Welcome to IDEA Voices – a space for members to share perspectives, experiences and reflections on issues related to Global Citizenship Education. This reflects the spirit of IDEA’s commitment to dialogue, critical reflection and the diversity of perspectives within our network.

Written by:  Stephen McCloskey, director of the Centre for Global Education and editor of Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review.

From the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza more than two years’ ago, there has been a difficult and discomforting internal debate within the global education sector as to how it should respond. The sector has shifted somewhat from an initial collective silence that was broken by three members of IDEA (Centre for Global Education, Comhlámh and Síolta Chroí) who came together to organise online sessions that were extremely well attended and reflected strong support for a more robust sectoral response. These same three members subsequently established an IDEA Working Group on Palestine with the support of IDEA’s staff. It aimed to support education, discussion, collaboration and activism among IDEA members in solidarity with Palestine. The group succeeded in engaging affiliated members in discussion on Palestine and advocacy with the Irish government on passing the Occupied Territories Bill into law and calling for the withdrawal of the strongly criticised International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. These initiatives were mostly confined to the Working Group, however, rather than actions taken by the network as a whole which created the sense that Palestine was confined to a silo.

There have been encouraging signs since that the network was becoming more engaged with Palestine when it supported calls for the Irish Central Bank to stop facilitating the sale of Israeli war bonds and called on the Irish government to join The Hague Group. Whilst these actions are welcome, I think they fall short of what we could and should be doing as a network to stand in solidarity with Gaza. From the beginning of the genocide, IDEA members should have been galvanised to join the monthly Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) national protests in Dublin that have drawn huge participation from citizens and civil society movements across the island. This was a minimal test of solidarity with Palestine that was failed. The network should (and still could) directly lobby the Irish government to implement in full the Occupied Territories Bill, particularly as the government is threatening to remove a ban on trade in services from any legislation that comes into law. The network should (and still could) call for the Irish government to stop the use of Shannon Airport as a transit point by the United States military in contravention of Irish neutrality. The network should (and still could) call on the Irish government to stop the sale of dual-use products to Israel that can have a civilian and military application.

In her latest report, Francesca Albanese, the UN rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian Territories, finds that Ireland has the largest dual-use trade with Israel in integrated circuits valued at $3.2 billion in 2024. She writes that ‘Gaza is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel’. Ireland is one of the ‘Third States’ named in the report which in itself is evidence that perhaps we could have done more as a sector to end Irish complicity in genocide.

For many colleagues, the global education sector’s limited response to the genocide has provoked a deeper discussion on how many aspects of global education practice have shifted from their radical Freirean roots to a more professionalised and depoliticised form. From the vantage point as editor of a global education journal, Policy and Practice, I conducted a kind of vox pop earlier this year when I asked for short 500-word articles on ‘The Future of Development Education’. The collection included calls that the sector move beyond hospicing the broken neoliberal economic system by maintaining our largely uncritical support of the SDGs and embrace a stronger decolonial approach which does more to acknowledge that under-development is the result of capitalism, not development deficits in the global South. A decolonial education on the genocide in Gaza would have immediately framed it in the context of Israel’s settler-colonialism in Palestine. It would also have framed a sectoral response shaped by Freire’s call that global education means standing in solidarity with the oppressed.

In 2022, a report commissioned by the Centre for Global Education and Financial Justice Ireland found that ‘neither the international development nor the development education sector give anywhere near adequate attention to explorations with the public of the economic causes of poverty, inequality and injustice and of responses, through education, to the global neoliberal system’. The report bemoaned a lack of systemic thinking in the sector that is reflective of a technocratic or managerialist approach to development that fails to address the root causes of poverty and equality; the professed aim of our sector.

In applying a systemic analysis to the genocide in Gaza, the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, immediately recognised that Gaza was a warning to the people of the global South. He wrote on X that the West ‘seeks to defend the bubble of consumption of the planet’s rich and not to save humanity, whose majorities are disposable to them, like the children of Gaza’. This explains the callous indifference of the Euro-Atlantic powers to the suffering of the Palestinians and their willingness to make a pyre of the conventions and norms of international law. Picking up on this, the journalist Chris Hedges wrote that:

“The struggle for Palestine is our struggle. The denial of freedom for Palestinians is the first step in the loss of our freedom. The terror that defines life in Gaza will become our terror. The genocide will become our genocide”.

The Palestinians are leading our decolonisation by exposing and resisting the joint criminal enterprise underpinning the genocide in Gaza. Is it not time that the global education sector did more to offer meaningful solidarity to Palestinians?

The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and should not be taken to reflect the position of IDEA or its wider membership. IDEA maintains a clear organisational position on Palestine, grounded in our values, remit and long-standing member leadership. To learn more, see IDEA for Palestine.