers, many victims are no longer there to see justice done. Institutions, like universities, also instrumentalize their own bureaucracy to produce delays, and prevent radical change. Speaking to organizers at OA4P, they explain to me that this is exactly why they refuse to let demands by Gazan academics be ignored by the University any further.

The Students Say: Scholasticide is Genocide!

Despite the deliberate short-comings of IHRL when it comes to conceptualizing genocide, many Indigenous rights activists have continued to insist that the historical and ongoing violence against them constitutes cultural, as well as physical genocide. In Australia and Canada, for example, historical practices of removing Indigenous children from their communities to force their cultural assimilation has provoked accusations, and legal charges, of cultural genocide.¹⁹ In Palestine, cultural genocide has manifested in diverse forms, but the the systematic targeting of Palestinian’s knowledge reproduction is unequivocally among them. In fact, the term “scholasticide” was first coined here at the University of Oxford, by Palestinian scholar and Professor Karma Nabulsi, to specifically describe Israel’s attempts to stifle resistance by targeting Palestinian educational institutions. “Gaza’s higher education is, at its core, an act of anticolonial resistance,” an OA4P organizer tells me. They continue, “A university in Gaza, led and taught by Palestinians in a context of colonisation means something entirely different than it does to us here at Oxford, where education is wholly detached from the cultural production of the place in which it is physically based. Universities in Gaza are essential for cultural life. It is therefore not by accident that they have been targeted by the occupation.”

Scholars, like Maya Wind document how, before the current genocide, Israel has long been criminalizing Palestinian-led universities as hot-beds for rebellion, abducting, detaining, and torturing student organizers, and shutting down Palestinian universities directly or indirectly, through economic isolation.²⁰ Education as a tool with which to resist cultural genocide, the erasure of collective identity, history, traditions, and belief, and settler-colonialism has been a pillar of Palestinian resistance since the Nakba of 1948.²¹ In the first Intifada, for example, Israel’s targeting of Palestinian schools forced professors, teachers, educators, and community members to deliver education underground, in secret, and in resistance.²² This occurred decades ago, and it occurs again today, when it is estimated that 93 percent of schools in Gaza have been destroyed, or targeted since October 7.²³ Facing censorship, and fears of being criminalized for speaking the truth about Israel’s actions, the pro-Palestine student movement continues carrying out its own campaign of collective education for Palestinian liberation and resistance. At the University of Oxford, the encampments have turned the university campus into a site of knowledge contestation. The students are not only acting in solidarity with Palestine by creating a political “library tent” in the lawn of the University’s Radcliffe Camera library, and organizing regular teach-ins, including about the use of archiving for political knowledge reproduction,, they are also developing systems to challenge the political censorship, distortion, and depoliticization that many Western universities fuel.

By having painted a reductionist picture of genocide as somehow separate from imperialist, settler-colonial projects, colonial states successfully reduced the preventative efficacy of the document, so that genocide, or genocidal intent, could only be identified at what is often the final step of a genocidal agenda.

Heeding calls from the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza, Oxford Action for Palestine has also been working to prevent the participation of Western universities in replacing Gaza’s educational infrastructure and, as such, part of Gaza’s pattern of life. Under pressure from student organizers, the University of Oxford has, thus far, agreed to increase the allocation of scholarships for Palestinian students and committed, at least rhetorically, to creating an online teaching platform. An organizer tells me achieving such progress has been “a battle every step of the way” for the students, who have endured the administration’s hostility, including its refusal, in practice, to engage decently and respectfully with Palestinian students. Moreover, despite agreeing to work alongside the OA4P in drafting the language for the announcement of the scholarship scheme, the administration refused to name Israel as the cause for the destruction of the Gazan education sector, instead referring to the genocide in Gaza as a “conflict” and “humanitarian crisis”.²⁴ The OA4P organizer I spoke to also stressed that measures like scholarships, while an achievement, are nonetheless insufficient, in that they do not address the crux of the issue: educational reconstruction efforts that do not center Palestinian-led education only serve Israel’s genocidal agenda to replace Gaza’s “national pattern” of life. She explains,“ultimately, the aim is not to contribute to extraction, or to the replacement of Palestinian education, which is, in fact, what the Israeli project intends to do,” and continues “if the University only commits to things like scholarships, and not actually rebuilding Palestinian-led education systems, they are contributing to cultural erasure and genocide.”

