Palestinians’ commitment to academia has always remained extraordinary. Higher education has long been understood as both a path to collective leadership and a lifeline to social mobility, especially for refugees living in host countries with lower socioeconomic levels and civil rights. This helps explain why both Palestine and Jordan — the latter having a population of which over half is estimated to be of Palestinian origin due to displacement during the Nakba — report the highest literacy rates in the Arab world and the wider region.
Nevertheless, we should also be honest: scholarly life in Gaza and the West Bank was not flourishing before the genocide began. It was, rather, surviving. The history of Palestinian academia is one of building institutions under circumstances in which institutions are not meant to exist. Under the British Mandate, despite Palestinians making up the overwhelming majority of the population, the only universities established were Jewish institutions. Palestinians had to form their scholarly community by studying abroad, mainly in Cairo and Damascus.
After the Nakba of 1948, Palestinians found themselves dispossessed, fragmented, and later subjected to military occupation after the Naksa in 1967. A national university did not exist until 1972. From that point on, universities in the occupied territories endured chronic underinvestment, closures, raids, and instability. Under such conditions, scientific research was never given the oxygen it needed. Funding was scarce, infrastructure weak, mobility restricted. This meant that certain fields, especially experimental and basic sciences, which require stable labs, equipment, and collaboration, struggled to take root. Where Palestinian scholarship flourished, it often did so in humanities, medicine, and public health, supported by international partnerships that helped circumvent the blockade on resources.
Yet despite the constraints, the attachment to education never…
Auteur: Ibrahem Hanafi
