“If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
….
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale”
– Rafat Alareer, Palestinian university professor assassinated in 2023, Gaza
Resilience is often intertwined with crisis, yet not all crises are created equal. An earthquake may shake the earth for seconds, a hurricane stays for days or weeks, and a pandemic stretches its impact over months or few years. But what happens when the crisis is a colonial occupation that has persisted for over 77 years, compounded by nearly two decades of blockade, and a live-streamed genocide happening since October 2023?
Despite ongoing scholasticide, Gaza’s academics continue to teach, research, and make fragile attempts to sustain academic life. Yet, how do we understand the different ways they respond to the destruction surrounding them?
Three contested concepts
We want to better understand how academics in Gaza respond to past conditions of oppression and to ongoing genocide. While some academics remain in Gaza and others don’t, we noticed the disagreement between how these responses are interpreted. At the same time that a study says “this is not resilience, it is sumud,” another says, “this is not sumud, but resistance.” This is also evident in the literature as the concepts of resilience, academic resistance, and sumud have blurry and contested boundaries and intersections. Sometimes resilience is linked to coping and survival; in others, those same qualities are framed as expressions of sumud. What one scholar identifies as academic resistance (manifested through e.g., withdrawal, avoidance, or even silent compliance) another may describe as resilience, while others situate these same practices under passive sumud. Some studies even use resilience and resistance interchangeably, or in conjunction with one another. The picture becomes even more complex when sumud is described as “resilient resistance” which leaves uncertainty as to how sumud is to be understood distinctively or equally from the other two concepts.
From “better fled than dead” to “better dead than fled”
Academic responses to war do not emerge in a vacuum. They are shaped by a complex interplay of personal beliefs and skills, institutional factors, available resources, the scale and nature of the adversity, as well as the broader societal values and norms within which teachers operate. We need to trace the complex and intersecting lines of academics’ responses to the genocide in Gaza.
These two notions gave birth to GazaRISE. The project seeks to examine how resilience, resistance, and sumud are conceptualised and intersect, and how personal, institutional, and societal factors shape higher education teachers’ responses to war, as understood through their own experiences.
An art and research project
Initially, we imagined a research project. But we soon realised that academic outputs alone would not be enough. We need to create spaces for collective memory, preserve stories that might otherwise disappear, and find ways to make these experiences accessible beyond academic circles. The idea thus evolved into a research-and-art project combining integrative literature review, collective memory workshops, interviews, artistic installations, and a digital archive to preserve and promote the plurality of stories and complexifying visions about the kind of experiences Gazan academics have been enduring. Our creative process is grounded on an ethical stance refusing to flatten teachers’ experiences, neither as ‘helpless victims’ nor as ‘superheroes’ miraculously able to keep their work moving despite unimaginable psychological and physical pain.
Why GazaRISE?
We carefully chose the name GazaRISE to bring together the core concepts of the project: resilience, resistance, and sumud. Yet we recognize that rising cannot be the responsibility of those who have endured such devastation alone. Rebuilding Gaza’s academic community requires solidarity, accountability, and collective commitment. It does not require celebrating the determination of academics to continue their work but it requires confronting the conditions that have made that work so extraordinarily difficult.
GazaRISE was officially launched in autumn 2026 and will continue until autumn 2031. Stay tuned for more updates on our project!