Towers of Ivory and Steel

"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 <i>The Shock Doctrine</i> and <i>Doppelganger</i> 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 <i>In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities</i> 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 <i>Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism</i> 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 <i>Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East</i> 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 *"