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

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.

Speaker

Maya Wind is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Riverside. Her research on the reproduction and international export of Israeli security expertise has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Killam Laureates Trust. Her book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, investigates the complicity of Israeli universities in Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid.

This lecture is organised by the Critical Studies Research Node at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences in collaboration with Lund Academics for Palestine.