War, higher education and development: the experience for educationalists at Gaza’s universities

The 2014 Israeli war on the Gaza Strip was described, as the ‘longest’ and ‘most violent’, compared to previous wars since 2008. This paper reports on this war experiences for educationalists (academic staff and students) at two of Gaza’s universities. It draws on 36 in-depth semi-structured interviews with educationalists in the Gaza Strip, which I conducted via Skype and mobile/phones from the UK, for my PhD research at the University of Cambridge. Theoretically, the inductive study uses insights from Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Bourdieu’s work on symbolic violence, retrospectively. Findings from this research show the impact of the war on Gaza’s educationalists has varied between vulnerability and resilience. The memories of loss, fear, and dehumanization continued to affect educationalists, even after the war came to halt. Some of Gaza’s universities buildings, and facilities were also damaged. Consequently, Gaza’s universities found themselves in a dilemma on how to manage immediate needs, with developmental prospects. This paper documents the history of Gaza’s universities, enhancing our sociological understanding of the experiences of higher education in the Gaza Strip, and the challenges for its development. The research widens the geographical scope of research on conflict, and education, by including the experiences of educationalists in the occupied and besieged context of Gaza, which is significantly under-researched. Insights from this research could be useful to inform the process of reconstruction of higher education in the Gaza Strip, after Israel’s ongoing war on the Gaza Strip, since 7th October 2023 comes to end.