The Enforced Silence: Gaza and the Scholasticide of Palestinian Academics—Parallels, Provocations, and Pathways for Action

Abstract

This article interrogates “enforced silence” in higher education as an active, racialised technology of governance that manages speech, polices dissent, and narrows the horizons of legitimate knowledge. Bringing scholarship on institutional racism, decoloniality, and academic freedom into dialogue with analyses of scholasticide, the systematic destruction of education and intellectual life in Palestine, the paper argues that neutrality and professionalism function as administrative veneers that protect institutional reputation while disciplining racialised scholars and erasing Palestinian epistemologies. Palestine operates here as both an acute site of violence and a diagnostic mirror that illuminates a transnational repertoire of epistemic governance: censorship, securitisation, campus injunctions, and weaponised definitions that chill debate and criminalise solidarity. The article extends the concept of scholasticide beyond material destruction to include ideological and institutional assaults on dissent and critical thought, demonstrating how marketised, securitised universities reproduce racial regimes while disavowing complicity. Against this architecture, the paper advances a praxis-oriented framework drawing on critical pedagogy and the Palestinian ethic of Sumud to envision universities as sites of freedom rather than corporate neutrality. It sets out concrete strategies for scholars and institutions, including protections for dissent, refusal of censorious definitions, divestment from complicit partnerships, cross-border classrooms, and recognition of emotional–political labour, to convert witness into transformative action. The article concludes by insisting that academic responsibility is irreducibly collective: education must commit to liberation, not serve domination.

1. Introduction

In times of crisis, silence is never neutral; it is complicit. This article interrogates the concept of scholasticide, first coined by Nabulsi (Ahmad and Vulliamy 2009) and further developed by Hajir and Qato (2025a) and Wind (2024) as both a humanitarian and epistemic crisis. Scholasticide captures the systematic destruction of Palestinian universities, schools, teachers, scholars, and intellectual life, exposing education as a key target of settler colonial violence. Yet, this article argues that scholasticide also illuminates broader global patterns of academic suppression, including censorship, retaliation, and the dismantling of equity and critical pedagogical initiatives. Drawing on examples from Palestine and beyond, including the United States and the United Kingdom, the paper situates the silencing of educators and students within wider nationalist and neoliberal co-optations of the academy.

The analysis engages three interrelated questions: how scholasticide reveals mechanisms of suppression in global academia; what ethical and political responsibilities scholars and academic institutions bear in resisting complicity; and what strategies can break enforced silence and foster spaces of resistance. Mobilising critical pedagogy (Freire 2000; Giroux 2022; hooks 2014), the article contends that education is not a neutral endeavour but a practice of freedom requiring moral clarity and action.

Historical precedents illustrate pathways for collective resistance, while contemporary examples highlight the urgent need to protect endangered scholars and centre marginalised voices. The article concludes with a call to action: for educators, students, and institutions to move beyond performative solidarity, confront systemic injustice, and reclaim academic freedom as a space of resistance. Now more than ever, breaking the silence is not only a pedagogical imperative but also an ethical and moral duty.

2. Positionality and Research Design

This paper is co-authored by three women working across different fields of education, as activists, researchers, and practitioners, whose collaboration is grounded in shared ethical and moral commitments to social justice. Our identities and lived experiences shape both the questions we ask and the stakes of our intervention. Two of us are visibly racialised women who routinely navigate institutional surveillance, marginalisation, and the racialised expectation to perform “diversity work”. One of us is a Jewish dual Israeli-British academic who has faced silencing and accusations of antisemitism for expressing solidarity with Palestinian rights, reflecting the ways in which dissent is policed through the weaponisation of identity. We write from positions marked by different forms of risk yet united by a refusal of epistemic erasure and a collective commitment to amplifying subjugated knowledges. These positionalities inform our analytical lens and the ethical obligations that guide our work.

Against this backdrop, the article employs a critical interpretive and contextual analysis drawing on scholarship in decolonial theory, academic freedom, and the political sociology of knowledge. Rather than a traditional empirical study, the paper adopts a conceptual and transnational comparative approach to examine how scholasticide, understood as both material destruction and epistemic suppression, operates most visibly in Palestine, and most recently in Gaza, while also manifesting in differentiated but connected forms of silencing globally. Through an examination of epistemic governance and the global assault on critical knowledge, the paper positions Palestine as a mirror through which wider mechanisms of epistemic control and repression become legible. This framing enables us to illustrate patterns of censorship, punishment, and institutional retaliation against students and academics expressing solidarity with Palestine, and to articulate strategies through which educators and institutions might move from silence to meaningful solidarity.

The analysis is guided by three research questions:

• How does scholasticide, as developed in Palestinian scholarship, reveal broader global mechanisms of academic suppression and epistemic governance?
• What ethical and political responsibilities do scholars and institutions bear in moments of genocidal violence and enforced silence?
• What frameworks and strategies can meaningfully challenge institutional complicity and cultivate liberatory, decolonial educational practices?

To situate these questions, we begin by examining the conditions of enforced silence that shape academic life today, both in contexts of overt scholasticide such as Gaza, and in the more subtle forms of epistemic governance that discipline scholars globally

3. The Enforced Silence

Institutional silence operates not as a passive omission but as an active process of racialised dehumanisation (Ahmed 2012; Bhopal 2018; Mirza 2018). Through the institutional language of neutrality and professionalism, higher education conceals its racialised structures of exclusion.

Within higher education, silence is often disguised as neutrality, professionalism, or collegiality, but in practice, these terms function as disciplinary tools to contain dissent and regulate the speech of racialised and minoritised scholars (Ahmed 2012, 2021; Puwar 2004). As Bhopal (2018, 2022) argues, universities sustain white privilege through policies and discourses that claim inclusivity while maintaining structural exclusion. This silencing is not benign; it is a mechanism that protects institutional reputation and whiteness itself, ensuring that racialised and decolonial critiques remain peripheral to the academic mainstream (Ahmed 2012; Bhopal and Pitkin 2020).

Bhopal (2022) demonstrates that universities maintain white privilege through symbolic performances of diversity that pacify critique and silence those who challenge institutional racism. This silence is not merely the absence of speech, but an active strategy of containment that protects the university’s image while delegitimising racialised scholars’ experiences and epistemologies (Ahmed 2012; Bhopal and Pitkin 2020). Scholars advocating for, or working within decolonial frameworks, or those supporting students engaged in such work, frequently report experiencing a profound sense of self-censorship. This self-censorship entails continuous emotional labour to meet institutional expectations, conform to Eurocentric academic norms, and avoid professional marginalisation (Ahmed 2012; hooks 1994; Pervez 2025).

