How Israeli universities are an arm of settler colonialism
Aerial view of the road from Jerusalem to the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, with the Hebrew University campus on the left, 2007
Marcy Newman reviews Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom
by Maya Wind in Mondoweiss on 2 March 2024:
Little by little, state legislatures across the United States are intervening in university practices like tenure and DEI. Recently, Indiana’s House of Representatives has been trying to legislate “intellectual diversity” by mandating that scholars share a variety of perspectives that can be evaluated when they are up for review. On a national level, elite institutions have come under fire if their administration isn’t sufficiently Zionist.
Government encroaching on the sacred cow of academic freedom is precisely the way the Israeli government intervenes in the lives of faculty and students. The difference is that, in Israel, such interference is baked into the system. That’s why Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom is a critical tool for anyone affiliated with academic life — students, faculty, or staff. It is also a text that people involved in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement will find essential: its systematic analysis, history, and solid data are the ammunition we need to combat those who mistakenly assume that boycotting Israeli academic institutions undermines academic freedom.
Wind’s book is structured in two parts — complicity and repression. It opens and concludes with two brilliant essays by Nadia Abu El-Haj and Robin D. G. Kelley. Wind’s first section lays out the creation of Israeli academic institutions as foundations for the militarized settler colonial state while the second half covers how those institutions implement apartheid and suppress Palestinian students and faculty. From the outset, Wind is refreshingly unequivocal: “Israeli universities are not independent of the Israeli security state but, rather, serve as an extension of its violence” (p. 13). Throughout her book, readers glean insight into how Israeli universities create the knowledge necessary to rationalize and legalize Israel’s apartheid regime.