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<div class="gmail-archive-name"><a href="https://english.palinfo.com/category/Zionist-Terrorism/">Zionist Terrorism</a> </div>
<h1 class="gmail-single_title">\u201cEpistemicide\u201d in Gaza, how Israel eradicates memory by breaking the chain of consciousness production</h1>
<p class="gmail-single_date">Thursday 12-February-2026</p>
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<p>GAZA, (PIC)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 \u201cepistemicide\u201d
Scholasticide as a framework for understanding the war as a structural
project aimed at erasing Palestinian society materially, culturally, and
intellectually.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="gmail-has-vivid-red-color gmail-has-text-color gmail-has-link-color gmail-wp-elements-870401b1709793a46a5701fa25981ad6">State terrorism and the normalization of violence</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The study\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>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 \u201cself-defense\u201d or \u201csecurity preservation,\u201d it does not merely
suppress the victim, it trains society as a whole to accept this
suppression and even to participate symbolically in it.</p>
<p>Here Giroux distinguishes between direct military violence and what
he calls \u201cstate terrorism,\u201d 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="gmail-has-vivid-red-color gmail-has-text-color gmail-has-link-color gmail-wp-elements-9ba2e0bb203e1de7397ba098ca17182b">From exceptional violence to structural violence</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>One of the most prominent axes of the study is the deliberate
targeting of educational institutions. According to United Nations data:</p>
<p>Approximately 90% of Gaza\u2019s schools were destroyed or damaged.<br>All 12 universities in the enclave were bombed or vandalized.<br>Studies were halted for around 90,000 university students.<br>Thousands of students and hundreds of teachers and university professors were killed.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="gmail-has-vivid-red-color gmail-has-text-color gmail-has-link-color gmail-wp-elements-186ef14b4108dff57eb2d8e27e28b200">Epistemicide, concept and meaning</p>
<p>Giroux defines \u201cepistemicide\u201d 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:</p>
<p>The destruction of schools and universities.<br>The killing or displacement of teachers and intellectuals.<br>The erasure of archives and libraries.<br>The destruction of museums and cultural sites.<br>The theft or obliteration of historical relics.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>He warns that destroying memory is no less dangerous than destroying
bodies, because it seeks to eliminate the Palestinian narrative at its
foundation.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="gmail-has-vivid-red-color gmail-has-text-color gmail-has-link-color gmail-wp-elements-c4f7125697eb3e875cdfd14bb59b56e5">Israeli universities and their role within the system</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 \u201chostile environment,\u201d or the
Palestinian is viewed as a \u201cpotential security threat,\u201d knowledge shifts
from a neutral framework into a tool serving violence.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
\u201cinfrastructure of occupation,\u201d where research questions are formulated,
projects funded, and academic success measured by the extent to which
it serves national security.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="gmail-has-vivid-red-color gmail-has-text-color gmail-has-link-color gmail-wp-elements-4ba8627254284765502a80063915cf38">Why is knowledge targeted?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Giroux warns that this behavior is not viewed in official Israeli
discourse as a crime, but as part of \u201cdismantling the enemy\u2019s
infrastructure,\u201d 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="gmail-has-vivid-red-color gmail-has-text-color gmail-has-link-color gmail-wp-elements-3e965cbf9cfef287fba114e6d60e3714">Children between war and deprivation</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="gmail-has-vivid-red-color gmail-has-text-color gmail-has-link-color gmail-wp-elements-9688dbce2ea130ddae7b7a1f10ae7ad9">Invisible violence</p>
<p>In one of the sharpest sections of his analysis, Giroux presents the
concept of \u201cepistemicide\u201d as a form of slow violence, measured by the
destruction of a society\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>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 \u201cslow violence\u201d
or \u201cviolence that is not seen,\u201d 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
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