Today's academic nonsense: Claiming Israel had a policy to attack Aran education since 1948 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, December 18, 2025

Today's academic nonsense: Claiming Israel had a policy to attack Aran education since 1948

Here's an abstract of a brand new paper in Globalisation, Societies and Education by Jo Kelcey of American University of Beirut:

A tragedy foretold? The necropolitical foundations of the Gaza scholasticide
Jo Kelcey
Published online: 15 Dec 2025
Cite this article https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2025.2598276

ABSTRACT
This article contextualises the scholasticide in Gaza (2023 – ) within the longer history of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian education. Using primary and secondary historical sources, it argues that the near total destruction of Gaza’s education sector is the latest iteration of a longstanding repertoire of Israeli colonial violence enacted on Palestinian education since 1948. Through the lens of necropolitics, the article identifies how this treatment coalesces around three overarching logics: indigenous erasure, political containment and the normalisation of violence. In this way, the article contributes to broader debates regarding the relationship between education and conflict and provides a framework to understand how neo/colonialism operates in and through education.

There is a lot to unpack here. You can see how social sciences take previously defined concepts that may or may not even exist and apply them willy-nilly to Israel, by citing others who did it first and pretending that they are proven fact - hence, "scholasticide" (purposeful destruction of education) and "necropolitics" (a state asserting control over who lives and who dies.)

But it is also a shining example of how anyone can cherry pick whatever evidence they want and ignore the rest. The footnotes mention a handful of cases of Israel supposedly attacking schools, including in Lebanon - no context is given as to whether they were terror sites.

But what is not said is where the lies hide.

Before 1948, Arabs in Palestine were largely illiterate. Literacy rates tripled under Israeli rule as of the 1980s, no doubt they are much higher now.

Before 1967, there was not one university in the West Bank or Gaza. Not one. Under Israel's "scholasticide," 11 universities were opened as of 2005.

Before 1967, only a few hundred Palestinians went to colleges - after Israeli control, that number reached tens of thousands.

We have shown that Israel-haters are epistemologically equivalent to conspiracy theorists, and their explanations for these counterexamples show this clearly. They say that the Palestinians flocked to higher education in spite of Israeli restrictions. If Israeli "scholasticide" explains both why universities were built under Israeli control (and not under Egyptian/Jordanian control) but it also explains why Israel attacked universities in Gaza or Lebanon, then it doesn't explain anything.

It is an unfalsifiable assertion - there is literally nothing Israel could do to make the haters believe anything else.

Which makes this kind of research worse than useless. It is propaganda dressed in academic garb, which describes nearly all of the papers about Israel in many journals.