Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom

Regular price $ 29.95

by Maya Wind

Verso

2/13/2024, paperback

SKU: 9781804291740

 

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.

Reviews:

"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

"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

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.