Such emotional labour, while often framed as resilience or professionalism, inadvertently sustains the very institutional complicity that enables structural minoritisation and silencing within academia (Ahmed 2012; Lorde 1984). There is additional emotional labour from advocacy and diversity work where scholars take on the personal sense of responsibility to address injustices such as in the case of Palestine, in their work and workplace, absorbing the emotional, political costs (Ahmed 2013; Pervez 2025), and frequently even financial costs. hooks (1994) described that although this radical or transformative work in the academy is often tolerated it is not affirmed, leaving scholars isolated and vulnerable to professional marginalisation.

Additionally, decolonial knowledge production requires emotional labour that is often unrecognised, undervalued, or penalised by institutions that prize detachment, objectivity, and Eurocentric standards (Ahmed 2012). Ahmed (2012) and Pervez (2025) describe this as a disciplinary emotional labour imposed on minoritised scholars. Ahmed (2012) argues that universities create an environment where “diversity work” or critical scholarship is simultaneously undervalued and expected of those already experiencing structural oppression. Minoritised scholars are seen as the “best fit” for these roles, not because their scholarship is valued, but because they seemingly check institutional diversity boxes. This form of stress and exhaustion as a direct consequence of institutional silence, may be conceptualised as a third level of trauma: the first borne by those directly experiencing and living oppression; the second by those witnessing and empathising with that suffering; and the third by those who shoulder the emotional and political burden of speaking up against systemic injustice within institutions that resist such critique (Fanon [1952] 1970; Tuck and Yang 2012). Thus, cumulative trauma does not emerge in isolation but is sustained by the very structures that claim to uphold academic objectivity: structures that discipline, exclude, and silence dissenting voices.

The culture of institutional silencing and emotional extraction creates the conditions in which academic gatekeeping thrives, particularly around ‘politically charged’ issues such as Palestine. It is within this terrain that the emotional, epistemic, and political costs of speaking truth to power converge, revealing how universities reproduce colonial hierarchies not only through what knowledge is produced, but through whose pain and resistance are deemed legitimate. Academic gatekeeping, not least around issues of Palestine during a genocide, constitutes a form of epistemic violence (Dotson 2011; Spivak 1988). When institutions claim neutrality in the face of genocide and occupation, this supposed impartiality becomes an act of erasure, neutralising critical discourse and depoliticising struggles for liberation. The marginalisation of Palestinian scholarship and their advocates through the rhetoric of neutrality and “walking on eggshells” is thus not limited to individual acts but reflects a broader institutional pattern of silencing (Pervez 2025; Said 1997). Resistance to this silencing is often pathologised, framed as unacademic, biased, or unneutral, and these accusations are intensified for racialised scholars and visibly Muslim people, especially women (Ahmed 2012; Mirza 2018; Pervez 2025).

This dynamic can be further understood both actually and symbolically through Wolfe’s (2006) theory of settler colonialism, a continuing system of power working to eliminate and replace Indigenous or colonised populations to secure the settlers’ access to land, resources, and sovereignty. This logic of elimination is not confined to moments of conquest or occupation; it is continually reproduced through political, legal, educational, and cultural institutions that normalise the dominance of the settler and the erasure of the colonised. This means that acts of violence, displacement, or suppression, such as the targeting of Palestinian academics, can be understood not as isolated incidents or remnants of past conflict, but as expressions of an ongoing settler colonial structure that seeks to maintain control by silencing Indigenous knowledge and intellectual resistance.

Within UK higher education, colonial logics continue to shape knowledge production, privileging Eurocentric epistemologies while limiting Indigenous and occupied peoples’ scholarship. Consequently, marginalised voices who carry the burden of representing the silenced, oppressed, or annihilated are systematically denied full epistemic participation. Their knowledge is deemed incompatible with dominant academic norms of legitimacy and objectivity (Fraser 1990; Santos 2014).

Thus, institutional silence is not merely an absence of voice, it is an active, racialised practice of epistemic control and dehumanisation that maintains colonial power structures within contemporary academia.

4. Scholasticide

The term scholasticide was first coined by Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian scholar and professor at the University of Oxford, during Israel’s 2008–2009 war on Gaza (Ahmad and Vulliamy 2009). Defined as the systematic destruction of educational institutions, particularly as a tool of colonial violence aimed at erasing Palestinian intellectual life and resistance, Nabulsi described Scholasticide as part of a broader strategy to “annihilate an educated Palestine” (Ahmad and Vulliamy 2009, n.p), linking it to decades of attacks on Palestinian education dating back to 1948, which can be interpreted as a genocide on schooling and scholarship.

The term combines the Latin root schola (school) and the suffix -cide (killing), aligning it conceptually with genocide. It has since been expanded by organisations like Scholars Against the War on Palestine (Spectre Journal 2024), which lists acts such as the killing of students and educators, destruction of schools and universities, and the obstruction of scholarly exchange as forms of scholasticide. Work by both Wind (2024) and Hajir and Qato (2025a) further elaborate on the systematic targeting of Palestinian scholars, students, and educational institutions, both during specific invasions and historically since the Nakba. In fact, unlike other -cides (e.g., politicide, educide), which can serve merely as descriptive shorthand, scholasticide carries definitional weight, giving it legal, political, and strategic significance. Hajir and Qato (2025a) argue that the term not only explains the modalities of these attacks but also foregrounds their genocidal character, enabling human rights and educational advocacy groups to challenge and hold perpetrators accountable. At the same time, while it can strengthen claims of accountability, its legal framing may risk over-legalising or simplifying complex structural violences, potentially limiting attention to broader ongoing injustices (Hajir and Qato 2025a). Wind (2024) focuses on the multitude of ways Israeli universities are structurally implicated in scholasticide. Through hosting military academies and training programmes, developing weapons, or developing legal justifications to the genocide and erasing Palestinian history, language and knowledge. Her work also demonstrates the ways that critical voices are silenced, which reaches well beyond the state of Israel.

Giroux (2025) similarly extends scholasticide beyond the physical destruction of schools, universities, and other educational infrastructure to encompass the ideological and political assault on dissent, critical thinking, and academic freedom. He highlights how silencing critical perspectives and repressing solidarity with Palestine within universities and academic institutions globally, represents a continuation of this process. In Giroux’s framework, scholasticide is not confined to overt acts of violence or occupation but includes the systematic marginalisation of knowledge, voices, and pedagogical practices that challenge dominant political and ideological narratives. This broader understanding emphasises that attacks on education can operate both materially and symbolically, curtailing the capacity of scholars and students to engage in transformative critique or to cultivate social consciousness. Giroux’s work thus positions scholasticide as a multidimensional phenomenon, linking physical destruction, institutional censorship, and ideological control to the wider project of repressing dissent and maintaining structural inequalities in global education.

