Wednesday, December 17, 2025, 7 pm Palestine time
Panelists:
- Sherene Seikaly, Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara
- Jehad Abu-Miri, undergraduate student at the Islamic University of Gaza
- Amani Al-Mqdama, Head of the International Relations Department at the Islamic University of Gaza
Title: Confronting Scholasticide
Abstract: A prominent aspect of the genocide that has unfolded in the Gaza Strip since October 2023 has been the meticulous and complete destruction by Israel of the infrastructure of research and higher education, and the systematic targeting of leaders of the Gazan academy. Education has always been at the heart of Palestinian identity, so this act of “Scholasticide” is particularly painful, and has profoundly effected the 80,000 university students and thousands of faculty and staff at the dozen universities in the area. This targeted destruction has also elicited a strong international academic response, which has been subject to intense suppression.
Bios:
Jehad Abu-Miri is a student at the Islamic University of Gaza, working towards a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science. For years Jehad has served as content creator for a range of social media sites: the Instagram pages Hind’s Call https://www.instagram.com/hind.call/ and seen.tvhttps://www.instagram.com/seen.tv/?hl=en and is the founder of Infinite Code, a team that offers programming and design services for websites and mobile apps https://www.instagram.com/infinitecode.co/?hl=en. He is a frequent commentator in international media and has been an active participant in the MIT SPOCs4Gaza and other international university projects in Gaza.
Amani Al-Mqdama is currently a fellow of the Council for At-Risk Academics and PhD candidate at University of Edinburgh Business School. Her background is in electrical engineering. She holds a Master Degree in Development Policies and Practices from the Geneva Graduate Institute as well as Diploma focused on multidisciplinary gender studies from Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. She also serves as Head of the International Relations Department at the Islamic University of Gaza.
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016). She is the Editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UCSB, and co-editor of Jadaliyya.