You are not erased

Tasked with commentary of Lubna Abu Sitta’s ‘Writing against erasure: a geography of resistance in Gaza’, we can add little to her defiant words. We instead seek to speak alongside Abu Sitta and the geographical community in Gaza she carefully memorialises. As part of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, academic life has been systematically taken apart in the bombing of university buildings and the killing of staff and students. Yet Abu Sitta also teaches us that universities are more than buildings as she carries the inspiration of her killed colleagues and teachers into her current reality of studying via remote methods. With care not to overstate, we read this as a reminder that scholasticide refers to military intent that can only be incomplete in its effects. Abu Sitta and others like her are testament to the defiance and resistance of indigenous intellectual life that is the still-beating heart of universities in Gaza.