The young Senegalese who will return to middle and high schools next week should all have more than a thought for the students in Gaza who are already condemned to live a second blank year. There were around 625,000 of them before the attacks on their territory began and nearly 15,000 of them have already died in Israeli bombings (along with nearly 400 school staff), tens of thousands more carry a disability, physical or mental, and those who survived missiles, injuries, hunger, thirst, epidemics (but in what condition are they?) will not return to their classes anytime soon. Firstly because no part of Gaza is safe from bombings, and above all because there is no longer any school or university infrastructure worthy of the name. According to estimates by United Nations experts, 85% of its educational infrastructure was systematically destroyed, university buildings which had miraculously escaped the bombings were dynamited by the Israeli army, along with their equipment, including their libraries, laboratories and even museums. Israel did not spare the school premises which had been transformed into refugee accommodation centers, under the protection of international institutions, and we still remember the bombing, on August 10 at dawn (the chosen time n was not chosen at random), from the Al Taba’een school, one of the biggest massacres carried out in the territory since it would have left 90 dead. The explanations provided by the Israeli army, which boasts of carrying out well-targeted surgical operations, to justify this destruction are not convincing to anyone since this bombing targeted an establishment located in an area under United Nations protection and the deaths were civilians, mainly women and children. In any case, Israeli military strategy pays little attention to what is called collateral damage and if to kill a single member of Hamas or Hezbollah, it is necessary to destroy an entire building, raze a mosque, crush women under the rubble and children, who are simple victims of the conflict, the IDF will not hesitate to drop its bombs.
Israel is the only country in the world to “ to use school for military purposes “, and the accusation is made by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which has kept the populations of Gaza at arm’s length for decades. It is a position of principle as shown by its refusal to sign, in 2015, a declaration initiated by Norway, approved by UNESCO and the vast majority of UN member countries on “ school security in times of war. »
The annihilation of Gaza’s school and university infrastructure is therefore not a simple accident of war. It is even so systematic and so methodically conducted that UN experts have deemed it reasonable to “ wonder if it doesn’t existon the part of Israel, an intentional effort to completely destroy the Palestinian education system ! » What is it called when all the youth of a country are voluntarily deprived of places of education and culture, that they receive no intellectual nourishment, that they are left abandoned and languishing between fear and boredom in temporary shelters where she is forced to cover her ears so as not to hear the sound of bombs? This now has a name, it is called a scholastic and experts from the Human Rights Council have estimated that Israel is using it in Gaza.
But the school is not, far from it, the only target of the bombings which have continued night and day in Gaza for almost a year. In reality, all the infrastructures of the small territory were destroyed, starting with the sanitary and sanitation system, the distribution of water and electricity. Even more serious, because these are things from which we cannot recover, the Israeli government and especially its very influential extremist wing, now have the objective of “de-Arabizing” all of Palestine, and not only of pushing its indigenous inhabitants to flight and exile. They want to erase all traces of the Palestinian past, as Narendra Modi is trying to do in India for Muslim populations. All Palestinian heritage is looted and in Gaza the archives containing the civil status of the population have been destroyed, making Gazans men and women who have lost their bearings, who are unable to prove their identity, to decline. their genealogy, even their past, as if their time on earth had been blurred, as if they only existed in their memory. This vacuum cleaning goes further, the very places where their ancestors lived are gradually disfigured and this is how their olive groves, some of which are more than a century old, are gradually razed and replaced by plantations of conifers, with the sole aim of making unrecognizable the landscape that their ancestors had left their mark over the centuries.
This revisionism of historical and natural realities also now has a name: it is called a culturocide !
So, schoolchildren and students in Senegal, this Monday, October 7, the day of the start of the school year, do not fail to express your support for the students and college students in Gaza who are victims of scholasticide…
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