[News] “Epistemicide” in Gaza, how Israel eradicates memory by breaking the chain of consciousness production

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Zionist Terrorism <https://english.palinfo.com/category/Zionist-Terrorism/>
“Epistemicide” in Gaza, how Israel eradicates memory by breaking the chain
of consciousness production

Thursday 12-February-2026
<https://english.palinfo.com/Zionist-Terrorism/2026/02/12/357703/#>
<https://english.palinfo.com/Zionist-Terrorism/2026/02/12/357703/#>
<https://english.palinfo.com/Zionist-Terrorism/2026/02/12/357703/#>
<https://english.palinfo.com/Zionist-Terrorism/2026/02/12/357703/#>
<https://english.palinfo.com/Zionist-Terrorism/2026/02/12/357703/#>

GAZA, (PIC)

The Israeli war of extermination against the Gaza Strip is not limited to
mass killing and the military destruction of the urban and civilian built
environment, it goes beyond that toward a far more dangerous and longer
lasting pattern, represented in the systematic targeting of education,
culture, collective memory, and Palestinian identity.

This is the conclusion reached by the American researcher Henry Giroux in
his study titled Academic Genocide, the War on Education from Gaza to the
Western World, Scholasticide, Waging War on Education from Gaza to the
West, where he introduces the concept of “epistemicide” Scholasticide as a
framework for understanding the war as a structural project aimed at
erasing Palestinian society materially, culturally, and intellectually.

Giroux, one of the most prominent theorists of critical pedagogy, presents
a striking analytical concept in his study published in the Journal of Holy
Land and Palestine Studies, treating this form of extermination as one of
the core dimensions of the ongoing war.

State terrorism and the normalization of violence

The American researcher sees that what is happening in Gaza cannot be
understood as isolated military operations, but rather as an integrated
project to reshape Palestinian reality by destroying the conditions of its
material and intellectual survival. Not only bodies are targeted, but also
the institutions that preserve history, transmit knowledge, and shape the
consciousness of future generations.

The study’s analysis of the Israeli model shows that state terrorism does
not always appear in its crude form, nor is it necessarily practiced
outside the law. In many cases, it is reproduced within institutional
frameworks themselves and wrapped in a security and moral discourse that
makes violence acceptable and necessary.

Giroux explains that Israeli violence is presented as an inherent part of
the state structure and its logic of managing the conflict, not as an
exception or deviation. He points out that the most dangerous form of state
terrorism is not the use of excessive military force, but the normalization
of military force within society and its transformation into a familiar
daily practice that provokes no ethical questioning and faces no
accountability. When the state legalizes violence and redefines it as
“self-defense” or “security preservation,” it does not merely suppress the
victim, it trains society as a whole to accept this suppression and even to
participate symbolically in it.

Here Giroux distinguishes between direct military violence and what he
calls “state terrorism,” meaning violence practiced in the name of law and
security and granted political and moral legitimacy through organized
official and media discourse. According to this understanding, the
widespread bombing of civilians, the targeting of schools and hospitals,
arrests, and home demolitions are part of a systematic policy base and
integrated tools that represent the essence of the political system of a
state working to normalize violence socially, morally, and culturally, so
that it does not become an internal burden or a source of doubt regarding
its legitimacy.

The researcher points out that Israel is not only waging a war on Gaza, but
at the same time a war on all forms of criticism and opposition, whether
inside Palestine or abroad, where any attempt to describe what is happening
as a war crime or genocide is met with smear campaigns and ready-made
accusations, most notably antisemitism.

>From exceptional violence to structural violence

The study relies on international human rights reports indicating that
Israel dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip within
a few months, a figure equivalent in destructive capacity to two nuclear
bombs. Giroux affirms that this unprecedented firepower density, especially
in a densely populated area, makes claims of mistakes or collateral damage
impossible to believe.

According to international humanitarian law, the use of this level of
destructive force in civilian areas constitutes a clear war crime,
especially when repeatedly used against non-military structures.

One of the most prominent axes of the study is the deliberate targeting of
educational institutions. According to United Nations data:

Approximately 90% of Gaza’s schools were destroyed or damaged.
All 12 universities in the enclave were bombed or vandalized.
Studies were halted for around 90,000 university students.
Thousands of students and hundreds of teachers and university professors
were killed.

