Victoria Brittain, former Associate Foreign Editor of the Guardian

 

 

To honour the lives of heroic, professional fellow journalists Anas Al-Sharif, Mohanned Qraeqaa, Ibrahim Zaher, Moanem Alium, Mohammed Noufal and Mohammed El-Khalif—targeted, assassinated and defamed by Israeli forces in Gaza on August 10—I want to share about another cohort of a dozen astounding professionals in Gaza who I was privileged to spend two hours listening to on Zoom four days earlier.

These are academics from various parts of Gaza, where all twelve universities have been destroyed. Each of them has been displaced multiple times. Like the 238 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel over the past 22 months, these academics live lives of constant disciplined service to their community, despite the unspeakable loss, grief, fear and deprivation of every day.

Organised by ActforPal, the afternoon was a miracle of planning, ingenuity and patience. From tents, shelters and the street, all managed to get internet connection, with excellent translation available in English, Arabic, Spanish and French by volunteers from Jordan, Tunisia and Germany. This was a webinar unlike any other. Everyone should see it. Rarely is humanity seen so clearly.

Common experience and purpose brought the audience into what the first speaker, independent researcher Dr Ibrahim M. Alsemeiri, called “a place of deep struggle” with noise, dust, counting the hours of electricity, rare and expensive internet and his own loss of 25 kilograms, but where “writing continues” regardless and six peer-reviewed articles have appeared. “Please, see me and the others as scholars and scientists, not just survivors,” he continued, because “this is an intellectual war; we can call it ‘mindcide’.” Dr Ahmed Jeninah, Head of the English Department at Al-Aqsa University, spoke in total agreement.

Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Al-Azhar University, Dr Mohamed Zughbur, then told us of the completely destroyed labs, the near-destroyed hospitals and the loss of colleagues and families—but also the support of academics in Malaysia and Pakistan whence hundreds of Gazan students, with extreme difficulty, are receiving online instruction. Independent researcher and academic Dr Mahmoud al Sheki thanked everyone for attending the webinar, saying, “I greet you with dignity; this has a great effect on us; we feel affection for you.” He emphasised, “We ask only for the right of teaching and learning.” Dr Hussein Sad, a lecturer at Al-Quds Open University, spoke of the systematic “starvation of our minds and spirits too,” regretting that he can not continue his research. He asked the audience, “Help us to write our voice.”

Dr Samaher Al-Khazinder, now a volunteer lecturer at local universities in Gaza, spoke of being “a novelist, a journalist and student researcher, before.” Her family was forced to disperse to the south after hundreds of neighbours were killed. “Then my husband’s family was killed and our hearts were broken with the truce being broken,” she described. “Now I spend all my time on my thesis with Dr Wesam [Amr],” Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Languages at Gaza University who is now a Council for At-Risk Academics fellow at Cambridge University in the UK and the organiser of this webinar. Dr Al-Khazinder continued, “Why do we do that? It’s the example to my daughter and son, to prove Israel’s war will never de-civilize us.”

She spoke of Gaza’s martyred iconic poet, scholar and activist Dr Refaat Alareer, the prominent professor of English Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza who was threatened by Israeli military phone calls, before being targeted and assassinated by an Israeli airstrike on 6 December 2023 alongside his brother, sister and four nephews. “Dr Reefat is still there, alive in my heart.” His poem, “If I must die”, is known across the world and his book with the same title has been shortlisted for this year’s Palestine Book Awards. Lubna Ahmed, a poet who was a student of Dr Al Alareer, read a poem she had written, demonstrating how the work of these academics echoes across generations.

Dr Amr’s opening words were for the “need for action as well as solidarity,” as “this is a war on knowledge and memory, also in the West Bank and Jerusalem, [with more than] 20 months of no higher education, after decades of occupation, siege [and] now starvation. Our colleagues are facing erasure [but] they resist. The future is here today in every action and every voice lifted.”

International university leadership and politicians are not powerless to end this genocide. If they listened to these outstanding scholars and scientists, they would be shamed into action.