[News] The war on the Palestinian thinker: Why Israel is systematically erasing Gaza’s intellectuals

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Comments <https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/>
The war on the Palestinian thinker: Why Israel is systematically erasing
Gaza’s intellectuals
By Ramzy Baroud <https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012>

Thursday 21-August-2025

The killing of seven Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza on
August 10 has prompted verbal condemnations, yet has inspired little to no
substantive action. This has become the predictable and horrifying
trajectory of the international community’s response to the ongoing Israeli
genocide.

By eliminating Palestinian journalists like Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed
Qraiqeh, Israel has made a sinister statement that the genocide will spare
no one. According to the monitoring website Shireen.ps, Israel has killed
nearly 270 journalists since October 2023.

More journalists are likely to die covering the genocide of their own
people in Gaza, especially since Israel has manufactured a convenient and
easily deployed narrative that every Gazan journalist is simply a
“terrorist”. This is the same cruel logic offered by numerous Israeli
officials in the past, including Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who
declared that “an entire nation” in Gaza “is responsible” for not having
rebelled against Hamas, effectively stating that there are no innocent
people in Gaza.

This Israeli discourse, which dehumanizes entire populations based on a
vicious logic, is frequently repeated by officials who fear no
accountability. Even Israeli diplomats, whose job in theory is to improve
their country’s image internationally, frequently engage in this brutal
ritual. In comments made in January 2024, Israeli ambassador to the UK,
Tzipi Hotovely, callously argued that “every school, every mosque, every
second house has access to tunnels,” implying that all of Gaza is a valid
military target.

This cruelty of language would be easily dismissed as mere rhetoric, except
that Israel has, in fact, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
reports, destroyed over 70% of Gaza’s infrastructure.

While extremist language is often used by politicians around the world, it
is rare for the extremism of the language to so precisely mirror the
extremism of the action itself. This makes Israeli political discourse a
uniquely dangerous phenomenon.

There can be no military justification for the wholesale annihilation of an
entire region. Yet again, the Israelis are not shying away from providing
the political discourse that explains this unprecedented destruction.
Former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin chillingly said, last May, that “Every
child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy… not a single Gazan child will be
left there.”

But for the systematic destruction of a whole nation to succeed, it must
include the deliberate targeting of its scientists, doctors, intellectuals,
journalists, artists and poets. While children and women remain the largest
categories of victims, many of those killed in deliberate assassinations
appear to be targeted specifically to disorient Palestinian society,
deprive it of societal leadership, and render the process of rebuilding
Gaza impossible.

These figures powerfully illustrate this point: according to a report
released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs, based on the latest satellite damage assessment conducted in July,
97% of Gaza’s educational facilities have been affected, with 91% in need
of major repairs or full reconstruction. Additionally, hundreds of teachers
and thousands of students have been killed.

But why is Israel so intent on killing those responsible for intellectual
production? The answer is twofold: one unique to Gaza, and the other unique
to the nature of Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism.

First, regarding Gaza: Since the Nakba in 1948, Palestinian society in Gaza
has invested heavily in education, seeing it as a crucial tool for
liberation and self-determination. Early footage shows classrooms being
held in tents and open spaces, a testament to this community’s tenacious
pursuit of knowledge. This focus on education transformed the Strip into a
regional hub for intellectual and cultural production, despite poorly
funded UNRWA schools. Israel’s campaign of destruction is a deliberate
attempt to erase this generational achievement, a practice known as
scholasticide, and Gaza is the most deliberate example of this horrific act.

Second, regarding Zionism: For many years, we were led to believe that
Zionism was winning the intellectual war due to the cleverness and
refinement of Israeli propaganda, or hasbara. The prevailing narrative,
particularly in the Arab world, was that Palestinians and Arabs were simply
no match for the savvy Israeli and pro-Israeli public relations machine in
Western media. This created a sense of intellectual inferiority, masking
the true reason for the imbalance.

Israel was able to “win” in mainstream media discourse due to the
intentional marginalization and demonization of Palestinian and
pro-Palestinian voices. The latter had no chance of fighting back simply
because they were not allowed to, and were instead labeled as “terrorist
sympathizers” and the like. Even the late, world-renowned Palestinian
scholar Edward Said was called a “Nazi” by the extremist, now-banned Jewish
Defense League, who went so far as to set the beloved professor’s
university office on fire.

Gaza, however, represented a major problem. With foreign media forbidden
from operating in the Strip per Israeli orders, the Gazan intellectual rose
to the occasion and, in the course of two years, managed to reverse most of
Zionism’s gains over the past century. This forced Israel into a desperate
race against time to remove as many Palestinian journalists, intellectuals,
academics, and even social media influencers from the scene as quickly as
possible—thus, the war on the Palestinian thinker.

The Israeli logic, however, is destined to fail, as ideas are not tied to
specific individuals, and resilience and resistance are a culture, not a
job title. Gaza shall once more emerge, not only as the culturally thriving
place it has always been, but as the cornerstone of a new liberation
discourse that is set to inspire the globe regarding the power of intellect
to stand firm, to fight for what is right, and to live with purpose for a
higher cause.

*–Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine
Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His forthcoming book, ‘Before the
Flood,’ will be published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include
‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The
Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center
for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA).*
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