In Gaza, Education Is a Daily Act of Quiet Resistance
by Hassan Herzallah For students in Gaza, studying is no longer an individual activity, but a collective, grassroots effort to preserve education in the absence of formal institutions. A gallery of art by Alaa, a 23-year-old fine arts student at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza. (Image from Waging Nonviolence) In a corner of a displacement camp in Al-Mawasi, in southern Gaza, Alaa carefully tapes a sheet of white paper onto a worn wooden board. Dust moves through the air as the wind blows across the camp, where noise and movement rarely stop. Around her, other tents stretch across the sandy ground of the camp, where thousands of displaced families now live. Children move between the narrow paths separating the tents, while the distant sound of generators and conversation fills the air. Just a week before the war began in October 2023, Alaa, a 23-year-old fine arts student at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, worked inside the university’s art studio, surrounded by paints and materials as she planned her graduation project — a collage made by assembling different materials on a single surface. Today, after being displaced during the war, she is trying to rebuild that project using simple materials gathered from friends and a few belongings she managed to retrieve from beneath the rubble of her family’s bombed home. “When I lost my tent and the materials I used for painting, I felt like I had lost a big part of my soul,” Alaa said. “At first, I lost my passion, but not my hope. Later I tried to start again...
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