Education under Siege: Resilience, Agency, and the Refusal of Normalization
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Introduction
This paper examines how higher education in Gaza operates as an anthropological site of resistance rather than mere adaptation. Drawing on Ahmed Kamal Junina’s study, Displaced but not Replaced (2025) and broader crisis-education studies, it argues that the persistence of learning under siege is not simply resilience in the psychological sense, but a collective moral stance that reclaims intellectual life amid systematic destruction. Education becomes an act of Sumud, steadfastness, as students and teachers assert existence through knowledge and community.
Context and Background
For nearly two decades, Gaza’s education system has operated under blockade, bombardment, and the deliberate targeting of schools and universities: a process scholars identify as ‘Scholasticide’ (PCHR, 2024). As someone who has lived and studied in Gaza for 28 years, surviving six wars and continuing my education amid bombardments and displacement, I have witnessed how learning itself becomes an act of defiance. Despite destroyed campuses and displaced faculty, teaching persists in makeshift classrooms, online spaces, and community gatherings. These are not mere coping mechanisms but deliberate assertions of existence: political gestures that refuse to be destroyed. As Junina (2025) cautions, celebrating this endurance as “normal” recovery risks concealing the violence that makes such perseverance necessary.
Learning, Literacy, and Steadfastness
Anthropological theory helps reframe Gaza’s educational survival. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s (1991) concept of ‘situated learning’ views education as participation in shared social practice rather than individual cognition. Within Gaza’s universities, learning is not only about mastering content but sustaining a moral community where knowledge itself becomes resistance. Rebuilding classrooms, teaching through power cuts, or sharing materials online are forms of collective participation that keep social life intact. Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983) Ways with Words and Brian Street’s (1995) Social Literacies further reveal that literacy is never neutral: it is bound to culture, power, and identity. In Gaza, reading, writing, and teaching are ideological acts that affirm belonging and dignity. These practices transform the classroom into a moral field of struggle, echoing Veena Das’s (2007) and Michael Jackson’s (2017) insights that people rebuild life through ordinary gestures of care and continuity. Learning under siege thus becomes a collective assertion of humanity and social coherence.
Resilience as Moral Agency
From this perspective, resilience in Gaza is not passive adaptation but active refusal. It aligns with Rema Hammami’s (2010) notion of the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” in which daily acts reclaim life from systems of domination. Students and educators enact agency not through grand politics but through everyday commitment to thinking, writing, and teaching. Their persistence is both intellectual and ethical: education as re-humanization against the machinery of elimination.
The story of Yousef Abu Rabiʿin Desai et al. (2025), an agricultural-engineering student at Al-Azhar University, embodies this moral agency. By cultivating and distributing food during the siege, he extended learning into community survival. His death by drone attack illustrates the lethal stakes of intellectual life under colonization, yet his work represents education as care and continuity: a living anthropology of resistance.
Policy and Future Directions
Recognizing education as a form of moral resilience has policy implications. Support for Gaza’s academic institutions must extend beyond reconstruction to the protection of intellectual autonomy. The following policy measures address the structural conditions that enable scholasticide and reflect a commitment to education as a collective right rather than a privilege.
1. Establish an international protection protocol for universities in conflict zones.
There is an urgent need for a formal mechanism under the UN or UNESCO that closely monitors attacks on educational institutions, documents violations, and initiates legal and diplomatic responses. Such a protocol would recognize the deliberate targeting of universities as a breach of international law and help prevent its normalization.
2. Invest in a digital preservation program for academic materials.
Given the ongoing destruction of campuses and archives, international partners should support efforts to digitally secure Gaza’s academic records, research, and curricula. Maintaining these materials in multiple safe repositories would protect the intellectual life of universities even when their physical structures cannot be safeguarded.
3. Strengthen community-based and decentralized learning networks.
Because teaching and learning in Gaza often continue outside formal classrooms, support should be directed toward grassroots educational spaces such as neighbourhood study groups, temporary learning centres, and mobile teaching units. These networks, often led by displaced educators, help sustain academic life despite displacement and repeated attacks.
Conclusion
Education under siege in Gaza is not evidence of recovery within the crisis but a refusal to accept the crisis as usual. Through learning, teaching, and collective care, Gazans reconstruct moral and social worlds, transforming resilience into steadfastness. In this sense, higher education becomes a practice of survival and resistance: a re-humanizing act that insists on the continued life of thought amid destruction.
Bibliography
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Desai, Chandni, et al. “Scholasticide and Resilience: The Gaza Genocide and the Struggle for Palestinian Higher Education.” Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2025.
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Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). “800,000 Students Deprived of Their Right to Education amid Ongoing Destruction of Schools and Universities.” Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 13 May 2024, pchrgaza.org/800000-students-deprived-of-their-right-to-education-amid-ongoing-destruction-of-schools-and-universities/.