What critics miss when they accuse Israel of ‘scholasticide’ and ‘domicide’
Scholasticide is one of several new terms that has been used to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza
Faculty from the University of Texas in Austin gather to protest what they term ‘scholasticide’ in Gaza. Photo by Getty Images
Aviya Kushner January 8, 2025
The American Historical Association, the largest association of professional historians in the U.S., passed a resolution this week condemning what it called the “scholasticide” in Gaza — a term that might be unfamiliar to many.
As The New York Times reported, the resolution “argued that the destruction of most of the enclave’s education infrastructure, along with many archives and libraries, amounted to “scholasticide.”
“Scholasticide” isn’t a word in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, or the Oxford English Dictionary, but it does appear in Wikipedia, which is run by volunteers and has nearly 50 million registered users.
“Scholasticide,” according to Wikipedia, is “often used interchangeably with the terms educide and epistemicide, (and) refers to the intended mass destruction of education in a specific place.”
“Schola” in Latin is “school,” or more precisely, an “ancient Roman school” as Merriam-Webster puts it. “Cide” is also Latin; it means killing.
The echo of genocide
Of course, just hearing a term with the suffix “cide” makes “genocide” echo in the mind, along with all its moral weight — and the constant wrangling over what it means.
“Ever since the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the word in 1944 by combining the Greek word genos, meaning ‘race or tribe,’ with the Latin cide, or ‘killing,’ it has been pulled taut between languages — Greek and Latin, legal and moral,” Linda Kinstler, a junior fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows, observed in The New York Times magazine.
I often return to that sentence, and think about how describing Lemkin as a “Polish lawyer” omits something crucial; Lemkin was Jewish, and lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust.
And Lemkin probably didn’t expect his coining of the term “genocide” to spawn so many other “cide” terms. He wanted a term that would describe the specific crime of intentionally destroying an entire people. He wanted precision.
I am concerned that the growing use of the word “genocide” to describe war may dilute the term’s meaning, and weaken its direct connection to the Holocaust.
And this must be said: The cascade of newish terms ending in “cide” — “scholasticide,” “educide” and “domicide” — all have one thing in common on Wikipedia:
The current war in Gaza is always used as an example.
What is domicide?
Like “scholasticide,” the term “domicide” also does not appear in the OED.
“Domicide,” in case you missed it, has been discussed on NPR, primarily in relation to Gaza, and on the op-ed page of The New York Times, where the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing wrote a piece with the headline “Domicide: The Mass Destruction of Homes Should Be a Crime Against Humanity.” That piece also focused heavily on Gaza.
In the absence of dictionary meanings, I tried Wikipedia:
“Domicide (from Latin domus, meaning home or abode, and caedo, meaning deliberate killing, though used here metaphorically) is the deliberate destruction of housing by human agency in pursuit of specified goals,” the site informed me. That definition is from a 2001 book titled Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home by Douglas Porteous and Sandra Smith.
I scrolled down for an example of the term.
“The recent Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip is considered to be one of the most destructive campaigns in history,” Wikipedia noted.
Something about that language caught my eye.
While there has certainly been tremendous human suffering in Gaza — the phrase “one of the most destructive campaigns in history” seems to erase World War II, World War I, and other “destructive campaigns” familiar to members of the American Historical Association.
These days, the anti-fact front is strong, and we are all soldiers in the battle for truth and accuracy.
Meta, the parent of Facebook, announced yesterday that it would get rid of fact-checking. Incredibly, last fall’s vice-presidential debate opened with a journalist stating that there would be no checking of facts, and recently, even The New Yorker’s famed fact-checking department didn’t check on some basic aspects of the history of Israel, Palestinians, and the Holocaust.
Recognizing that I am now the fact-checker for everything I read, I scrolled some more.
The source for Wikipedia — see footnote #9 — was an Associated Press article with the headline “Israel’s military campaign in Gaza seen as among the most destructive in recent history, experts say.”
There is a big difference between “recent history” and “history.”
The phrase “most destructive in history,” which Wikipedia is using to describe the war in Gaza, means all of history. That’s quite a claim.
It’s this kind of difference that should matter to historians, and to all of us.
The other side of ‘cide’
Language reflects what we believe, and the push to use all kinds of “cide” terms to describe Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza reflects the focus many academics have on this war, and specifically, on Israel’s conduct in it.
It’s a focus that often doesn’t extend to other conflicts, like Sudan.
“With more than 100 universities, including the prestigious University of Khartoum, suffering extensive damage, looting, or complete destruction, the effects on Sudan’s academic community and the future of its higher education are profound,” Professor Mohamed Hassan, the president of the Sudanese National Academy of Sciences and the World Academy of Sciences in Italy told University World News last March.
In October 2023, at a time when the world was focused on Israel, The New York Times reported that students in Sudan had not been in school for six months. Officials from the United Nations said it was about to become “the worst education crisis in the world.”
The situation has only worsened.
“The war has dealt Sudan’s higher education system a catastrophic blow. Universities have been regularly attacked, looted, and even converted into military bases. This has forced many Sudanese university students to abandon their education,” The Christian Science Monitor reported today.
And of course, there is the death toll in Sudan — the “cide.”
“More than 61,000 people have died in Khartoum state, where the fighting began last year, according to a report by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Sudan Research Group,” the BBC reported in November, noting that the death toll in Sudan is higher than previously believed.
Once, historians were interested in numbers, facts, and broader context. But the historians’ resolution not only reflects a trend in language, but a larger trend in academia where activism only extends to certain topics.
There is also curiously little activism on survival issues closer to home, and on campus. The Government Accounting Office found that 23% of undergraduates were food insecure in 2020, yet hunger among students is not addressed by major academic associations like the MLA and the AHA.
College freshman enrollment is down 5% nationwide, the academic job market is terrible, and the study of history is in decline. “As of 2019, history accounted for slightly less than 1.2% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded, the lowest share in records that extend back to 1949. For comparison, in 1967, history accounted for 5.7% of all bachelor’s degrees,” the AHA’s own newsletter recently reported.
We could argue that the AHA should focus on all of that.
What we don’t say
Language is an intriguing mirror. It reflects not only what we want to focus on — but what we don’t.
When we don’t want to emphasize killing, the use of the suffix “cide” somehow fades away.
“We no longer say “suicide,” a former professor of mine commented when we discussed the “scholasticide” term. “Now, we say, he ‘took his own life.’”
What “cide” is about is making the destruction of homes and schools — an awful but standard feature of war — sound like murder.
With the echo of “genocide” and the focus on Israel, “scholasticide” is just more of the same charge against Israel, and another pass for Hamas.
And my professor is right — what we don’t say matters a lot.
“Hamas” does not appear in the historians’ resolution.
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