Over 80% of the schools in in Gaza have
been reduced to rubble—libraries, archives, publishing houses, and cultural
centers . . . and centuries-old manuscripts in the Great Omari Mosque have been
completely destroyed.
By Fareed Khan
A version of this can be found on Substack.
In his 1980 book, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera wrote, “The first step in liquidating a people … is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, and its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.”
This chilling observation, drawn from the foundational logic of colonial erasure, precisely describes the century-long project of Zionism.
Founded in the late 19th century as a nationalist political ideology by ethnic European intellectuals like Theodor Herzl, who framed it explicitly as a secular political ideology rather than a religious imperative. Zionism sought to establish a Jewish state in historic Palestine through the systematic displacement of its indigenous inhabitants—Palestinian Muslims and Christians—and the erasure of their culture and history.
Far from an organic expression of Judaism, Zionism hijacked Jewish identity to pursue a supremacist agenda of demographic transformation and cultural obliteration. From its inception, the movement’s followers have pursued the goal of emptying Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants, and the erasure of Palestinian memory, history, and presence, employing mass violence, archival destruction, geographic renaming, and environmental camouflage as core tactics. This pattern, evident in the 1948 Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) and repeated in subsequent wars and the ongoing Gaza genocide, reveals Zionism not as a liberation movement but as a cancer on humanity, intent on annihilating a people by first annihilating their collective identity.
Zionism emerged not from ancient religious longing but from 19th-century European nationalist fervour. Herzl, a secular Austro-Hungarian journalist, articulated in his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat a political program for Jewish colonization of Palestine, viewing it as a “new society” to be built by European settlers while sidelining or removing the Palestinian majority. Early Zionist congresses, beginning in Basel in 1897, emphasized “transfer” of the indigenous population as a practical necessity, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing that became explicit policy.
This was no theological “return” of Jews to the Holy Land, where Jews had lived in peace with Muslims and Christians for centuries. It was a colonial enterprise by European Ashkenazi elites who claimed Jewish heritage while rejecting the Jewish religion. Prominent Jewish thinkers recognized this danger early. Albert Einstein, a vocal critic of Zionism, repeatedly rejected the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. In 1938, he declared his preference for “reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state,” warning that such a state would inflict “inner damage” on Judaism through “narrow nationalism.”
Jewish-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, similarly condemned Zionism’s embrace of exclusionary sovereignty. In her essays from the 1940s, she advocated a bi-national framework preserving Palestinian rights and decried the movement’s drift toward militarism and domination. Their stance culminated in a public letter published in The New York Times on December 4, 1948—signed by Einstein, Arendt, and 26 other prominent Jewish intellectuals—denouncing the “Freedom Party” (Herut) led by Menachem Begin as “closely akin to the Nazi and Fascist parties” of Europe for its terrorist methods and chauvinism. The letter warned that Begin’s vision foreshadowed a society built on oppression and violence, exposing the fascist undercurrents within Zionist factions even as Israel was being consolidated.
These warnings proved prophetic. The establishment of Israel in 1948 was founded on mass murder and ethnic cleansing—the Nakba in which Zionist terrorist militias, operating under Plan Dalet, systematically depopulated over 500 Palestinian villages and urban neighborhoods. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed in massacres such as Deir Yassin, where Irgun and Lehi terrorist gangs slaughtered hundreds of civilians, including women and children, as a deliberate terror tactic to induce flight. By war’s end, over 750,000 Palestinians—more than half the indigenous population—had been expelled or fled in terror, their homes looted and lands seized. To conceal these crimes, Zionist forces razed villages to the ground and planted forests over the ruins through the Jewish National Fund (JNF). Pine trees, alien to the Palestinian landscape, now blanket sites like those of Lubya (renamed Lavi) and hundreds of others, transforming sites of life into recreational parks that erased visual evidence of Palestinian existence. This planting of forests was not environmental stewardship but deliberate camouflage—a “greenwashing” of genocide, as documented in Israeli archives and eyewitness accounts.
