It enrages me everytime it dawns on me that there is no graduating class in Gaza this year.
How maddening it is to think that just last summer I watched as Al-Shaima Akram celebrated received the news that she got the highest score in all of Palestine in her high school examination, not knowing that come October, Israel will kill her and her family and all the joy that was left.
No tawjihi celebration videos will come out of Gaza this year and that is devastating.
Since October, Israel had destroyed every university in Gaza and destroyed 80% of schools, killing hundreds of teachers and professor and thousands of students in its deliberate attempt to destroy Gaza’s education system along with everything else.
In the words of Gazan poet Khaled Juma “the school year that never started in Gaza has come to an end”. No last day of school bells, no kids celebrating the last day of school. All these joyful sounds have been drowned out by the sounds of bombs. No deadline extension requests for final projects, missiles had their final say.
No graduation ceremonies when parents are instead burying their children. No plans are made for the summer either, when everyone is busy counting the days and the dead.
I say this with a lot of frustration because you cannot mistake how deliberate this is, knowing how important education is for Palestinians. It’s the one thing we know that even if Israel tries to kill us off, you cannot kill our ideas.
This is why Palestinians in Gaza have opened temporary schools and got innovative with prioritising education while trying to survive, like Noor’s moving school initiative and many many makeshift schools that have been set up in displacement camps.
Afterall, try as you might but you cannot defeat a people whose graduate students are defending their thesis in displacement tents during genocide.