Together, these perspectives underline the multidimensional nature of scholasticide, encompassing material destruction, legal and political contestation, and the broader ideological mechanisms through which education and dissent are suppressed. Recent scholarship has further situated scholasticide within frameworks of cultural genocide, settler colonialism, and epistemicide, or the destruction of knowledge systems. For instance, César Domínguez (2024) explored scholasticide as a form of educational lawfare, drawing parallels with medicide and arguing that both are strategic attacks on civilian infrastructure intended to erase cultural and intellectual life.

While writing this paper in October 2025 during a very fragile ceasefire, maiming, killing and death is ongoing, and destruction has been deplorable, with two children killed a day during the ceasefire (United Nations News 2025). Over the last two years, reports document the bombing of all twelve universities in Gaza, the killing of thousands of students and educators, and the complete disruption of academic life (Azzouz 2024). For example, Professor Refaat Al-Areer, who survived an Israeli assault in 2014 that claimed the lives of 30 of his relatives, had repeatedly received death threats from the Israeli occupation forces. This prompted him to move (again) from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) school where he was sheltering, to his sister’s home where he was killed, along with his son and neighbours (Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor 2023; Sulaiman and Aljamal 2025).

Furthermore, at least 193 academics including professors have been killed during the ongoing conflict, among them university presidents, deans, and faculty members (Desai 2024). Over 800 schoolteachers and education staff have been killed (Abuaisha and Chouiref 2025). This targeted killing of intellectual leaders is viewed as part of a broader strategy to dismantle Palestinian national identity and suppress critical voices, creating a future educational void. Thus, the deliberate, targeted killing and destruction convey an unmistakable message to those being attacked (Azzouz 2024): this is not collateral damage, it has become the very objective itself.

As such, other scholars have extended the concept to critique complicity by academia in the Global North, highlighting how silence, censorship and suppression of solidarity with Palestine reflect scholasticidal tendencies within institutions. For example, Hajir and Qato (2025b) refer to scholasticidal continuities giving the example of the attempted assassination of Edward Said, and how his office on campus was subsequently made bullet proof. The scholasticidal tendencies, however, are manifested in various ways, one of which is silence.

Shakir (2025) reinforces the notion that in times of crisis, silence is complicit, emphasising that the erasure of Palestinian education is not only a humanitarian catastrophe but also an assault on knowledge and history. She contends that global patterns of academic suppression, censorship, and enforced silence sustain settler colonialism and genocide, not just in Gaza but across universities in the Global North. Similarly, Hajir and Qato (2025b) identify tendencies within academia in the Global North that align with scholasticide, including silence on Palestine, suppression of solidarity, and the framing of Palestinian issues as too complex or too sensitive to address. These censorship tendencies function as forms of intellectual repression that mirror the mechanisms of scholasticide in occupied contexts. Real-world examples underscore these dynamics. For example, the Harvard Educational Review’s cancellation of a Special Issue on Palestine in 2025, as well as the retraction of articles by Palestinian scholars such as Rabea Eghbariah due to political pressures, illustrate how Global North institutions can actively inhibit critical scholarship (Speri 2025). Together, these accounts suggest that scholasticide in the Global North operates not through physical destruction but via the systematic silencing of knowledge, voices, and critique, extending the concept beyond its original context while retaining its function as a tool of dehumanisation and structural control.

Therefore, scholasticidal silencing is not limited to Gaza. Across the Global North, academics who speak out against Israeli settler colonialism face professional retaliation, censorship, and institutional intimidation (Landy et al. 2020). These patterns reflect a broader ideological suppression that seeks to dismantle intellectual resistance and collective memory (Shakir 2025).

Palestinian scholasticide is not a solely regional, military nor exceptional phenomenon, and extends beyond the physical destruction of educational infrastructure. The structural bombings in Gaza and the ideological suppression of dissent central to scholasticide reinforce each other globally (Giroux 2025) and are identifiable in patterns of academic suppression in other contexts through attacks on schools, universities and teachers worldwide. A key feature of scholasticide is the “calculated structural, ideological, and political assault on dissent and education” (Giroux 2025, p. 1) and an attempt to erase Palestinian knowledge and scholarship. One such repressive act is through limiting or outright bans on powerful theoretical and critical scholarship which could support depth of understanding of Palestine and on precisely the meaning and gravity of scholasticide. What emerges, then, is a transnational architecture of silencing in which assaults on Palestinian knowledge are mirrored by broader efforts to discipline, restrict, and criminalise critical thought in other national contexts. These shared logics become even clearer when examining how states regulate and police knowledge globally.

5. Epistemic Governance and the Global Assault on Critical Knowledge

The United States has seen bans on Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Watson 2023) and loyalty pledges against the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Opponents of anti-CRT laws claim they are designed to silence discussions of racism. Proponents of anti-BDS laws often frame the movement as inherently antisemitic to justify censorship and punishment. Younes (2020) characterises this “War on Antisemitism” to silence dissent from non-white actors resisting the genocide, in the same way that the “War on Terror” focuses attention on the “Muslim Other” and the “War on Drugs” targets Latinx and Black communities. Barghouti (2011) characterises repressive tactics like these as designed to supress free speech and human rights advocacy, arguing that such pledges are a response both to the growing success of BDS and an attempt to silence criticism of Israeli policies by misrepresenting support for Palestinian rights as disloyal and antisemitic. Similarly, from a free speech and civil liberties perspective, banning CRT creates a chilling effect on expression and academic freedom, causing educators and other professionals to self-censor. In both cases, the vagueness of the law around these bans contributes to the chilling effect, making it unclear what speech or activity is prohibited.

Similarly, the UK has seen parallel narratives to the USA regarding CRT (Warmington 2020), where some theoretical frameworks are labelled as divisive or unpatriotic. The silencing extends beyond the specificities of Palestine and creates a spiral effect that supresses broader discussions on racism and inequality. This in turn, allows the denial of systemic problems and the punishment of those who highlight them, protecting a specific state-sanctioned version of reality. In the USA and the UK, this is visible in efforts to dismantle Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives, sometimes framed as inefficient or ideological by political actors (Sullivan and Suissa 2022; Martínez and Villarreal 2025). It is also seen in the penalisation of pro-Palestine speech which critics argue is enabled by the widespread adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, thereby creating a chilling effect on academic freedom and discourse on Palestine (BRISMES and ELSC 2023; Shabi 2024).

According to Lentin (2025), the IHRA definition is best understood as a carceral tool, effectively treated as a ‘quasi-law’ in places like Germany, allowing it to be used as a tool to identify targets of the struggle against antisemitism by conflating anti-Zionism as a hate crime, rather than stopping actual violence against Jewish people. Lentin suggests we must therefore refuse the terms, language and conceptualisations of this oppression through the enforcement of the IHRA definition because they are distortions used to sustain oppression. If the goal is to dismantle systems of oppression which allow scholasticide, the solution therefore is not to replicate new definitions but to destroy the systems that necessitate them.

