In mid-January , soon after the ceasefire in Gaza was announced, Palestinian students rushed back into what was left of their schools. Until Israel broke the ceasefire in March, the United Nations estimated that over 150,000 Palestinian children filled Gaza’s classrooms for the first time since October 2023. The reprieve was brief, but it nevertheless represented something more than a pause in the carnage—or it seemed to, for children and their families who, facing the abyss, deemed studying in schools a worthwhile use of terrifyingly finite time. Displaced, dispossessed, and under deadly assault for more than a year, Palestinians still somehow wanted to learn, to make sense of an impossible world. In fact, they had never stopped. Even at the height of Israel’s onslaught, you could read reports on social media of a Palestinian doctoral candidate defending his dissertation in a bombed-out building.…