You are not erased

After 32 months of genocidal warfare in Gaza, Israel has not—and will not—reach its objective of total erasure of Palestinian life there. Lubna Ahmad Abu Sitta’s moving intervention is testament to this. Written “in the shadow of loss”, Abu Sitta angles a light on a geographical journey that is indebted to her evidently inspirational educators—Dr Abdel Nasser Al-Saqqa and Dr Wiesam Essa—and to her friend and colleague, Shahd. Abu Sitta’s recollections of the Department of Geography at Al-Aqsa University textually preserve an intellectual environment that nurtured her “geomorphological love story with the land”. The text is exemplary writing against erasure; in Abu Sitta’s words: “the geographical knowledge planted in us by our academic mentors does not fall with the buildings but rather remains in us”. Tasked with commentary, we can add little to these defiant words; we instead seek to speak alongside Abu Sitta and the geographical community in Gaza she carefully memorialises.

For us, from our different positions in Palestinian solidarity and struggle, we read Abu Sitta’s text as a reminder that scholasticide refers to military intent that can only be incomplete in its effects. We all witnessed the horror of Israel’s systematic bombing of university buildings and killing of professors and students. Yet we are reminded that the 12 universities in Gaza are more than buildings; even in the most terrible conditions they continue to function, educating and graduating students in tents and via online platforms. Determinedly, academic life continues. Abu Sitta pursues her studies away from campus, forced to trade “a short and pleasant walk across a leafy campus” for a two-hour traipse to an internet café. Her displacement from north to south and back again is a marked by the ongoing trauma of space re-made, of a razed home and buried memories. While family members take refuge in the same university halls Abu Sitta once used to prepare for her exams, she mourns the “parallel world” of the bombed-out Geography Studio at Al-Aqsa and the green spaces of its campus.

Abu Sitta does not simply tell us she is a geographer, she shows us the violence of obliterated space as well as the adaptive spatial struggles of maintaining a grasp on her chosen discipline—of seeking to hold onto that precious parallel world of which we are all constituents. This is a distinctly cartographic exercise where memories are mapped onto the current realities of getting by, making do, re-building from the shadows. Through Abu Sitta’s evocative words, we journey past the lawns, halls and lecture spaces of campus, through today’s displacement camps and towards the rubble of destroyed homes. The effect—for a reader located outside Gaza—is to construct a counter-cartographic rendering of past and present daily realities. Brought to mind are the words of the Gazan poet, Alaa Alqaisi (2026) who, on leaving Gaza for Dublin, describes dislocation through Edward Said’s concept of the contrapuntal: ‘two synchronized tempos in the same nervous system’. Abu Sitta reaches towards a similar, embodied framing—except in the same place—where destructive warfare has forced her to inhabit two tempos at once.

From this perspective, her testimony contests and subverts occupied land in the mind of the reader, (re-)making space on the terms of Gaza’s population. Palestinians in Gaza, we learn, are engaged in a struggle to adapt to the new realities of life in a bombed-out land that remains home. The injustice of this struggle is stark, but without romanticising, without recourse to damaging discourses of Gazan resilience (see Dader et al., 2025), this adaptation consists in the continuation of scholarly life in Gaza. We are witness here to a wider practice of ‘fitful infrastructuring’ among a depleted but present population that invents and improvises as a practice of ‘dwelling with erasure and its incapacitating conditions’ (Dader and Joronen, 2025, 901, original emphasis). More broadly we recall that colonial power is always incomplete, never able to capture the inherent “ungovernability” of life in Palestine and elsewhere (see Joronen and Griffiths, 2022). As a community of geographers working on Palestine, we have long strived for a mode of inquiry that fully recognises and rejects the extreme oppression of Israeli colonial power—one that might at times appear all-encompassing—without ever giving in to the conviction that Palestinian political and cultural life persists (see e.g., Griffiths, 2022).

These geographical framings should not be read as mere abstractions but as approaches that enable articulations against erasure, such as that of Abu Sitta. And she will know that she is not alone, that her efforts to study are the foundations of rebuilding efforts. As the presidents of Gaza’s three main non-profit public universities—Al-Aqsa University, Al-Azhar University, and the Islamic University of Gaza ¹ —stated emphatically last summer: ‘despite the physical obliteration of campuses, laboratories, facilities, and libraries, the assassination of our students and colleagues, our universities continue to exist. We are more than buildings—we are academic communities, comprised of students, faculty, and staff, still alive and determined to carry forward our mission’ (Sobh et al., 2025). In other words, universities are made up of academic communities, not buildings. Seen from this unified perspective, the university takes on an altogether new purpose: not just of educating enrolled students but of shoring up the next generation of thinkers, organisers, and community members in a landscape devastated by genocide and human-made starvation. Abu Sitta reminds us—insofar as a reminder is needed—of the defiance and resistance of indigenous intellectual life that is the still-beating heart of universities in Gaza.

This is a crucial prompt to prioritise efforts to support Gazan academia, both faculty and students – for their sake and for the sake of a future for education in Gaza. This is foundational to ensuring the continuation of Palestinian life in Gaza now and in the future. As we and colleagues (Agha et al., 2024: 6) argued a full 32 months ago, ‘we must develop an academic praxis that works meaningfully towards an end to the siege of Gaza, towards a reckoning with the political alliances that prop up Israel’s settler colonial regime and normalise Apartheid policies across Palestine’. To forward such a praxis, we must contribute and amplify existing efforts aimed at bolstering Palestinian universities in Gaza. As outlined in the recently published Friends of Palestinian University’s Partnership Guide (2025), there are multiple ways of supporting Palestinian universities in an equitable and collaborative way, including institution-to-institution twinning agreements, teaching and research partnerships, joint virtual fellowships and scholarships providing material support as well as infrastructural support. Such initiatives are of benefit not only to the academic institutions in Gaza—who call for ‘practical, structured, and enduring partnership’ (Sobh et al., 2025)—but also to the academic community in the UK and beyond. By encouraging shared research, scholars can follow the lead of Palestinian institutions to develop a deeper understanding and commitment to the socio-political realities of Palestinians living under a brutal and illegal siege.

Also highlighted in these initiatives is the notion of a global academic community. The brave students who set up Gaza solidarity encampments from the beginning of this war set this in relief by showing how our institutions are complicit in the capacities of the Israeli military to wage war on Palestine. Research strategies and allegiances are never apolitical; we see this in the university sector’s embrace of “defence industries” and in resistance to student and staff calls to boycott and divest. In a political climate of restricted manoeuvres and state-sanctioned surveillance in this area, we must at least be at pains to ensure our colleagues and students are keenly aware of university ties to weapons industries and the prominent role of Israeli higher education institutions in the reproduction of the military state and its power to distribute military violence in Palestine (see Wind, 2024).

To Abu Sitta’s aching provocation there can only be a response that honours the memory and legacies of Dr Abdel Nasser Al-Saqqa, Dr Wiesam Essa, Shahd, and the thousands of university staff and students killed by Israel in the last 32 months. Her text is a clear, generous testimony of life in Gaza as a geography student today. It is a missive not to equivocate or to look away, but a gracious call for solidarity. Our solidarity must reach beyond words towards a meaningful and material agenda to support Gazan academia and sever ties with the industries and institutions that make possible the decades-long war on Palestinians.