Hungary and India offer emblematic cases of how illiberal statecraft targets universities to reshape knowledge production and public debate. In Hungary, the Orbán government’s 2018 revocation of licences for gender studies and the forced relocation pressures on CEU were not isolated bureaucratic acts but part of a wider “polypore” strategy: building parallel, politically loyal academic authority while delegitimising critical fields such as gender studies (Pető 2020). These measures fuse culture-war framing (anti-gender) with regulatory muscle to erode academic autonomy and quality assurance systems, recasting expertise as ideological threat.

In India, repression has combined policy, police power, and administrative interference to discipline dissenting scholars and students. These range from campus raids and arrests around the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests, to high-profile resignations under political pressure, producing a chilling effect on teaching, research, and public engagement (Bhushan 2020). The CAA fast-tracks Indian citizenship for non-Muslim migrants (Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, Christians) from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh who arrived before 31 December 2014. Critics say it introduces religion as a criterion for citizenship and discriminates against Muslims, undermining constitutional equality (Jayal 2022). The movement includes nationwide protests (e.g., Shaheen Bagh, university campuses) and legal challenges (Bhatia and Gajjala 2020; Sengupta 2021). Documented patterns include restrictions on events, surveillance, curricular politicisation, and punitive use of law, all accelerating since 2014 and normalising self-censorship in universities. Taken together, these cases illustrate a transnational repertoire of epistemic governance, where states seek hegemony not only over institutions, but over what counts as valid knowledge, whether by outlawing gender scholarship or penalising dissent, thereby undermining the university’s democratic role. These processes have normalised fear on university campuses, generating conditions in which students, early career researchers, and faculty internalise the costs of speaking out. Taken together, the Hungarian and Indian examples illustrate a shared repertoire of epistemic authoritarianism, states seeking hegemony not only over institutional governance but over the boundaries of legitimate knowledge itself. This international pattern provides an essential backdrop for understanding the repression of Palestine-related scholarship and activism.

Across the political landscape, by late 2024, far right and neo-fascist candidates have become significant electoral actors across Europe, including in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Sweden. In cases such as Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia and Austria’s Freedom Party, leadership draws explicitly on lineages linked to Mussolini’s Italy and the Nazi past (Schir 2022). This consolidation has been propelled by long-running state racism, manifesting in “Fortress Europe”, institutionalised Islamophobia, and the routine circulation of racialised policy frames and rhetoric (Mitchell and Russell 2020). In these contexts, Palestine solidarity becomes a flashpoint for broader contests over who is permitted to name state violence, critique colonial projects, or articulate alternative political horizons.

In the United States, Donald Trump’s return to office for a second term in January 2025 further energised racist and fascistic forces (Crothers 2025). His administration amplified polarising, exclusionary politics, legitimised groups implicated in the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack, rolled back diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and circulated dehumanising content, including AI-produced media on Gaza (Ng et al. 2025; Holmes and Owen 2025). The vilification of migrants and refugees has helped normalise racism (including Islamophobia) and xenophobia in mainstream debate (Cole 2019; Younes 2020) and highlights how technological and state power work in tandem to delegitimise Palestinian narratives and suppress dissent. This sits within a wider architecture of state racism, where migrants, refugees, and Muslims are systematically vilified, producing an atmosphere in which pro-Palestinian speech is readily conflated with extremism, further demonising support for Palestinians.

These dynamics are not limited to the Global North. Leaders such as Narendra Modi in India and Javier Milei in Argentina exemplify parallel dynamics, stoking Islamophobia (Choonara 2024) and compounding anti-Palestinian solidarity. While tactics vary across the globe, the political climate channels social grievances towards already marginalised groups, especially migrants, Muslims, refugees, Palestinians and those who stand with Palestine. Such grievances appear state driven. In May, Prime Minister and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, stated the UK risked becoming “an island of strangers” when announcing plans to cut immigration, echoing the racist and xenophobic words of Enoch Powell from his famous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 (Nevett and Zeffman 2025). This revival of Powell’s rhetoric is not merely nostalgic, it signals how racialised fear and exclusion are once again being weaponised to consolidate political authority and suppress dissent. Across these diverse sites, Palestine becomes a diagnostic locus that reveals how contemporary states manage dissent through epistemic regulation: controlling academic curricula, restricting protest, criminalising critique, and disciplining scholars and students who speak out. Palestine solidarity is thus not merely a geopolitical stance but a terrain through which governments reassert racialised hierarchies, fortify cultural-nationalist narratives, and suppress critical knowledge that challenges colonial orders. In this sense, the repression of Palestine activism is inseparable from the wider global assault on critical inquiry. The silencing of Palestinian narratives, whether through campus bans, immigration enforcement, defunding, or criminalisation, forms part of a transnational pattern in which states seek to police the limits of permissible knowledge and reconfigure universities into instruments of ideological containment rather than democratic contestation. It is within this climate that Palestine becomes more than a geopolitical issue; it operates as a mirror reflecting the wider architecture of racial regimes, epistemic control, and the global repression of resistance.

6. Palestine as Mirror: Racial Regimes, Epistemic Control, and the Global Repression of Dissent

While scholasticide is a global pattern of suppression and erasure, Palestine can be regarded as an acute site that makes visible mechanisms embedded elsewhere. Lentin (2025) outlines several interconnected mechanisms of suppression which function largely through the recalibration of the racial regime to protect Zionism, which she articulates as an integral part of global white supremacy and imperialism. Among these are a system deployed by universities to maintain a strict system of management and knowledge production. This can be done through implementing censorship, restricting study, cancelling courses, and limiting or prohibiting access to materials linked to Palestine. Similarly, epistemic erasure is key to the racial regime, often manifesting through sidelining and negation of indigenous and colonised activists and scholars as theorists of their own experiences. The racial regime, according to Lentin, adapts by incorporating and neutralising oppositional discourses, particularly those related to indigeneity and anti-colonialism.

Vital to Lentin’s analysis is the concept of “field-testing” repression (Lentin 2025, p. 143). The increasingly militarised policing of public, academic, and domestic spaces is justified by the identification of racialised outsiders, criminalisation of visible Palestinian symbols such as a keffiyeh scarf or flag colours, which can lead to arrest in some European capitals, for example (Alkousaa and Foroudi 2023; Human Rights Watch 2023). Lentin argues that the suppression of Palestine dissent is a recursive process of the racial regime which uses both overt oppression in the form of state violence and scholasticide, and covert tactics such as ideological co-optation into “not racist” and “anti-antisemitic” discourse. This activates deflection through weaponised definitions of antisemitism to protect Zionism as a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation opposed to barbarism” (Theodore Herzl, cited in Lentin 2025, p. 220) integral to securing global white dominance.

