[News] The Epistemicide of the Palestinians: Israel Destroys Pillars of Knowledge

[Anti-Imperialist News]

palestine-studies.org <https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1655161>
The Epistemicide of the Palestinians: Israel Destroys Pillars of Knowledge
Author: Abdulla Moaswes
February 2, 2024
------------------------------
[image: Gaza Destruction 845x400.png]

On Nov. 6, 2023, an Israeli airstrike destroyed Gaza's Al-Azhar University
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231106-israeli-air-strikes-target-gazas-al-azhar-university/>,
one of the largest educational institutions in the occupied territory. Far
from being the sole university targeted during Israel's recent escalation
of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and indeed throughout Palestine, a short video
published by the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Scientific Research
on the same day as the attack pointed out that a total of nine university
buildings (at the time of the video's publication) in Gaza and two in the
West Bank had been either “completely or partially damaged
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=72LRmseQw8AfhAEg&v=fLj7_FRhO-c&feature=youtu.be>.”
According to the video, at least 227,335 Palestinian students, including
555 Palestinians in Gaza with scholarships abroad, had faced severe
disruptions to their higher education at the time.

In the weeks since, Israel's assault on Palestinian schools and
universities has only intensified. On Jan. 18, Israel destroyed
<https://www.thenational.scot/news/24059315.israel-destroys-last-university-gaza-strikes-continue/>
Al-Israa University with 315 mines — it was the last university standing.
Every university in Gaza had been destroyed, in full or in part, along with
over 350 schools, educational institutions, and public libraries during the
ongoing genocidal campaign.

With this in mind, the bombing of university buildings in Gaza cannot be
simply understood as attacks on bricks and mortar but also as assaults on
archives, student and staff records, and the intellectual labor of the
university's community. Indeed, the attack upon Al-Israa University also
included the demolition of a nearby museum
<https://twitter.com/BirzeitU/status/1747919399590203701> — a clear attempt
by the Israeli military to cover up and dispose of the evidence of their
looting of the over three thousand rare artifacts that it housed. Attacks
that obliterate universities such as Al-Azhar and Al-Israa equate to the
erasure of the accomplishments of Palestinian knowledge producers and
contribute to Israel's ongoing epistemicide of the Palestinian people — a
process intertwined with their summary genocide.

Epistemicide can be broadly defined as the destruction of knowledge systems
and the knowledge that they generate. The Latin American sociologist Ramón
Grosfoguel explains how epistemicide played a crucial role in Europe's
colonization of the rest of the world, including the settler colonization
of the Americas. It granted European philosophy an “epistemic privilege,”
allowing it to become the “new foundation of knowledge in the
modern/colonial world
<https://www.niwrc.org/sites/default/files/images/resource/2%20The%20Structure%20of%20Knowledge%20in%20Westernized%20Universities_%20Epistemic.pdf>
.”

In other words, it created a world in which only knowledge produced by
European colonists and settlers was deemed legitimate, while colonized
societies were compelled to construct new systems from scratch — often
mirroring those of their colonizers — because their own systems had been
destroyed. As a result, the structural conditions of knowledge production
that facilitated the mechanisms of their colonialization also imposed
constraints on their liberation.

Israeli efforts to discredit and sabotage Palestinian knowledge production,
along with its literal and material attacks on Palestinian institutions of
learning and their respective communities, serve as evidence of this.

*The British Mandate and the Hebrew University*

An early example of epistemicide in Palestine dates back to the British
Mandate's attempts to thwart the development of a Palestinian system of
higher education while enabling the establishment of Zionist Jewish
universities. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, established as a public
university in 1925, is the most notable example of this. In response to the
absence of a comparable Arab Palestinian institution, the eminent historian
Ilan Pappé argues that the failure to open an Arab university in Jerusalem
can be attributed to a combination of British colonialism, Zionist
lobbying, anti-Arab racism,
<https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/Why%20Only%20a%20Hebrew%20University.pdf>
and an overall underestimation by both British officials and some
Palestinian leaders of the scope and ambition of the settler colonial
project of Zionism.

Furthermore, according to Pappé, the British Mandate afforded Zionist
institutions a level of autonomy that “enabled it to build itself up as
part of an independent infrastructure for a state within a state,” thus
allowing it to become foundational to the future Israeli state. At the same
time, he describes the Mandate as micromanaging Palestinian education in an
attempt to keep it apolitical and under the control of British colonial
officials. As Pappé explains, the British “deemed the Palestinians yet
another colonized people who had to be oppressed, while regarding the
Zionist settlers as fellow colonialists.” A Palestinian university,
according to Pappé, “would have empowered the anti-colonial narrative,
helping to counter the project of the Hebrew University that provided
scholarly scaffolding to the Zionist ideology.” In practice, this colonial
sabotaging of Palestinian attempts at building knowledge systems laid the
foundation for Israeli epistemicide.

*The Nakba and Oral History*

Nur Masalha describes the Nakba
<https://research.stmarys.ac.uk/id/eprint/27/1/Masalha-N-2008-Remembering-the-Palestinian-Nakba.pdf>
as causing the destruction of Palestinian society, and this would include
their knowledge systems. Needless to say, the dispossession of Palestinian
land and resources, along with the majority of the Palestinian population's
new status as exiles and refugees, posed significant challenges to attempts
to reestablish Palestinian systems of knowledge production. It is,
therefore, unsurprising that oral history and memory accounts of the
experiences of those who survived the 1948 expulsions are, in Masalha's
words, “central to Palestinian history and the Palestinian society of
today.”