As Maya Wind puts it, higher education and settler colonialism are linked in two ways: first, Israel represses Palestinian universities due to their liberatory potential, but also to establish their own system of education, and truth.²⁵ In other words, to destroy in order to replace. Unfortunately, Western institutions have already been participating in discussions around rebuilding universities in Gaza without centering Palestinian’s self-determination. Recently, University and College Workers for Palestine (UCU) has issued a warning that, despite the many initiatives that have sprung up to support Palestinian universities and students, a lack of central coordination, and consultation with the demands of the Committee has allowed some initiatives, disguised as economic aid, to further Israel’s cultural genocide agenda.²⁶ The New York Times has even documented how in April 2024 officials, including from the World Bank, gathered to discuss Gaza’s reconstruction, sidestepping questions around Palestine’s right to self-determination, and even mentioning the creation of a Technical University of Reconstruction in Gaza where students, from around the world, can earn degrees, studying the scale of destruction in Gaza.²⁷

Responding to such “alleged reconstruction schemes” the Emergency Committee emphasizes these serve as a “scholasticide front”, carried out by the allies of the Israeli occupation in the United States and United Kingdom, that only “seek to eliminate the possibility of independent Palestinian educational life.”²⁸ According to the Committee, only by coordinating academic aid efforts directly with them, can this “send a powerful message to Israel and the international community that any attempt to destroy our institutions will not be successful and that there will be a future for our colleagues and students.”²⁹ Indeed, the OA4P organizer indicates that prestigious universities like Oxford need to use their international status to reject participation in such “scholasticide fronts”. Otherwise, they are contributing to the genocidal narrative that Palestinian universities do not need to exist.

The Student Struggle Continues

Moving forward, and despite the closures of many pro-Palestine encampments, student organizers are redoubling their efforts to resist scholasticide in Palestine, and academic censorship. In the case of Oxford Action for Palestine, this included setting up a “summer school” for political education. However, after the events of the last year, students at Oxford, like at so many other universities in colonial states are organizing in increasingly hostile environments. Indeed, in a “welcome back letter” sent out to the student body a few weeks ago, the administration conveniently attached the University of Oxford’s “Guidance on Demonstrations or Protests.” Under the document, students are asked to seek approval and a risk assessment from the Proctor’s Office to organize protest. Potential consequences for violating the University statutes are, as is increasingly the case wherever solidarity with Palestine has spread, wide-ranging, and invasive, including fines, bans from University premises and facilities, and even allows the University to “issue directions” related to the “references” that a student member is allowed to receive in the future.³⁰ Moreover, following the encampment actions throughout the spring and summer, the University of Oxford issued changes to its Code of Practice on Freedom of Speech in July this year, in which it seemingly restricts when and where events where people express “voices and views” can take place, stating that “With appropriate regulation of the time, place and manner of events, members of our community should have no reasonable grounds to feel intimidated or censored.”³¹

Disciplinary proceedings against students that have exercised their right to protest genocide in Palestine are waging on across the world. Oxford is not alone in making “adjustments” for this new academic year with the aim of stifling further protest.³² Still, student organizers have managed to, despite the inertia, if not hostility, from their university’s administration, make leeway in their demands. In the UK, student organizers at King’s College, York University, and Trinity College Dublin, among others, have all managed to get their University to agree to divest from Israel’s arms suppliers.³³ At Oxford University, after months of back and forth, the student movement has finally succeeded in getting the University of Oxford to commit to meeting with the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza, as part of OA4P’s demands on the Palestinian-led rebuilding of the higher education sector in Gaza. Speaking to OA4P, it is clear the student movement has by no means been dissuaded or intimidated into inaction. Despite the threats, and in some cases, the disciplinary and legal actions, that they have seen their closed ones face, all evidence points to the fact that the student movement will continue working tirelessly this academic year, to ensure that their university removes all ties to the Israeli apartheid regime’s genocidal campaign in Palestine.

Organizers at OA4P will continue to heed the calls of Gazan academics and administrators, because, in the Committee’s words, “The fate of higher education in Gaza belongs to the universities in Gaza, their faculty, staff, and students and to the Palestinian people as a whole.” Its rebuilding is therefore not “just a matter of education”, but a testament to Palestinian “resilience, determination, and unwavering commitment to securing a future for generations to come.”³⁴ As such, we can expect that students will continue to use their platforms to resist all forms of genocide in Palestine, including cultural genocide and scholasticide and, that with this, comes a wider resistance against the colonial biases that have been woven into the fabric of international human rights law.

Encampment Protests, Genocide, Law, Palestine, Social Movements

Soledad Santana

Soledad Santana is a feminist community organizer, published poet, and student at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Law. She is currently focusing her research on the rights of refugees to participate in political activity in their host country, under international law.

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Scholasticide as Cultural Genocide

The pro-Palestine Student Movement and International Law’s Colonial Underbelly

Soledad Santana

The 1948 Genocide Convention as per the Genocidaires

The Students Say: Scholasticide is Genocide!

The Student Struggle Continues

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