Meticulously outlining the historical context of student activism and the legal frameworks governing free speech at both public and private universities in the USA, Udas and Stagg (2019) argue that limitations on student expression are often motivated by protecting institutional financial interests and the political status quo. Rubin’s (2024) examination of modern tactics of academic repression, categorises them into policy-based limitations, surveillance and harassment, police violence, and legal actions, including the use of disciplinary and criminal systems. Finally, Rubin focuses on how pro-Palestinian activism is disproportionately repressed through these means, highlighting the consequences such as doxxing, rescinded job offers, and the weaponisation of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

Exploring the intersection of neoliberalism and growing right-wing populism in North America, also apparent across the European continent and elsewhere, Wasi (2025) examined the repression of pro-Palestinian student activism. Peaceful student activism has included demands for divestment from companies complicit in the genocide on Gaza, disclosure of financial investments, protections to the right to protest, and institutional public condemnation of the genocide. Wasi concludes that in a trade-off between democratic rights and institutional economic interests, right-wing populist discourse is deployed to suppress student activism and uphold oppressive structures which criminalise dissent in exchange for protection of the neoliberal order.

Across the UK, the space for Palestine solidarity has narrowed through a mix of legislative, regulatory, and institutional moves that recast dissent as disorder. At the national level, ministers have sought anti-Boycott and Divestment Sanctions (BDS) measures aimed at preventing public bodies from making procurement or investment choices that reflect moral or political disapproval of a foreign state, legislation widely read as targeting boycotts related to Israel (see UK Parliament 2024, research briefing on Economic Activity of Public Bodies). Parallel Home Office interventions have urged police to treat certain protest chants as potentially criminal, contributing to a climate in which Palestine-focused assemblies are pre-emptively framed as threats to public order (see Home Office 2023, Letter to Chief Constables from Suella Braverman). These moves intersect with a broader expansion of police powers over protest. Current proposals go further, empowering police to factor the “cumulative impact” of prior demonstrations and tightening controls in response to Palestine marches, changes civil-liberties groups warn will chill lawful protest (Siddique 2025).

Across 2024 and 2025, UK universities, including Cambridge, Birmingham, Nottingham and Cardiff turned to the High Court to ban Palestine encampments and restrict the terms of on-campus protests (Landmark Chambers 2024; Liberty Human Rights 2024; The European Legal Support Center 2025). Civil liberties and academic freedom groups argue that these campus injunctions chill political speech by converting normative disciplinary questions into contempt-of-court risk (injunction breach), with knock-on effects for teaching, research events, and student organising around Palestine. Taken together, anti-BDS initiatives, expanded public-order powers, and campus governance practices, form a mutually reinforcing architecture of control that narrows the avenues for dissent and civic participation, especially for those advocating Palestinian rights.

7. Racialised and Gendered Silencing of Academia and Students in Palestinian Solidarity Contexts

The silencing of pro-Palestinian scholarship and activism in higher education must be theorised as a deeply intersectional process shaped by racialisation, immigration status, gendered vulnerability, and geopolitical power. Far from being evenly or neutrally distributed, the risks associated with speaking about Palestine accrue disproportionately to those who are themselves positioned within structures of marginality, racialised scholars, migrant or international students, women and gender-nonconforming individuals, and those working in fields historically scrutinised for their political content. This dynamic has intensified since October 2023, producing what Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly (2021) call racialised governance of dissent, whereby institutional mechanisms of discipline intersect with external political pressures to regulate which voices are allowed to shape academic discourse.

The Middle East Scholar Barometer (MESB 2023) findings provide a crucial empirical anchor for understanding self-censorship among scholars. Across multiple waves of the survey, Lynch and Telhami (2023, 2024) document that a substantial proportion of Middle East and international relations scholars in the United States consciously refrain from commenting publicly, publishing op-eds, or even addressing Palestine and Israel in their teaching because of anticipated backlash, donor interference, reputational damage, or institutional sanction. While the survey does not release full race and gender disaggregation, critical scholarship on the politics of knowledge production indicates that Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and broader racialised scholars bear intensified risks within an academy shaped by Orientalist epistemic hierarchies (Bayoumi 2018; Said 1978). Their work is more likely to be scrutinised for political intent, dismissed as activism rather than scholarship, or framed as lacking objectivity, an accusation often selectively deployed against scholars of Colour (Bhambra et al. 2018).

At the same time, gender operates as a parallel and compounding axis of regulation. Feminist analyses of academic labour (Ahmed 2012; hooks 1994) show that women, particularly women of Colour, carry disproportionate burdens of emotional labour, mentoring, and institutional service, leaving them with less institutional protection and greater exposure to reputational harms when engaging in politically sensitive research. Women Palestinian and Arab scholars often describe a dual burden: they must navigate the generalised professional caution surrounding politically “dangerous” topics, while simultaneously resisting gendered prescriptions of decorum, neutrality, and respectability that frame assertive critique as emotional, excessive, or unprofessional (Abu-Lughod 2013; Pervez 2025). These expectations deter outspoken political engagement and reinforce a climate of anticipatory self-censorship that disproportionately impacts those already at the margins of academic authority.

The case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian-Syrian refugee and graduate student at Columbia University detained in 2025 by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), illustrates how racialised silencing also operates at the student level, particularly among migrants and individuals whose belonging is legally conditional (MESA 2025). Reports from Amnesty International USA (2025), the ACLU (2025), and international media (e.g., Reuters 2025) show that Khalil was held under a rarely invoked statutory authority, framed as a national security threat, and placed in deportation proceedings despite the absence of criminal charges. These experiences typify what scholars describe as the securitisation of Muslim and Arab identities in Western democracies (Awan et al. 2012): his political activism was interpreted through the lens of presumed extremism, his gendered and racialised identity constructed him as potentially violent, and his refugee background rendered him perpetually suspect.

Immigration status magnifies this vulnerability. As scholars of migration and law have argued (Bosniak 2006; Ngai 2014), non-citizen students and academics occupy a precarious position that allows the state, and, by extension, universities collaborating with state security apparatuses, to curtail their speech or participation without needing to demonstrate wrongdoing. The threat of deportation, visa revocation, or exclusion from study constitutes a powerful tool of silencing that is disproportionately wielded against racialised, Muslim, and Palestinian students. This is consistent with long-standing research on the racialised deployment of immigration enforcement in the governance of political dissent (Ryo et al. 2025).

Gender is also deeply implicated in this process, though less visible in public reporting. Khalil’s detention while his wife was pregnant, the fact that he missed the birth of his child, and the broader disruption to familial life illustrate how the state’s disciplining powers interact with gendered social roles and domestic responsibilities (ACLU 2025). Meanwhile, women and non-binary student activists frequently report heightened exposure to online harassment, misogynistic abuse, and Islamophobic sexualisation when engaging in Palestine solidarity, forms of gendered surveillance that remain structurally under-documented (Phipps 2020). Their activism is often trivialised as emotional, irrational, or excessively personal, reinforcing gendered and racialised discourses that delegitimise critique and justify institutional monitoring.