Giroux does not view these facts as incidental outcomes of war, but places
them within a policy aimed at cutting the knowledge chain that links past
and present, making the reconstruction of society extremely difficult.

The study pauses at the bombing of schools that had been converted into
shelters for displaced people, including Al-Tabaeen School, which was
bombed while hundreds of civilians were inside. Human rights investigations
indicate the absence of any military activity inside these schools,
reinforcing the hypothesis of deliberate targeting.

Giroux sees the repetition of these incidents as reflecting a
transformation of schools from spaces of protection into military targets,
in blatant violation of international standards that obligate conflict
parties to protect educational facilities.

Epistemicide, concept and meaning

Giroux defines “epistemicide” as the systematic destruction of education,
culture, and the intellectual structure of a society, with the aim of
erasing its collective memory and its ability to produce and transmit
knowledge. According to this definition, it is an advanced form of
extermination that targets not only the present, but the future. This
extermination includes:

The destruction of schools and universities.
The killing or displacement of teachers and intellectuals.
The erasure of archives and libraries.
The destruction of museums and cultural sites.
The theft or obliteration of historical relics.

The study expands the scope of analysis to include the targeting of public
libraries, publishing houses, cultural centers, and even cemeteries and
historical landmarks. Giroux points out that this pattern of destruction
reflects a desire to forcibly rewrite history by erasing the material
evidence that proves continuous Palestinian presence.

He warns that destroying memory is no less dangerous than destroying
bodies, because it seeks to eliminate the Palestinian narrative at its
foundation.

According to Giroux, epistemicide does not stop at the borders of
Palestine, but extends to universities in the United States and Europe,
where academic freedom of expression is witnessing a noticeable decline.
The researcher documents cases of professors being dismissed or suspended,
students being punished, and peaceful protests being suppressed because of
expressing solidarity with Gaza or criticizing Israeli policies.

He sees this trajectory as reflecting an alliance between political,
economic, and media power to silence any critical discourse under the
pretext of security or combating hatred.

Israeli universities and their role within the system

Giroux relays from Israeli academics, some from within the institution
itself, growing criticism of what they consider the erosion of academic
independence. Universities are no longer merely educational institutions,
having transformed into platforms for producing military knowledge,
developing technological tools used in repression and surveillance, and
providing legal and moral cover for occupation policies.

In fields such as artificial intelligence, drones, and biometric
surveillance systems, Israeli universities do not operate in a scientific
vacuum, but within close partnerships with the army, weapons companies, and
intelligence agencies.

The study highlights the role of Israeli universities in this path, not
only through research cooperation with the military, but also through
producing a knowledge discourse that strips the victim of humanity. When
Gaza is studied as a “hostile environment,” or the Palestinian is viewed as
a “potential security threat,” knowledge shifts from a neutral framework
into a tool serving violence.

This form of epistemic normalization makes violence acceptable to wide
segments of society because it is presented as an inevitable result of
scientific or security data. Thus, education, which is supposed to be a
tool of liberation, contributes to entrenching the logic of domination and
turning killing and destruction into actions that can be rationally
justified, because the academic structure itself has become part of the
system of privileges granted by the existing order.

More dangerous than that, according to Giroux, is that this involvement is
not presented as a temporary exception, but marketed as a national duty,
creating a university culture that directly integrates scientific research
into the military domination project. Here the university loses its role as
a critical space and becomes part of the “infrastructure of occupation,”
where research questions are formulated, projects funded, and academic
success measured by the extent to which it serves national security.

In this context, academic silence regarding crimes committed in Gaza and
the West Bank becomes a natural outcome of long-term structural
entanglement, making it difficult to hold universities accountable because
they are part of the system.

Why is knowledge targeted?

Giroux moves from describing the internal Israeli role to a broader
analysis of the logic behind targeting Palestinian education, emphasizing
that what is happening in Gaza, from destroying schools and universities,
killing teachers, and displacing students, represents part of a conscious
strategy targeting the core of society, and cannot be considered collateral
damage of a military war.

According to the study, one of the gravest manifestations of state
terrorism is targeting children and education without provoking sustained
global shock. When children are killed or deprived of their schools, we are
facing an advanced level of normalization where crimes are emptied of their
human meaning.