Palestinian oral histories, however, are routinely discredited and
delegitimized by the Israeli government
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2001.30.3.19>, its knowledge
institutions, and those who participate within them. As the Tantura affair
demonstrated over two decades ago, even attempts by Israeli researchers to
construct knowledge on Palestinian history, and specifically Palestinian
villages, using Palestinian sources and memory accounts (as well as an
equal number of Israeli ones in this case) can be dismissed as
illegitimate. Although Teddy Katz's work as the man at the center of the
affair has since been vindicated by the publicizing of the recorded
confessions of the perpetrators of the Tantura massacre as part of the 2022
documentary film carrying the village's name, the accounts of the
massacre's Palestinian survivors remain sidelined.

Unlike Katz, however, there is a countless number of Palestinian knowledge
producers whose work is yet to be, and may never be within their lifetimes,
similarly vindicated. In 2019, the Israeli Ministry of Defense created a
department known as Malmab, tasked with concealing and locking away
previously declassified archival materials related to the Nakba, among
other topics. Former Malmab head Yehiel Horev explained that this was due
to the possibility of such materials generating “unrest” among
Palestinians. Coupled with the systematic discrediting of Palestinian oral
accounts, Malmab's locking away of Israeli written sources further
sabotages Palestinian knowledge production.

*Epistemicide and Palestinian Institutions Today*

Another facet of Israel's epistemicide of Palestinians is the interventions
that the Israeli Occupation makes into the operations and academic freedom
of homegrown Palestinian knowledge institutions.

Beyond the standard pattern of Israeli border control routinely denying
exiled Palestinian researchers access to their homeland to conduct
research, participate in conferences, or even join the faculty at
Palestinian institutions, Israel, in 2022, extended the powers of the
Coordination
of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) authority to determine
the terms within which foreign academics
<https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2022/03/23/the-right-to-education-is-also-palestinian/>,
including Palestinian citizens of foreign countries, may conduct their work
in the West Bank.

As well as being a clear attack on Palestinian academic freedom, this
narrowing of the field of supposed “acceptable knowledge production”
maintains the Israeli state's epistemic privilege over that of
Palestinians. The COGAT's ability to intervene in Palestinian knowledge
production in such a patrimonial and patronizing manner — reaching the
point where it is tasked with deciding what counts as a “necessary field
<https://www.gov.il/en/departments/policies/judeaentry2022>” in which a
Palestinian institution may hire a foreign citizen — further delegitimizes
Palestinians not only as knowledge producers but as the sovereigns of their
own knowledge production. This amounts to an extermination of the very
Palestinian epistemic imperatives that outline the relationship between
knowledge and existence, both around the world and in Palestine.

*Knowledge and Genocide*

It is not only Israel and its institutions that have participated in the
silencing, attacking, discrediting, and undermining of Palestinian
knowledge production. Powerful institutions within the “blancosphere” (also
popularly referred to as “The West”), including governments, news
organizations, and academic institutions, also contribute to further
enabling the epistemicide of Palestinians.

A brazen example of this would be U.S. President Joe Biden unilaterally
passing judgment regarding who was culpable for the attack upon the Al Ahli
Baptist Hospital
<https://www.politico.eu/article/us-biden-on-gaza-hospital-strike-the-other-team-did-it/>
in Gaza, accepting Israel's claims of innocence uncritically while wholly
dismissing the accounts of Palestinian eyewitnesses. Similar roles are
played by references from the BBC and many other mainstream media houses to
the Gaza Ministry of Health as a “Hamas-run Ministry”
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67332684> — an attempt to
delegitimize its reporting of casualties.

Not all examples are so brazen, however. Little has changed since Edward
Said argued, in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, that
Palestinians have been denied the “permission to narrate.” According to
him, the privileging of a “Western master narrative, highlighting Jewish
alienation and redemption” erases the Palestinian understanding of reality,
where the struggle for liberation is far from over. In this sense, the
epistemic privilege accorded to the Israeli state and its institutions
through its epistemicide of Palestinians plays a role in legitimizing it in
the eyes of those more powerful than it.

Therefore, in attempting to resist the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and
across the entirety of historic Palestine, it is absolutely vital to
recognize and push back against epistemicide in all of its forms. Rana
Barakat asserts
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2201473X.2017.1300048> the
importance of centering Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty, resistance, and
endurance within analyses of Israel's settler colonial project. It is
crucial to add here that recognizing Palestinians not just as narrators of
history but as producers of knowledge within the context of the land of
Historic Palestine and the experiences of Palestinian people all over the
world pushes back against the Israeli state's attempts to solidify its
epistemic privilege through escalating its epistemicide.

To conclude, Israel's attempts to destroy Palestinian knowledge and systems
of knowledge production form an essential component of its protracted
genocide of the Palestinian people. Yet, as my late grandfather, who was
expelled from his home in Jerusalem in 1948, said to me throughout my life:
“You will always protect your wealth, but your knowledge will always
protect you.”

About The Author:

Abdulla Moaswes is a writer, researcher, translator, and educator. His
current academic explorations focus on the globalization of settler
colonial logics. He has previously written about the politics of food, with
special reference to chai karak, and the sociopolitical role of internet
memes in South and West Asia. In addition to this, Abdulla also writes
poetry and speculative fiction.
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