Taken together, these dynamics reveal a layered system of intersectional silencing. Racialised and gender-marginalised faculty face intensified professional discipline: withdrawn invitations, stalled promotions, hostile media campaigns, and internal investigations. Migrant and international students confront legalised precarity through immigration enforcement, visa control, and collaboration between universities and government agencies (Karinda 2025). Public shaming, doxxing, and moral panic narratives disproportionately target women and racialised activists, both amplifying their exposure and minimising their institutional protection. As Ahmed (2017) notes, institutions often maintain their reputational coherence by absorbing or suppressing the dissent of minoritised individuals, transforming them into “institutional killjoys” whose critique is pathologised rather than engaged with.

The cumulative effect is not merely individualised harm but a structural reconfiguration of academic freedom. Those with the least structural power face the greatest constraints on political voice, producing a stratified landscape in which the right to speak, research, and teach about Palestine is unevenly distributed along racialised, gendered, and citizenship lines. This disjuncture undermines the conditions necessary for decolonial pedagogy, which depends upon the capacity of marginalised staff, and students, to interrogate dominant narratives, name structures of violence, and articulate alternative futures. As decolonial scholars argue (Maldonado-Torres 2011; Tuck and Yang 2012), epistemic justice is inseparable from material and political conditions; silencing racialised voices reproduces colonial hierarchies of knowledge that decolonial pedagogy seeks to dismantle.

Consequently, meaningful institutional responses must move beyond abstract commitments to academic freedom and instead address the structural inequalities that determine who is placed at risk when they speak. This requires recognition that silencing is not episodic but systemic; that racialised and migrant students and scholars bear disproportionate burdens; and that gendered labour, visibility, and vulnerability shape the experience and distribution of repression. Only by acknowledging these layered dynamics can universities, professional associations, and academic communities cultivate an environment in which decolonial praxis is not merely permitted but materially possible.

These academic dynamics sit within a broader political climate in which state repression normalises racialised standards of belonging and citizenship. In the UK, public discourse has turned to patriotism and nationalism as a prerequisite to education, serving hegemonic narratives through the Prevent Duty, British Values and other structures which effectively define which people, beliefs, and actions constitute Britishness vs. Britishness (Gilroy 2004; Hirsch 2018). Whilst Palestinian flags have been identified as weapons which instil fear into Jewish people, British flag-waving, reminiscent of the fascist marches on Cable Street in 1936, has been defended as healthy patriotism. Streets across the UK were plastered with flags of the Union Jack and St George’s cross in the summer of 2025 by people reportedly “expressing affection for one’s country” whilst many, particularly those from already marginalised communities, see this display as racist, othering, and a message that they are not welcome in the UK (Ryan et al. 2025). These developments produce a political terrain in which solidarity with Palestinians is framed as disloyal, foreign, or extremist, thereby feeding back into the university as an epistemic space already primed to sanction dissent.

Within marketised higher education, academic work is frequently stripped of its political edge: inquiry becomes abstract, insulated from social movements, and circulates mainly in scholarly venues rather than public arenas. Compliance with regulators and funders often eclipses commitments to substantive transformation. At the same time, grassroots organising, especially in marginalised communities, sometimes lacks sustained access to scholarly infrastructure, hindering the development of durable, theoretically informed strategies that can endure beyond episodic crises (Apostolopoulou et al. 2022). The result is a recursive cycle: the academy distances itself from political struggle at precisely the moment when state repression intensifies, further isolating those who dare to articulate critiques, especially critiques of racial power and settler colonialism in Palestine.

In the contemporary, market-oriented academy, universities operate as tightly managed arenas that regulate what counts as legitimate knowledge. Radical and anti-racist work is routinely sidelined, branded overly political or dismissed for alleged lack of objectivity (Porter et al. 2021). Scholars who pursue explicitly political agendas, especially racialised academics, disproportionately encounter stalled progression, constrained funding, or direct institutional pushback (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly 2021). In the UK, The Prevent Duty and the wider securitisation of higher education under counter-terrorism logics have intensified these dynamics, casting activism as suspect and placing critical scholarship on state racism, Islamophobia, and imperialism under heightened surveillance and sanction (Abbas et al. 2023; Ramadan 2017). Academics who organise or publish critiques of institutional racism frequently encounter monitoring, content suppression, and career penalties. Public-facing scholars addressing Palestine, police violence, or immigration are often targeted by smear efforts, lose positions, or attract direct attention from state authorities (BRISMES and ELSC 2023; Hassan and Hellyer 2024). Compounding this, the expansion of insecure contracts across higher education leaves many, especially racialised and working-class staff, without the protection needed to challenge institutional power without risking reprisals.

Only by acknowledging these layered dynamics can universities, professional bodies, and academic communities cultivate environments in which decolonial praxis is materially possible, rather than rhetorically celebrated. The challenge is not merely to protect academic freedom in the abstract, but to confront the racialised, gendered, and political inequalities that determine who pays the price for exercising it.

Responsibility is not optional: universities are never neutral spaces. Historically, higher education has both reproduced oppression and nurtured resistance. On the side of complicity, academic institutions have provided the epistemic scaffolding for racial science and eugenics, legitimating exclusionary policies in the name of objectivity (Kevles 1985); helped naturalise imperial hierarchies through Orientalist scholarship (Said 1978); have actively erased centuries of knowledge production, culture, and history of Palestinian people (Wind 2024). In settler-colonial and apartheid contexts, universities often codified racial orders in curricula, selection, and research priorities, entrenching structural domination (Jansen 2009).

By bringing together professional association activism, Palestinian-led institutional initiatives, and the historical legacy of popular education, this section argues that academic freedom and critical pedagogy cannot be conceptualised solely within university walls. They emerge from the interplay of legal advocacy, disciplinary norms, community organising, and resistance to settler-colonial violence. Cabral (2016) argues that colonial domination operates not only through military or economic force but through the destruction and suppression of a people’s cultural and intellectual life. For Cabral, the struggle for liberation is always also an epistemic struggle. This insight resonates with contemporary attempts to marginalise, criminalise, or delegitimise Palestinian knowledge production, which function to weaken collective capacity for resistance and limit the horizons of political imagination. Walcott (2020) extends this critique to the modern university itself, contending that disciplines rooted in Eurocentric epistemologies remain structurally unable to confront the violence of racial capitalism and settler colonialism and helps illuminate why Palestinian scholarship, and those who stand with it, face intensified scrutiny; the academy often protects its colonial foundations by disciplining critiques that expose its complicity.

In this context, defending Palestinian education, whether through litigation, institutional policy, or grassroots praxis, becomes inseparable from the broader struggle to protect knowledge production, intellectual autonomy, and the right to liberation, and in this we as academics have a defined role. Said (1994) insists that the intellectual must speak truth to power and align with the oppressed, even at personal cost. The repression of Palestine activism thus represents not only institutional risk aversion but a profound betrayal of the university’s ethical vocation.

