Palestine conflict dominates WISE Summit in Doha

This year’s WISE Summit examined and discussed in detail, the role of AI in education across the board. Most sessions focused on this relatively new but immensely powerful technology that today raises many more questions than it answers.

However, the destruction and ongoing horrors of Gaza dominated much of the messaging during the plenary sessions, attended by a very international audience from all four corners of the world. 

Every plenary featured the story or the voice of a young Palestinian, bringing to life the physical and emotional destruction that is taking place. 

Among the highlights of the opening plenary was a performance by 15-year-old Palestinian rapper Abdulrahman Al-Shanti, known as MC Abdul. His message was a simple one: a call for peace.

In addition to the nightmare scenarios of children, women and vulnerable communities bearing the brunt of the violence that Palestinians in Gaza are being subjected to, the audience learnt that the educationrelated work that the WISE Foundation has done in that area over a long period was itself under attack.

That was the message in the keynote address by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, founder of the Foundation and of the Summit and the mother of the current Emir of Qatar.

There was no skimping on robust language to describe what is happening in Palestine, including calling it a genocide – a  term that unleashes many implications. 

During a plenary discussion around ‘education in times of war’, Israel was accused of deliberately targeting places of learning. An example given was disclosing that five out of six universities had been destroyed.  The destruction was not limited to Gaza but also took place in the West Bank.

On a different scale

A clear picture emerged that the atrocities in Gaza are on a different scale to what has been seen previously, not only in Gaza itself but also elsewhere in the world. 

The organisers of the Summit were determined to use this platform to make a clear statement and bring to light the implications of what is happening. Delegates learnt, for example, that a school the Foundation had built in 2009 following the Gaza war that year, had been bombed and destroyed during the current conflict. 

In her remarks, Sheikha Moza added that 36 schools and universities the Foundation’s Education Above All programme was supporting had been completely or partially destroyed. 

The physical infrastructure can be rebuilt but the emotional damage, and the destruction of the environment of learning will be hard to repair. The trauma of war cannot be overestimated, leaving a whole generation with psychological wounds that will be impossible to erase and difficult to overcome. 

Using the backdrop of the current conflict, Sheikha Moza also highlighted how artificial intelligence is being used for the fabrication of stories as well as for creating a certain narrative that will be skewed in favour of one party or another, that we do not currently control and over which we have little oversight. These are important issues that will need to be addressed. 

The area raises critical questions around bias, around whose narrative will prevail, around values, ethics and independence of expression. The fall-out could be as complex as impacting the sovereignty of countries and societies. 

The two-day summit brought together nearly 7,000 stakeholders in education including a strong contingent of youth.