Reparative Praxis with Gaza

A guest blog written by Dr Khawla Badwan, Reader in Applied Linguistics, Manchester Metropolitan University

September 2025

A new school year has just started. It is an exciting time, yet it is not without stress. It marks the return of a scheduled routine that shapes the lives of everyone connected to schools. It also happens to be the time to review the latest updates on ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’ which form part of the training sessions school staff have to attend. Among other sectors, the schools sector is one that is highly trained in the language of safeguarding, inclusion, special needs, tackling disadvantage, equality, mental health, wellbeing, and working with families, among many others. It is also a sector attracted to awards linked to initiatives by international organisations whose ranking systems recognise schools’ commitments to children’s rights and international collaborations. It is a sector concerned with the betterment of the human so that we make, think and care for one another, for our communities and societies, and for our broken planet. It is a sector rooted in moral practice. Does this sound familiar to you?

Many readers will read this first paragraph with a sense of scepticism. Is this really what education is about these days, in the age of political surveillance, and the rise of AI at the expense of attending to what it means to be human in genocidal times? Your scepticism is indeed justified, for education has been repurposed to serve neoliberal agendas that reduce the becoming of the human to the acquisition and accumulation of sticky knowledge and valuable skills measured almost annually. The neoliberal damage to education is not new and a lot indeed has been written about the commodification of education and its implications on how humans inhabit the world morally, socially, culturally, politically and relationally. However, what is new is how a sector well trained in the words and worlds of children and childhood has responded to the live streaming of the genocide in Gaza with silence, even silencing, under the guise of political impartiality:

Close your eyes

It’s the age of impartiality

It’s the balance

in the face of genocide

‘between what—and whom?’,

asks every sane person

in insane times

(Insane Times, 30 June 2025)

Let me be clear. There is no impartiality when Gaza is being bombed by weapons manufactured in the UK, with the assistance of UK spying planes, and with the political cover of most UK politicians and mainstream media. There is no impartiality when the historical making of Gaza as a strip of land inhabited by refugees happened due to the British colonial rule in Palestine. There is no impartiality when the UK is partial to this iconic struggle for justice that has spanned across 77 years and counting. In the case of Palestine and Gaza, we need to be factual, in the absence of the possibility of ever being impartial. Factual is the word.

While I am restricted by space to tell of the facts with historical precision while relying on independent journalism, it is important to use the right language to challenge Israel’s attack on our collective memory. Make no mistake. What we have been watching for nearly two years is a genocide, a well-documented one. The world’s first live-streamed genocide.

Say it with me: genocide.

Yes, it is a word that continues to be surrounded by discourses of denial. Still, it is important to develop civic courage and moral clarity to unapologetically use the assessment of credible human rights organisations including Amnesty International (Dec, 2024), Human Rights Watch (Dec, 2024), the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (April, 2024), and Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (July, 2025), noting the ruling of the International Court of Justice on the plausibility of genocide in Gaza in January 2024. On top of the horrors of genocide- the crime of all crimes, famine, is officially declared by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a United Nations-backed global hunger monitor in August 2025.

Trigger warning (1): Gaza Genocide

Trigger warning (2): Gaza Famine

Trigger warning (3): Complicity

The accurate figures of the loss of human life and the intensity of human suffering, especially for children, remain unfathomable. However, the little known of what remains largely unknown is already horrifying. Gaza has more child deaths than any other conflicts and with the highest number of child amputees in the world (De Vogli, et al., 2025), and the largest orphan crisis in modern history (Aljazeera, 2025). It has been annihilated with bombs equivalent to six Hiroshimas (Rogers, 2025). And yet, the news continues to speak of full annihilation and ethnic cleansing. All these horrors are inflicted on a civilian population, half of which children.

Many of us are living with deep wounds. We are wounded with Gaza, wounded by the burial of the post-World War II order in Gaza, wounded by the complicity of our elected politicians, wounded by the silence enforced on the education sector that knows better and should do better, wounded by the transnational complicities that glue all of us to the genocide in Gaza through what Albanese (2025) describes as the economy of genocide, the profitable enterprise of killing.