However, the university has also been a site of insurgent pedagogy and social transformation. Critical traditions insist that knowledge carries ethical commitments: education can either “domesticate” or “liberate” (Freire (1970), cited in Walker 2008). Contemporary anti-racist, decolonial, and critical legal movements, from Critical Race Theory to student-staff campaigns for curricular and institutional change, demonstrate how scholarship can unmask power, democratise knowledge, and build solidarities within and beyond the campus (Delgado and Stefancic 2017). Mignolo’s notion of “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo 2011) sharpens this analysis. Naming settler colonialism, apartheid, or scholasticide constitutes a refusal to comply with dominant epistemic orders that insist on euphemism and neutrality. The disciplining of such language, whether through managerial sanctions, public vilification, or legal threats, reveals the extent to which universities police the boundaries of acceptable knowledge. Brown and Strega’s (2005) call for “transgressive research” underscores that decolonial inquiry must challenge rather than accommodate systems of oppression. Their insistence on anti-oppressive methodologies demonstrates why Palestinian voices and solidarities are treated as threats, they expose the colonial conditions under which academic knowledge is produced and validated.

Collectively, these thinkers show that the suppression of Palestine activism is not an aberration but part of a longer global pattern in which states and institutions seek to manage dissent by controlling what counts as legitimate knowledge. The choice is thus practical and normative: through hiring, funding, curricula, partnerships, and governance, universities either reproduce unequal worlds or mobilise their resources to contest them. Responsibility resides not just in individual conscience but in institutional design; but to what extent the university will take on this responsibility remains to be seen. So, what can we do to resist?

8. Institutional Strategies, Transnational Solidarity, and Critical Pedagogy in Contexts of Suppression

Recent struggles over Palestine in higher education demonstrate that academic freedom and critical pedagogy must be understood as transnational, politically contested terrains shaped by state power, professional mobilisation, and community-driven educational resistance. Legal action in 2025, by professional associations such as the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) illustrates how collective, sector-wide strategies have become central to resisting the suppression of Palestine-related scholarship and activism. Their 2025 federal lawsuit challenges the Trump administration’s policy enabling the arrest and deportation of non-citizen students and scholars for pro-Palestine speech, arguing that the policy constitutes viewpoint discrimination and violates First Amendment protections (AAUP and MESA 2025). This litigation reflects a broader pattern in which state actors weaponise Title VI civil-rights mechanisms and “antisemitism” frameworks to police criticism of Israel, producing a chilling effect long documented in AAUP reports (AAUP 2025) and human-rights analyses (Deeb and Winegar 2024).

Professional bodies beyond the university have also become crucial institutional actors. Associations such as the American Studies Association (ASA) and the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) were early adopters of academic boycott resolutions, reframing Palestinian academic freedom as a disciplinary and ethical concern aligned with anti-racist and decolonial scholarship (AAAS 2013; ASA 2013). These resolutions operate as forms of normative governance, establishing collective professional expectations that institutions should resist, rather than comply with, repressive state agendas. Similarly, AAUP’s investigations and sanctions, such as its 2024 sanctioning of New College of Florida for state-driven political interference, highlight the embedding of Palestine-related repression within a wider far-right programme targeting gender, race, and decolonial scholarship (AAUP 2025). These actions articulate a crucial point: that academic freedom is not a private right but a collective professional infrastructure that must be defended institutionally.

Parallel to Northern professional responses, Palestinian-led initiatives such as ISNAD, The National Campaign to Sustain Higher Education in Gaza developed by Taawon Welfare Association, provide a compelling model of counter-scholasticidal educational praxis (Taawon 2025). Amid the near-total destruction of Gaza’s higher education sector, ISNAD aims to sustain learning and professional formation through emergency scholarships supporting approximately 15,000 university students and staff. By underwriting remote teaching, tuition, equipment, and connectivity for institutions such as the Islamic University of Gaza, Al-Aqsa University, and Al-Azhar University, the initiative enacts the right to education under siege. This aligns with international human-rights frameworks emphasizing availability, accessibility, and adaptability even in conflict (Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1999, Article 13). ISNAD thus illustrates a form of institutional resistance that both restores educational continuity and sustains collective intellectual life, resonating with scholarship that understands Palestinian education as a site of psychosocial resilience, political continuity, and refusal in the face of genocidal violence.

This continuity is historically grounded. During the First Intifada (1987–1993), Israeli military closures of schools and universities catalysed a wide network of “popular education” initiatives organised by community committees, neighbourhood groups, teachers, and youth. Scholars such as Ellen Fleischmann (1990) and Yamila Hussein (2005) describe how Palestinians created decentralised forms of learning in homes, mosques, churches, and community spaces, combining academic study with agricultural work, first aid, political education, and cultural preservation. These practices resonate strongly with Freirean critical pedagogy (1970), where education became a process of reading and transforming the social world rather than reproducing occupation-approved curricula. At the same time, sociological analyses by Khattab and Yair (1995) illuminate how the uprising reconfigured teacher–student relations, elevating youth political agency and disrupting conventional hierarchies. Although producing long-term challenges around curriculum continuity and examinations, this shift foregrounded education as a collective, insurgent practice embedded in broader liberation movements.

Critical pedagogy, grounded in the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Henry Giroux, positions education as a transformative and emancipatory practice rather than a neutral or technocratic enterprise. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire 1970, 2000) remains foundational in asserting that naming oppression is the first step toward transformation. Through the act of conscientização, or critical consciousness, learners come to recognise and challenge systems of domination that shape their realities. In this way, Freire’s pedagogy invites an ethical responsibility to act against injustice and transform both the self and society. Building on Freire, hooks’ (1994) concept of engaged pedagogy frames teaching as an act of love, resistance, and healing, one that insists upon the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual integrity of both teacher and student. Similarly, Giroux (2011) calls for education to be understood as a form of “cultural work” imbued with moral clarity, emphasising the political urgency of pedagogy in resisting neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and coloniality.

The Palestinian concept of Sumud, steadfastness or perseverance, offers a vital extension of these traditions of critical pedagogy. Originating during the early years of Israeli occupation, Sumud has come to represent every day, non-violent resistance, rooted in maintaining presence, identity, and dignity in the face of dispossession (Shehadeh 1982). As Kabel (2024) argues, Sumud not only embodies a pedagogical framework for resistance but also foregrounds collective memory, survival, and the moral imperative to endure. It redefines education as a site of resistance and cultural preservation rather than assimilation or defeat. In this sense, Sumud resonates with decolonial pedagogies that centre relationality, autonomy, and cultural sovereignty. It also aligns with recent calls to reimagine the digital commons as a pedagogical space that sustains education for displaced and besieged communities in the wake of scholasticide (Scott et al. 2025). Within such frameworks, education becomes a form of critical hope (Zembylas 2017), enabling communities not simply to bounce back but to transform and construct new social realities amid destruction.