Giroux warns that this behavior is not viewed in official Israeli discourse
as a crime, but as part of “dismantling the enemy’s infrastructure,”
stressing that this description itself reflects the logic of state
terrorism, where human life is reduced to security equations and any
independent moral consideration is eliminated.

The study warns that this normalization is not limited to the Israeli
interior, but extends to the international system, which deals with these
crimes with legal coldness or reduces them to fleeting statements of
concern, deepening the sense of impunity and encouraging the repetition of
violence.

Giroux sees education in colonial contexts as always being viewed as a
threat. Knowledge produces technical skills, awareness, organizational
capacity, and political imagination that transcends imposed reality.
Therefore, societies deprived of education are simultaneously deprived of
long-term tools of resistance.

In the Palestinian case, this targeting takes a clearer form. Gaza, which
has been under siege for years, was not merely a besieged population space,
but a living society that maintained, despite all constraints, an effective
educational structure, active universities, and high rates of enrollment in
higher education. This reality constitutes a structural threat, because
knowledge in Gaza is not neutral, but tied to questions of identity,
memory, rights, and continuity.

>From this perspective, Giroux argues that the destruction of universities
and laboratories and the killing of academics in Gaza has become a
political message par excellence, intended to break the chain of
consciousness production by targeting the present and striking the future
at its core.

Children between war and deprivation

Giroux gives special attention to children as direct victims of bombardment
and the group most affected by the simultaneous educational and
psychological collapse. War, in his view, is not measured only by the
number of dead, but by the depth of the wound it leaves in the
consciousness of future generations. When children in Gaza lose their
schools, they lose their sense of continuity.

He explains that the school in any society is not merely a place of
learning, but a space of safety, temporal organization, relationship
building, and meaning formation. When this space is destroyed, the child is
left in a state of existential void, where violence becomes the only
framework for understanding the world.

Giroux points out that accumulated traumas, bombardment, loss,
displacement, and hunger intersect with educational deprivation to produce
deep psychological effects that may not appear immediately. Children who
grow up in an environment without stable education and without a clear
horizon face compounded risks related to depression, anxiety disorders,
cognitive decline, and erosion of trust in the future.

Most dangerous, according to Giroux, is that this situation is not an
unintended consequence, but part of a logic of long-term subjugation. A
generation deprived of education is a generation less capable of demanding
its rights and less capable of rebuilding its society after the war.

Invisible violence

In one of the sharpest sections of his analysis, Giroux presents the
concept of “epistemicide” as a form of slow violence, measured by the
destruction of a society’s mental and cultural structure over years and
perhaps decades. Epistemicide, as he describes it, includes the destruction
of educational buildings, the killing of teachers, the dispersal of
students, the erasure of archives, the assault on collective memory, and
the severing of intergenerational knowledge transmission chains. It is a
relatively silent process that does not receive the same media coverage as
bombardment, but is far more lethal in the long term.

Giroux warns that ignoring this dimension of the war means accepting a
crime whose results will appear later, when society finds itself unable to
rise because of the erosion of its knowledge capital rather than a lack of
resources. Here lies the danger of what he calls “slow violence” or
“violence that is not seen,” it does not provoke immediate shock, but
produces deep cumulative destruction, manifested in the collapse of social
structures, erosion of hope, and paralysis of the ability to plan for the
future.

>From this perspective, rebuilding schools after the war, if it happens,
becomes insufficient unless accompanied by the protection of knowledge,
support for teachers, and the restoration of trust in education as a path
to life.

Giroux concludes that what is happening in Gaza goes beyond being a local
tragedy and constitutes a global test of the meaning of education as a
non-negotiable human right. When schools are destroyed, memory is killed,
and children are deprived of their right to learn, the target is not only a
specific people, but the very idea of justice itself.

He emphasizes that defending education is an act of moral resistance
against the logic of raw power, not a merely humanitarian position,
pointing out that silence in the face of the destruction of knowledge is
complicity in an ongoing crime and acceptance of a future built on
ignorance and oppression.

In a world that claims to defend values, Giroux poses a decisive question,
what is the value of talking about human rights if education, at the moment
of testing, is the first victim?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20260212/281136b8/attachment-0001.htm>