Geographic erasure complemented physical destruction. Zionist authorities launched a comprehensive renaming campaign by assigning Hebrew names to thousands of Arab place names—villages, hills, rivers—to fabricate a narrative of continuous Jewish presence while severing Palestinian ties to the land. The Palestinian village of Asqalan became Ashkelon, and countless others followed suit under a 1949 Israeli government committee. This linguistic colonization mirrored the destruction of archives and libraries. In the “Great Book Robbery” of 1948-1949, Israeli librarians and soldiers systematically looted over 70,000 books, manuscripts, and newspapers from Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, and elsewhere, transferring them to the National Library or destroying them. Private collections documenting centuries of Palestinian culture—poetry, legal records, family histories—were pillaged or vanished, ensuring that future generations of Palestinians would inherit a blank slate.
This erasure was not confined to 1948. Israel instigated multiple wars to expand territory or consolidate demographic control. The 1956 Suez Crisis saw Israel invade Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in coordination with Britain and France, seizing Gaza and the Sinai before international pressure forced withdrawal, demonstrating Zionist willingness to launch aggressive campaigns against Israel’s Arab neighbours. In 1967, Israel was the aggressor in the Six-Day War, launching a surprise aerial assault that destroyed Egypt’s air force and seized the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and again displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. These conflicts, framed by Israel as “defensive”, were rooted in an expansionist doctrine, enabling further settlement and land expropriation while perpetuating the Palestinian refugee crisis that began with Israel’s creation in 1948. Subsequent invasions, including Lebanon in 1982, followed the pattern of pre-emptive aggression to neutralize resistance and secure the vision of a “Greater Israel.”
The Gaza genocide, unfolding with ferocious intensity since October 2023 as a “defensive” operation against Hamas, represents the culmination of this century-old strategy. Israeli forces have replicated the Nakba playbook on a compressed scale and with greater brutality, targeting not only lives but the infrastructure of memory and knowledge. All twelve universities in Gaza have been destroyed, their collection of knowledge obliterated. In addition, over 80% of the schools in in Gaza—over 500 institutions—have been reduced to rubble. Libraries, archives, publishing houses, and cultural centres lie in ruins—the Gaza Public Library, the Edward Said Library, and centuries-old manuscripts in the Great Omari Mosque have been completely destroyed. Mosques and churches, repositories of communal history, have been bombed, including the 7th-century Omari Mosque with its 13th-century library.
This “scholasticide” also extends to human carriers of knowledge with at least 95 university professors, 261 teachers, and thousands of students—many of them children—have been killed, with journalists and story tellers systematically targeted by Israel. According to Euromed Human Rights Monitor, as of April 19th over 21,400 Palestinian children have been killed, with one study calculating that more than 300,000 children have been killed since October 2023. This ensures that future generations can’t reclaim or transmit their heritage, with UN experts and scholars noting this is not collateral damage but intentional annihilation of the fabric of Palestinian society.
Such actions align with the crime of genocide as defined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term in 1944. Lemkin described genocide as a “coordinated plan” to destroy a group’s “essential foundations of life”—not only through mass killing but by eradicating culture, language, religion, and national feelings so the group “withers and dies like plants that have suffered a blight.”
While the UN Genocide Convention emphasizes physical destruction, experts including the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and human rights organizations have applied this broader lens to Palestine, arguing that cultural erasure—destroying educational and religious sites, preventing knowledge transmission, and killing intellectuals—constitutes genocidal intent. In Gaza, the scale of scholasticide and heritage destruction, coupled with statements from Israeli officials invoking biblical erasure, fulfills Lemkin’s criteria with the intent to erase Palestinians and their identity.
Zionism’s legacy is thus one of calculated dehumanization and the erasure of Palestinian existence in all its forms. By liquidating Palestinian memory—through forests over villages, Hebrew names on maps, looted archives, and bombed universities—it has advanced halfway to total liquidation of the people. Yet Palestinian resilience persists, a testament to the ideology’s ultimate failure and the determination of Palestinians not to surrender to Zionist violence.
For more than a century, the supremacist project of Zionism has inflicted immeasurable suffering, hijacking Jewish ethics in service of colonial violence. Recognizing this political ideology for what it is—a cancer demanding confrontation—is essential to any just future for the region and humanity. Only by restoring Palestinian history, culture, and right of return, and opposing the Zionist ideology wherever it exists, can the cycle of erasure end and justice for the Palestinian people be achieved.
© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
This chilling observation, drawn from the foundational logic of colonial erasure, precisely describes the century-long project of Zionism.
Founded in the late 19th century as a nationalist political ideology by ethnic European intellectuals like Theodor Herzl, who framed it explicitly as a secular political ideology rather than a religious imperative. Zionism sought to establish a Jewish state in historic Palestine through the systematic displacement of its indigenous inhabitants—Palestinian Muslims and Christians—and the erasure of their culture and history.
Far from an organic expression of Judaism, Zionism hijacked Jewish identity to pursue a supremacist agenda of demographic transformation and cultural obliteration. From its inception, the movement’s followers have pursued the goal of emptying Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants, and the erasure of Palestinian memory, history, and presence, employing mass violence, archival destruction, geographic renaming, and environmental camouflage as core tactics. This pattern, evident in the 1948 Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) and repeated in subsequent wars and the ongoing Gaza genocide, reveals Zionism not as a liberation movement but as a cancer on humanity, intent on annihilating a people by first annihilating their collective identity.
Zionism emerged not from ancient religious longing but from 19th-century European nationalist fervour. Herzl, a secular Austro-Hungarian journalist, articulated in his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat a political program for Jewish colonization of Palestine, viewing it as a “new society” to be built by European settlers while sidelining or removing the Palestinian majority. Early Zionist congresses, beginning in Basel in 1897, emphasized “transfer” of the indigenous population as a practical necessity, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing that became explicit policy.
This was no theological “return” of Jews to the Holy Land, where Jews had lived in peace with Muslims and Christians for centuries. It was a colonial enterprise by European Ashkenazi elites who claimed Jewish heritage while rejecting the Jewish religion. Prominent Jewish thinkers recognized this danger early. Albert Einstein, a vocal critic of Zionism, repeatedly rejected the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. In 1938, he declared his preference for “reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state,” warning that such a state would inflict “inner damage” on Judaism through “narrow nationalism.”
Jewish-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, similarly condemned Zionism’s embrace of exclusionary sovereignty. In her essays from the 1940s, she advocated a bi-national framework preserving Palestinian rights and decried the movement’s drift toward militarism and domination. Their stance culminated in a public letter published in The New York Times on December 4, 1948—signed by Einstein, Arendt, and 26 other prominent Jewish intellectuals—denouncing the “Freedom Party” (Herut) led by Menachem Begin as “closely akin to the Nazi and Fascist parties” of Europe for its terrorist methods and chauvinism. The letter warned that Begin’s vision foreshadowed a society built on oppression and violence, exposing the fascist undercurrents within Zionist factions even as Israel was being consolidated.
These warnings proved prophetic. The establishment of Israel in 1948 was founded on mass murder and ethnic cleansing—the Nakba in which Zionist terrorist militias, operating under Plan Dalet, systematically depopulated over 500 Palestinian villages and urban neighborhoods. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed in massacres such as Deir Yassin, where Irgun and Lehi terrorist gangs slaughtered hundreds of civilians, including women and children, as a deliberate terror tactic to induce flight. By war’s end, over 750,000 Palestinians—more than half the indigenous population—had been expelled or fled in terror, their homes looted and lands seized. To conceal these crimes, Zionist forces razed villages to the ground and planted forests over the ruins through the Jewish National Fund (JNF). Pine trees, alien to the Palestinian landscape, now blanket sites like those of Lubya (renamed Lavi) and hundreds of others, transforming sites of life into recreational parks that erased visual evidence of Palestinian existence. This planting of forests was not environmental stewardship but deliberate camouflage—a “greenwashing” of genocide, as documented in Israeli archives and eyewitness accounts.