We live in wounded and wounding times, surrounded by silent and silencing organisations forced to practise selective humanity, moral blindness and double standards:

What remains

when education

remains silent,

when futures

are measured

in targets, not

in songs for humanity?

What remains

when Gaza

struggles to remain,

when atrocities

are streamed

and authorities

are revealed?

What remains

when worlds are lost

and lines are crossed?

What remains

when we are wounds,

with words killed

and values not lived?

Nothing remains-

except trying

(What remains, 27 June 2025)

Part of the trying I discuss in this poem entails a reparative praxis with Gaza. To repair, we need to acknowledge wrongdoing alongside current and historical injustices. Reparative justice seeks to make amends, with knowledge that speaks to the realities of genocides, racism, silences, erasures, the normalisation of mass killing, and the shredding of the rules-based international order. This knowledge necessitates the accuracy of language and the circulation of the language of truth-telling in response to daily propaganda and the manufacturing of civic cowardice and complicit silence. At heart, reparation means that we cannot carry on with business as usual. To repair means to disrupt, to connect, to rethink, to try, to fail, and to try again.

Praxis is a meeting point that brings together theory, practice, policies, action, and reflection in ways that attend to the what of the world, the how of the world and the so what of the world. It is a mediating space spiralling inward and outward. There is no guidance or fixed frameworks for this reparative praxis. Therefore, a reparative praxis with Gaza does not require individuals to claim expert status on the Gaza Genocide or the role of Britain in the Occupation of Palestine since the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Rather, it requires individuals to build communities for healing; spaces to walk alongside the oppressed and the marginalised with humility and curiosity. We are treading new grounds where ethical educational leadership is not about the mastery of knowing what to do. Rather, it is about the ethical commitment to try without fully knowing.

Find Language: Develop Your Reparative Lexicon with Gaza

There can be no justice, nor reparation without language that breaks the silence on Gaza. Learn your language and find your voice. Engage with recent reports from credible sources such as Save the Children, Amnesty International, UNICEF, Oxfam, The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Medical Aid for Palestinians, United Nations, among many others. These reports are anchored in precision, documentation, international humanitarian law and legal frameworks for genocide punishment and prevention. Remember, factual is the word.

Use this language in teaching, in relationship building and in connecting with children and communities. It is a language that centres dignity, humanity, justice, and respect for human life- for all and with no exceptions. It is the language to keep values alive in education, not as slogans on websites and inspection reports, but as lived practices that walk the talk when humanity is under attack.

Move forward with Wounds: Develop Pedagogies of Care

Let’s be honest. It is easier to attribute the ongoing ‘mental health crisis’ in schools to Covid. We still hear this, with no mention of the possible impact of a livestreamed genocide on children and communities. It is safer to speak of Covid, of behaviour problems, and of a spike in mental health issues. It is easier to use a language that pathologises children and individualises suffering, without naming perpetrators, or even worse, getting into ‘politics’.  After all, neoliberal education is exactly about this- the centring of the individual and the disregarding of human collectives.

The choice is yours. You can insist on being in denial, refusing to open your eyes to the moral wounds of living in genocidal times. Alternatively, you can open your mind and your heart to the collective wounds of witnessing Gaza and the decimation of its children. I hope you choose the latter which will then require you to develop pedagogies of care through transforming classrooms into spaces for collective caring and healing. Arts, stories, poetry, music, drawing, dancing and creative practice are pedagogical tools to teach, learn, express and practise care. Through them we learn to live with the wounds of genocidal times, leaning into the pain and grief, rather than tapping out from whatever there is that connects humans together in a world of travelling bombs.

Feel Gaza Everywhere: Let Gaza be a Catalyst for Fairer Educational Presents and Futures

Reparative educational futures insist on the importance of metabolic literacies (Machado de Oliveira, 2021) that see all of us as connected together and nested within larger harmful capitalist structures. The unprecedented global entanglement in the Gaza crime scene is a living witness to how we are all glued to violent structures of oppression. How do we move on with this wounded and wounding reality in education?

