For over 75 years, Palestinians have been subject to settler colonial destruction of their institutions, not least their academic institutions. Amid land theft, ethnic cleansing at the hands of the military, the judiciary and their settler proxies, apartheid and killings, the targeting of the educational infrastructure has been a constant and has aimed to dismantle Palestinian society by debilitating and atomizing its members. What do academic freedom and educational rights mean in the context of organized dehumanization and deprivation as official policy, and now genocide? From national underschooling under the British Mandate to educide by Israel, “from underdevelopment to de-development”, the Palestinian trajectory has defied the odds and the imagination, whether one looks at the UNDP’s Indexes, or turns to the ways in which education was kept alive, under or above ground, amidst Israeli repression, closure, arrests, raids and killings before, during and since the first Intifada. The scale of the ongoing destruction, which has engulfed every single aspect of life and its social manifestations, is testing the very possibility of Sumoud. What forms can education take henceforth and what for? Will “bare education” permanently resolve into dematerialized education, delivered from virtual and international pulpits? Where will present and future students and scholars congregate, how will repositories of knowledge be recovered and evolved? This roundtable traces the experiences, practices, and ideas that scholars of Palestine and Palestinian scholars have contributed to freedom, knowledge production, resistance, and the social-cultural role of academia. Beyond numbers, trends, and organized responses to the onslaught, what does documenting the destruction and disruption of academic instruction and institutions mean for students and their futures? How are Palestinian faculty expected to respond to that to which they must bear witness? How is our understanding of academic freedom, of a right to education, and to life informed by Palestinian-led initiatives such as the Emergency Committee of Gaza Universities Initiative (GUI), Gaza Educate Medics (GEM), the Palestinian Students and Scholars at Risk (PSSAR), or numerous other initiatives, including the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University?