Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom
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Maya Wind
Publisher: Verso
Year: 2024
Format: Paperback
Size: 289 pages
ISBN: 9781804291740
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How Israeli universities collaborate in Israeli state violence against Palestinians
Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights.
As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful expose of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project.
Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights.
As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful expose of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project.
What People Are Saying
"This book lands like a grenade, detonating comfortable and long held myths about the liberalism and independence of Israel’s university system. In their place, Wind’s rigorous and jaw-dropping research reveals countless ways that the nation’s most celebrated and storied education institutions are utterly entangled in the violent machinery of Palestinian dispossession, occupation, incarceration, surveillance, siege and military bombardment. From the development of deadly weapons to the crafting of state propaganda to the training of officers, there is no escaping the conclusion that these universities are part and parcel of the official infrastructure that has enabled Israel to systematically avoid the political solutions that are the only hope of enduring peace in the region. An explosive contribution from a brilliant young scholar."
—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and Doppelganger
"There are no ivory towers! Maya Wind brings this truth to the light with a forensic accounting of Israeli universities and their complete implication in Israel’s occupation and apartheid regime. Towers of Ivory and Steel lays bare Israeli campuses as Jewish settlements of replacement in occupied lands, the knowledge arm for security forces and the local military industry, and as sites of Palestinian intellectual suppression, all co-signed by the “liberal silence” of Israeli academics. Fearless, emphatic, and unflinching. No other work better demonstrates why higher education remains a vital site of struggle over the future of democracy, in Israel, in Palestine, and across the world."
—Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities
"This book is a must read — meticulously researched, lucidly written, and convincingly argued. Wind deftly illuminates the myriad ways in which the university is a site of meaningful struggle, debunking the deep-seated myths that heretofore have served to normalize Israel’s academic complex as it is part and parcel of the state’s settler colonial projects of both occupation and apartheid that violently dominate and dispossess the Palestinian people. Towers of Ivory and Steel provides a roadmap for Israeli academics to end the institutional complicity and join the movement to remake higher education for liberation."
—J. Kehaulani Kauanui, author of Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism
"A devastating analysis of the extensive, insidious ways that the Israeli academy is central to the architecture of occupation, settler colonial violence, and repression of Palestinians. Through meticulous ethnographic and archival research, Wind not only gives lie to the claim that the Israeli academy is a bastion of academic freedom and vigorous debate. She provides a model for the decolonial work we must all do until there is freedom and liberation for all."
—Jessica Winegar, co-author with Lara Deeb of Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East
"Drawing on Hebrew sources, Maya Wind shatters the myth of liberal expression in Israeli universities, revealing instead how they prop up apartheid."
—Rebecca Ruth Gould, New Arab
"Towers of Ivory and Steel is a paradigm-shifting book, with incredible insider reporting that provides riveting detail of how Israeli universities serve primarily as centers of military research, propaganda, and command. A must read."
—Sarah Schulman, Bookforum
"Wind's new book meticulously demonstrates how Israeli academic institutions were created to serve the Zionist colonization of Palestine...a critical tool for anyone affiliated with academic life.""
—Marcy Newman, Mondoweiss
"One set of universities serves a colonized, brutalized people, and the other, the colonizer, as Maya Wind has documented at length in her indispensable book, Towers of Ivory and Steel."
—Esmat Elhalaby, The Baffler
"Maya Wind is the best example of scholar-activist, speaking about her work, making it accessible and useful. Reading and putting into practice the critique made by this book is part of a process of active resistance inside and against Israeli academia, a process that is of a piece with the best most open aspects of scholarly work."
—Ian Parker, Anti-Capitalist Resistance
—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and Doppelganger
"There are no ivory towers! Maya Wind brings this truth to the light with a forensic accounting of Israeli universities and their complete implication in Israel’s occupation and apartheid regime. Towers of Ivory and Steel lays bare Israeli campuses as Jewish settlements of replacement in occupied lands, the knowledge arm for security forces and the local military industry, and as sites of Palestinian intellectual suppression, all co-signed by the “liberal silence” of Israeli academics. Fearless, emphatic, and unflinching. No other work better demonstrates why higher education remains a vital site of struggle over the future of democracy, in Israel, in Palestine, and across the world."
—Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities
"This book is a must read — meticulously researched, lucidly written, and convincingly argued. Wind deftly illuminates the myriad ways in which the university is a site of meaningful struggle, debunking the deep-seated myths that heretofore have served to normalize Israel’s academic complex as it is part and parcel of the state’s settler colonial projects of both occupation and apartheid that violently dominate and dispossess the Palestinian people. Towers of Ivory and Steel provides a roadmap for Israeli academics to end the institutional complicity and join the movement to remake higher education for liberation."
—J. Kehaulani Kauanui, author of Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism
"A devastating analysis of the extensive, insidious ways that the Israeli academy is central to the architecture of occupation, settler colonial violence, and repression of Palestinians. Through meticulous ethnographic and archival research, Wind not only gives lie to the claim that the Israeli academy is a bastion of academic freedom and vigorous debate. She provides a model for the decolonial work we must all do until there is freedom and liberation for all."
—Jessica Winegar, co-author with Lara Deeb of Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East
"Drawing on Hebrew sources, Maya Wind shatters the myth of liberal expression in Israeli universities, revealing instead how they prop up apartheid."
—Rebecca Ruth Gould, New Arab
"Towers of Ivory and Steel is a paradigm-shifting book, with incredible insider reporting that provides riveting detail of how Israeli universities serve primarily as centers of military research, propaganda, and command. A must read."
—Sarah Schulman, Bookforum
"Wind's new book meticulously demonstrates how Israeli academic institutions were created to serve the Zionist colonization of Palestine...a critical tool for anyone affiliated with academic life.""
—Marcy Newman, Mondoweiss
"One set of universities serves a colonized, brutalized people, and the other, the colonizer, as Maya Wind has documented at length in her indispensable book, Towers of Ivory and Steel."
—Esmat Elhalaby, The Baffler
"Maya Wind is the best example of scholar-activist, speaking about her work, making it accessible and useful. Reading and putting into practice the critique made by this book is part of a process of active resistance inside and against Israeli academia, a process that is of a piece with the best most open aspects of scholarly work."
—Ian Parker, Anti-Capitalist Resistance
About the Author
Maya Wind is a scholar of Israeli expertise and militarism. She is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.
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