Geographic erasure complemented physical destruction. Zionist authorities launched a comprehensive renaming campaign by assigning Hebrew names to thousands of Arab place names—villages, hills, rivers—to fabricate a narrative of continuous Jewish presence while severing Palestinian ties to the land. The Palestinian village of Asqalan became Ashkelon, and countless others followed suit under a 1949 Israeli government committee. This linguistic colonization mirrored the destruction of archives and libraries. In the “Great Book Robbery” of 1948-1949, Israeli librarians and soldiers systematically looted over 70,000 books, manuscripts, and newspapers from Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, and elsewhere, transferring them to the National Library or destroying them. Private collections documenting centuries of Palestinian culture—poetry, legal records, family histories—were pillaged or vanished, ensuring that future generations of Palestinians would inherit a blank slate.
This erasure was not confined to 1948. Israel instigated multiple wars to expand territory or consolidate demographic control. The 1956 Suez Crisis saw Israel invade Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in coordination with Britain and France, seizing Gaza and the Sinai before international pressure forced withdrawal, demonstrating Zionist willingness to launch aggressive campaigns against Israel’s Arab neighbours. In 1967, Israel was the aggressor in the Six-Day War, launching a surprise aerial assault that destroyed Egypt’s air force and seized the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and again displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. These conflicts, framed by Israel as “defensive”, were rooted in an expansionist doctrine, enabling further settlement and land expropriation while perpetuating the Palestinian refugee crisis that began with Israel’s creation in 1948. Subsequent invasions, including Lebanon in 1982, followed the pattern of pre-emptive aggression to neutralize resistance and secure the vision of a “Greater Israel.”
The Gaza genocide, unfolding with ferocious intensity since October 2023 as a “defensive” operation against Hamas, represents the culmination of this century-old strategy. Israeli forces have replicated the Nakba playbook on a compressed scale and with greater brutality, targeting not only lives but the infrastructure of memory and knowledge. All twelve universities in Gaza have been destroyed, their collection of knowledge obliterated. In addition, over 80% of the schools in in Gaza—over 500 institutions—have been reduced to rubble. Libraries, archives, publishing houses, and cultural centres lie in ruins—the Gaza Public Library, the Edward Said Library, and centuries-old manuscripts in the Great Omari Mosque have been completely destroyed. Mosques and churches, repositories of communal history, have been bombed, including the 7th-century Omari Mosque with its 13th-century library.
This “scholasticide” also extends to human carriers of knowledge with at least 95 university professors, 261 teachers, and thousands of students—many of them children—have been killed, with journalists and story tellers systematically targeted by Israel. According to Euromed Human Rights Monitor, as of April 19th over 21,400 Palestinian children have been killed, with one study calculating that more than 300,000 children have been killed since October 2023. This ensures that future generations can’t reclaim or transmit their heritage, with UN experts and scholars noting this is not collateral damage but intentional annihilation of the fabric of Palestinian society.
Such actions align with the crime of genocide as defined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term in 1944. Lemkin described genocide as a “coordinated plan” to destroy a group’s “essential foundations of life”—not only through mass killing but by eradicating culture, language, religion, and national feelings so the group “withers and dies like plants that have suffered a blight.”
While the UN Genocide Convention emphasizes physical destruction, experts including the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and human rights organizations have applied this broader lens to Palestine, arguing that cultural erasure—destroying educational and religious sites, preventing knowledge transmission, and killing intellectuals—constitutes genocidal intent. In Gaza, the scale of scholasticide and heritage destruction, coupled with statements from Israeli officials invoking biblical erasure, fulfills Lemkin’s criteria with the intent to erase Palestinians and their identity.
Zionism’s legacy is thus one of calculated dehumanization and the erasure of Palestinian existence in all its forms. By liquidating Palestinian memory—through forests over villages, Hebrew names on maps, looted archives, and bombed universities—it has advanced halfway to total liquidation of the people. Yet Palestinian resilience persists, a testament to the ideology’s ultimate failure and the determination of Palestinians not to surrender to Zionist violence.
For more than a century, the supremacist project of Zionism has inflicted immeasurable suffering, hijacking Jewish ethics in service of colonial violence. Recognizing this political ideology for what it is—a cancer demanding confrontation—is essential to any just future for the region and humanity. Only by restoring Palestinian history, culture, and right of return, and opposing the Zionist ideology wherever it exists, can the cycle of erasure end and justice for the Palestinian people be achieved.
© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment