New book exposes Israeli universities as agents of Palestine repression
Maya Wind was born and grew up in Jerusalem but did not meet a Palestinian until she was fifteen years old. Like all her schoolmates, she believed the IDF was merely defending Israel against the hostile antisemitic Arabs inside and outside the country. Not until a chance meeting with a Palestinian girl her age and subsequent visits to Palestinian villages did she recognise this as a make-believe world of Israeli innocence and victimhood. This led her to refuse military service even at the cost of time in prison, to study abroad, and at the end of this month to the publication of a startling expose of Israeli universities as active collaborators in Israel’s regime of occupation and repression, which will be published by Verso. Below is a short description of the book and some of the reviews that accompany it.
Towers of Ivory and Steel:How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom
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.