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Education Under Occupation: University Closures, Permit Denials, and Student Lives

The semester had barely begun when soldiers arrived at Birzeit University in the spring of 1988. They handed administrators a military closure order — one of dozens issued against Palestinian universities during the First Intifada — and the campus emptied. Students who had scraped together tuition fees, who had traveled from villages across the West Bank, found themselves locked out. Some waited weeks. Some waited months. The libraries were sealed. The labs went dark.

That moment is not an isolated footnote. It is a thread in a decades-long pattern that Palestinian scholars and human rights researchers have come to call scholasticide — the systematic destruction of a people’s educational infrastructure. Oxford political theorist Karma Nabulsi, writing on Palestinian civil rights, used the term to describe Israeli military policy toward Palestinian learning institutions, arguing that education has been targeted not incidentally but structurally, as part of the management of occupation itself.

A History of Closures: Birzeit, An-Najah, and Hebron Polytechnic

Palestinian universities in the West Bank were founded largely in the 1970s, many growing out of community colleges precisely because Israel had not permitted new higher-education institutions under its military administration. Birzeit University — the oldest and most internationally prominent — received its university charter in 1975. It was closed by Israeli military order for a cumulative period of more than eight years between 1979 and 1992, according to the university’s own institutional records and reporting by human rights organizations of that era. During the First Intifada alone (1987–1993), Birzeit was shuttered continuously for roughly four years.

An-Najah National University in Nablus and Hebron Polytechnic University faced similar treatment. Military Order 854, issued in 1980, placed all Palestinian educational institutions in the West Bank under the authority of the Israeli Civil Administration, requiring licenses for courses, textbooks, and visiting faculty. Books deemed politically objectionable were confiscated. Foreign academics were denied entry. The UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices documented recurring closures of Palestinian universities throughout the 1980s in its annual reports to the General Assembly, noting the cumulative harm to students’ academic continuity.

Physical raids have accompanied the administrative pressure. Israeli forces have entered Birzeit’s campus on multiple occasions — most recently in documented incidents during the post-Oslo period — arresting student council members and confiscating materials. The student council at Birzeit, one of the oldest elected student bodies in the Arab world, has been a repeated target. B’Tselem and Al-Haq have documented arrests of student activists on campuses across the West Bank, many held under administrative detention without charge or trial.

Gaza’s Students: Trapped Between Siege and Bureaucracy

If the West Bank tells a story of intermittent disruption, Gaza tells one of near-total severance. Since the imposition of the blockade in 2007, Gazan students admitted to universities in the West Bank — including Birzeit, An-Najah, and Bethlehem University — have faced an almost insurmountable barrier: the Israeli-controlled permit system governing movement out of the Gaza Strip.

Gisha — the Israeli legal center for freedom of movement — has documented this systematically. In its reports covering the 2010s, Gisha found that the vast majority of Gazan students applying for permits to study at West Bank institutions were denied, delayed beyond the start of the academic year, or simply received no response. Israel’s stated security rationale was rarely elaborated in individual cases. The result was that students who had won competitive places at West Bank universities — sometimes on scholarship — could not reach their campuses.

UNCTAD’s 2020 report on the Palestinian economy noted that Gaza’s isolation has produced a hollowing-out of human capital accumulation, with educational attainment increasingly disconnected from economic opportunity. OCHA oPt has repeatedly flagged the blockade’s impact on civilian life, including education, in its humanitarian snapshots of the Gaza Strip. UNRWA, which operates schools serving hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugee children in Gaza, has documented how successive military operations have destroyed school buildings, displaced student populations, and interrupted entire academic years.

The scale of destruction since October 2023 has compounded all of this catastrophically. UNESCO reported in 2024 that virtually every university building in Gaza had sustained damage or been destroyed, representing an educational catastrophe without precedent in the modern history of the territory.

The Permit Architecture: Movement as an Academic Obstacle

The permit system that governs Palestinian movement between Gaza and the West Bank, and within the West Bank itself, operates as a structural obstacle to academic life that rarely makes headlines but shapes daily educational reality. West Bank students traveling to universities in other governorates navigate checkpoints, settler road restrictions, and the physical fragmentation documented extensively by OCHA oPt’s closure mapping. A student from Hebron attending a seminar in Ramallah may cross two or three checkpoints. A student from a village near Jenin may find a road closed without warning.

For international academics wishing to teach in the West Bank, Israeli entry policy has long functioned as a filter. Birzeit University has publicly documented cases of foreign faculty and guest lecturers denied entry at Ben Gurion Airport or the Allenby Bridge crossing, their academic visits terminated before they began. The campus community has, over decades, improvised — teaching via video link before it was common, hosting scholars in Jordan who could not enter the Palestinian territories.

The right to education is codified in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Israel is a party. The Fourth Geneva Convention, governing occupying powers, prohibits measures that harm the civilian population’s access to basic rights. UN human rights mechanisms, including the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, have cited Israeli practices in the occupied territories as incompatible with these obligations.

Scholasticide as Policy: What the Evidence Shows

The word scholasticide carries weight precisely because it insists on intentionality. Karma Nabulsi’s use of the concept frames the evidence not as a series of unconnected security decisions but as a coherent effect — the degradation of a society’s capacity to reproduce itself intellectually, professionally, and culturally across generations.

Scholars including Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, 2020) and Noura Erakat (Justice for Some, 2019) have situated the targeting of educational institutions within the broader project of controlling Palestinian civil and political life. The data — decades of closure orders, permit denials logged by Gisha, arrests of student leaders documented by B’Tselem and Al-Haq, destruction of university infrastructure recorded by UNESCO — sustains that framing without requiring inference.

Palestinian students have, against this, maintained some of the highest tertiary enrollment rates in the Arab world, a fact the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics has documented across multiple census periods. That persistence is its own form of testimony. But persistence against structural obstruction is not the same as access — and the gap between the two is where occupation, for millions of Palestinians, is most quietly felt.

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