In the face of ongoing scholasticide, the deliberate destruction of educational infrastructure and intellectual life in Gaza, students and academics worldwide bear an ethical responsibility to resist silence and complicity. Strategies for resistance must move beyond statements of sympathy to actionable solidarity. Organising teach-ins, public lectures, and alternative learning spaces can create forums for critical dialogue and collective understanding (Giroux 2020; Shakir and Walton 2025). Academic writing, open letters, and publications also serve as vehicles of counter-hegemonic knowledge production, resisting the silencing of Palestinian narratives (Spiegel et al. 2024). The example of a “collective digital commons” (Scott et al. 2025) can enable Palestinian students to continue studying even when universities are bombed and educators are killed, transforming digital space into a form of Sumud.

Activism through marches, petitions, and cultural production similarly embodies engaged pedagogy in practice (hooks 1994). Embedding Palestine, settler colonialism, critical Zionism studies, and genocide studies within curricula challenges epistemic erasure and invites students to interrogate the complicity of institutions in global injustice (Salaita 2015). Adopting Gaza as a compass for research and teaching reorients academic inquiry toward moral accountability and solidarity (Govaerts 2025), foregrounding the question: If we do not stand with the oppressed, who will stand with us? This reframing situates the university as a space of ethical action, not neutral observation, a place where knowledge becomes both witness and resistance.

Institutions must also act with integrity by embedding anti-colonial and anti-repression principles within governance and practice. Universities have a moral obligation to protect staff and students who speak out against injustice through robust whistleblower protections and policy reforms that uphold academic freedom (Bhambra et al. 2018). This includes rejecting the adoption of external definitions, such as the IHRA definition of antisemitism, when used to weaponise censorship and suppress legitimate critique of Israeli state violence (BRISMES and ELSC 2023). Establishing solidarity networks across institutions and countries can amplify resistance, share resources, and provide mutual support for endangered scholars.

Institutions can also create and donate online educational resources to sustain learning for displaced students and those in Gaza (Oxford University 2024; Scott et al. 2025). Highlighting examples of good practice, such as academics facilitating remote learning for Palestinian students or training journalists to report ethically on Palestine, actioned by Professor Alison Phipps, University of Glasgow (Phipps et al. 2025). Such actions demonstrate how higher education can potentially operationalise solidarity. The key argument here is that education must transcend market-driven models of competitiveness and instrumentalisation to reclaim its role as a practice of freedom (Freire 1970; Giroux 2011). Universities must therefore reimagine themselves not as corporations but as communities of care, resistance, and moral courage.

The ongoing scholasticide in Gaza reveals that the suppression of knowledge is not an isolated event but part of a global architecture of repression. From Israel and Palestine to campuses worldwide, academic silencing through censorship, retaliation, and erasure, reflects intertwined systems of colonial power and capitalist control (Ahmed 2021; Hanieh et al. 2025; Santos 2014). To move forward, solidarity must evolve from performative gestures to structural change. This requires building transnational alliances among scholars, students, and activists that institutionalise protections for dissenting voices and endangered academics. Reclaiming universities as spaces of critical thought demands rejecting corporate neutrality and embracing the political nature of education as resistance.

Engaging in movements such as Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) offers a tangible means of enacting solidarity and accountability (Barghouti 2011). Scholars must also use their positions of privilege to challenge institutional silence and advocate for justice, exemplifying “anti-racist scholar activism” (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly 2021). As Miller (2025) reminds us, collective action, in a common enemy approach is the path toward dismantling the structures of oppression that bind us all. The struggle for Palestinian liberation is inseparable from global struggles against racism, patriarchy, and imperialism, a synthesis captured in Fannie Lou Hamer’s declaration in 1971: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free” (cited in Brooks and Houck 2010, p. 123) Through one fight, one struggle, and one love, education can once again become a force for collective emancipation and the reimagining of a more just world.

9. Conclusions: From Silence to Solidarity, from Pedagogy to Praxis

As Said (1994) instructs us:

No-one can speak up all the time on all the issues. But, I believe, there is a special duty to address the constituted and authorised powers of one’s own society, which are accountable to its citizenry, particularly when those powers are exercised in a manifestly disproportionate and immoral war, or in a deliberate program of discrimination, repression and collective cruelty.

(Said 1994, p. 98)

This article has demonstrated that what is often presented as neutrality in higher education is, in practice, an infrastructure of racialised governance that manages speech, regulates dissent, and polices the horizons of knowledge. The language of professionalism, objectivity, and civility functions as an administrative technology that protects institutional reputation while marginalising those who name and resist structural violence. Read alongside the devastation in Gaza, this enforced silence is not a benign absence but a political presence: an active process of epistemic control that mirrors, at a distance, the material destruction of intellectual life described as scholasticide. Palestine therefore works as both an urgent site of struggle and a diagnostic mirror, rendering visible the global repertoire through which states and institutions calibrate racial regimes, criminalise solidarity, and narrow the terms of legitimate inquiry.

Against this architecture, the article has argued for a reclamation of the university as a site of freedom, not corporate neutrality. Critical pedagogy, after Freire, hooks, and Giroux, and the Palestinian ethic of Sumud offer a counter-infrastructure for teaching and learning that centres dignity, collective memory, and transformative action. Such a project demands more than symbolic gestures: it requires concrete protections for academic freedom; institutional refusal of weaponised definitions that chill debate; material support for displaced learners and endangered scholars; and curricular commitments that treat Palestine, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism as core, not peripheral, to understanding our world.

The responsibility is institutional as much as individual. Universities must embed whistleblower and anti-retaliation safeguards; end the punitive outsourcing of protest management to courts and police; and align investment, procurement, and partnerships with human rights commitments, up to and including divestment where complicity is evidenced. They should fund secure digital commons and cross-border classrooms that keep study alive under siege; recognise the emotional and political labour of minoritised staff and students; and reform hiring, promotion, and research evaluation to value public scholarship and movement-building work. These are not add-ons to business as usual; they are conditions for any credible claim to educational purpose.

Finally, the horizon here is collective, not solitary. The same forces that attempt to erase Palestinian intellectual life also underwrite the suppression of anti-racist, feminist, decolonial, and labour struggles elsewhere. Building transnational solidarities, within and beyond the academy, means refusing the fragmentation of causes and the managerial domestication of critique. It means converting witness into action: organising, teaching, publishing, divesting, protecting one another, and insisting that knowledge serve liberation rather than domination. Join the conversation. Raise your voice. Refuse the silence. Because education, if it means anything at all, must be a practice of freedom.