There is no easy answer to this, but any attempt at an answer requires us to feel the pain of Gaza and to let it be a catalyst for fairer educational presents and futures. Through the lens of Gaza we need to ask the following:

• Whose voices do you teach and reproduce in education? Whose voices are silenced and pushed away or aside as ‘irrelevant’, or ‘political’? Who decides this? What role can you play?
• How are inclusion policies developed in your school? By whom? Who do they include? Who do they exclude as ‘irrelevant’, or ‘political’? Who decides this? What role can you play?
• Do you have a bereavement policy for staff and children, with a support system that acknowledges ongoing trauma? Who is excluded and whose grief is seen as ‘irrelevant’, or ‘political’? Who decides this? What role can you play?
• What is your position in relation to solidarity with the oppressed, with those without rights, with those deemed not humans, not animals, and not even trees? Who decides this? What role can you play?

This list is incomplete. The message is Gaza is entangled with everything we say and do in education.

Gaza matters.

Gaza matters because it experiences all the evil you could name in the world, including forms of evil for which we have no words yet. Gaza is the web of all issues that you could name as part of the collective human struggle for justice. Gaza matters because it is the epicentre of occupation, colonialism, racism, capitalism, White supremacy, corruption and necropolitics.

Without Gaza, our scholarship loses its value. Without Gaza, our education loses its meaning. Without Gaza, our values lose their mooring. Without Gaza, our world loses its order. Without Gaza, our words lose their holding.

And with Gaza we can dare to educate ourselves about the harms and wounds of silence on genocides, famine, mass killing, and the ongoing attacks on our shared humanity and collective memory. Perhaps one day many of us will be able to reclaim our ability to language the lost and the broken in the world and use this ability to centre education as a site for reparative presents and futures.

Until then, we sit in ruins, finding our ways through the ruins, and building fragile futures for reparation despite the ruins.

References

Albanese, F. (2025). From economy of occupation to economy of genocide. Human Rights Council. Available from: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/a-hrc-59-23-from-economy-of-occupation-to-economy-of-genocide-report-special-rapporteur-francesca-albanese-palestine-2025/#content

Aljazeera (2025, April). Gaza faces ‘largest orphan crisis’ in modern history, report says. Available from: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/3/gaza-faces-largest-orphan-crisis-in-modern-history-report-says

Amnesty International. (2024, December). Amnesty International concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Amnesty International. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza

De Vogli, R., Montomoli, J., Abu-Sittah, G. and Pappé, I. (2025). Break the selective silence on the genocide in Gaza. The Lancet, 406(10504), 688 – 689. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01541-7/fulltext

Human Rights Watch. (2024, December 19). Israel’s crime of extermination: Acts of genocide in Gaza. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-extermination-acts-genocide-gaza

Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (2025) Famine Review Committee: Gaza Strip, August 2025 https://www.ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ipcinfo/docs/IPC_Famine_Review_Committee_Report_Gaza_Aug2025.pdf

Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention. (2024, April 8). Israel is committing genocide across Palestine: Active genocide alert condemning ongoing violence in the West Bank. Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention. https://www.lemkininstitute.com/active-genocide-alert-1/israel-is-committing-genocide-across-palestine:-active-genocide-alert-condemning-ongoing-violence-in-the-west-bank

Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (2025). Gaza genocide. https://msf.org.uk/issues/gaza-genocide

Rogers, P. (2025). Gaza bombing ‘equivalent to six Hiroshimas’ says Bradford world affairs expert. Available from: https://www.bradford.ac.uk/news/archive/2025/gaza-bombing-equivalent-to-six-hiroshimas-says-bradford-world-affairs-expert.php

Other Relevant Publications:

Badwan, K and Phipps, A. (2024). Keep Telling of Gaza. Sidhe Press. https://www.sidhe-press.eu/books/keep-telling-of-gaza/

Badwan, K., & Phipps, A. (2025). Hospicing Gaza ( غزة ): Stunned languaging as poetic cries for a heartbreaking scholarship. Language and Intercultural Communication, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2024.2448104

Badwan, K. (in press). Urgent reckoning in times of failure: Language with Gaza. Global Commons Review.

Badwan, K. (under review). What remains when schools remain silent on the genocide in Gaza? British Psychological Society.

Guest contributions to the Repair-Ed blog represent the perspectives of the authors.