What makes a society? Is it merely existing as individuals, or is it the threads between them – the schools, the universities, the archives where memory lives? And what happens when those threads are being cut. Deliberately. Systematically.

In tent cities now in Gaza, students sit on dust. On rubble. In the ruins, students balance notebooks on their knees. Gaza’s universities are gone. The schools – gone. Universities, libraries, research, archives have been erased. But the professors, the teachers are still there. Teaching against erasure, teaching not just against the violence on Palestinian bodies but against the annihilation of possibility itself.

The destruction against educational systems represents the term sociocide. By definition, it is a strategic annihilation of the structures that make collective life possible. It goes hand in hand with genocide: Where genocide targets the people themselves, sociocide destroys their ability to exist as a society by stripping people of the means to sustain life, envision futures, or exist as anything beyond isolated survivors. Palestinian scholar Salim Abdul-Jawad defined sociocide in 1986 as “the gradual undermining of the communal and psychological structures of Palestinian society”. Today, the pace is anything but gradual.

Gaza’s schools and universities have been systematically targeted. Bombs and air strikes have reduced classrooms to rubble, erasing curricula as buildings collapse.........

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