Review of Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom by Maya Wind (Verso Books)

Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. By Maya Wind. London, UK and Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, 2024. pp 288 (paper) ISBN: 978-1-80429-174-0. US List: $29.95

Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom opens with tales of sieges: Palestinian students at Israeli universities, abducted, beaten, interrogated, and shot at by Israeli soldiers while on campus. Their crime? Attending meetings for Palestinian student groups that make up some of the 411 organizations Israeli authorities have deemed unlawful. And yet, while Wind demonstrates the routine and indeed cooperative nature of such violence, Western organizations have nonetheless lauded Israeli universities for decades for their strong protections of academic freedom. How can this be?

Wind parses this dynamic—Israeli universities’ active participation in state violence against Palestinians, including their own students, as well as attempts to cast these efforts as necessary to protect civil society in Israel, and thus democratic—in this meticulously researched and argued book. 

Towers of Ivory and Steel joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to reorient our understanding of universities’ relationship to state violence.¹ Wind shows that Israeli institutions of higher education actively participate in and create the conditions for ongoing settler violence against Palestinians and the occupation’s expansion. Crucially, agents for the university—presidents, provosts, faculty, scholars-in-residence—do so by providing the legal, archaeological, and cultural justification for settler colonialism in Palestine. Further, they generate the intellectual frameworks necessary to make settlers and other agents of the occupation appear vulnerable and aggrieved and thus in need of militarized protection. Wind’s delicate parsing of the rhetorical and material strategies universities use to advance the Israeli government’s campaign against Palestinians and Israel’s critics makes this book important reading for scholars of Palestine and Israel and academics working in critical and abolitionist university studies, especially those interested in universities’ geographic impacts.² Likewise, readers seeking to understand the infrastructures and epistemologies of settler colonialism and apartheid, especially when connected to global flows of specialized knowledge and capital, would benefit from Wind’s rich archival findings.³ Finally, Wind’s insistence upon the profound consequences of scholarly methodologies bent to ethno-nationalist aims offers much to those studying other forms of ethnic nationalism globally and bolsters a call that has grown over the past year to connect scholarly inquiry to demands and efforts towards justice.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first, “Complicity,” Wind discredits the narrative that Israeli universities are not actively involved in violence and injustices against Palestinians. She documents the ways that Israeli universities partner with the Israeli military, supporting and accelerating apartheid and territorial expansion. In this assiduous recounting, Wind shows that such behaviors are both systemic and particular: systemic in that university presidents and other administrators seek out military participation on their campuses, indeed even embedding such participation into the curriculum, and particular in that Wind also documents how individual departments and faculty members take up Zionist expansion as their specific intellectual mandate. For instance, faculty in fields like engineering develop more lethal weapons that are then marketed to the rest of the world as “battle tested” in Palestine—work for which universities are richly paid. These scholarly activities include the Israeli government’s reliance on legal scholars to manufacture justifications for occupation and apartheid, and Israeli criminologists who train Israeli soldiers and create definitions of terrorism and insurgency that stoke anti-Palestinian activities and Islamophobia. In terms of expanding territory, Wind describes a decades-long Judaization campaign and its afterlife during which archeologists recruit the Israeli military to help them push into archaeological sites in Palestinian territory. Such archaeologists then destroy or cover up evidence of an Arab and Muslim presence in these locations before claiming the land for Israel and, in at least one case, founding Israeli settlements. Indeed, Wind shows how university presidents strategically locate new universities and extension campuses to annex new land for Israel and to entice settlers to new locations.

The book’s second part, “Repression,” explains how Israeli universities obfuscate such activities by deeming any criticism of the state of Israel as illegitimate. Further, they abet vigilante blowback and violence against students and faculty who oppose Israeli power by hosting far-right, militarized entities on their own campuses. Like state actors who classify and reclassify documents that could be used to question state activities, Israeli universities have rescinded degrees awarded for theses that document Israeli atrocities against Palestinians and refused to provide legal support for faculty attacked for their work, attacks so intense that the most prominent of Israel’s so-called “new historians” have fled the country. At the same time, university administrators criminalize Palestinian students and relegate them to campuses’ margins to keep them apart from their Israeli peers, when Israel’s apartheid policies allow Palestinian students to even study at Israeli universities at all. 

To make her case, Wind draws upon scholarship conducted by Palestinian organizations and scholars, as well as state, military, and university archives that Wind can access only because she is an Israeli citizen and speaks Hebrew. This methodology shows how Israeli universities shield themselves from critique by becoming both inaccessible and illegible to the international gaze.

In doing so, Wind urges us to reconsider our understanding and definition of complicity. For Wind, complicity is not merely the act of silently watching continued Israeli aggression. Rather, she describes complicity as world-making: in relying upon and partnering with Israeli military forces for universities’ expansion and intellectual production, those who speak on behalf of Israeli institutions of higher education cast violence as both inevitable and foundational to their mission. These figures lament that very mission as imperiled—epistemologically, by those who might question how Israeli academics generate knowledge, and physically, by decolonial actors who contest Israel’s legitimacy in its ongoing violence against Palestinian subjects. This bait-and-switch only amplifies the call for increasingly technocratic and draconian measures against anyone who dissents from Zionist perspectives or documents Israeli crimes against Palestinians. Complicity is thus an active, not passive, process. To see Israeli civil society as calm or placid is therefore to actively acquiesce to the state terrorism that relegates Palestinians to the margins of Israel’s cultural and geographic borders, before destroying their heritage sites, incarcerating their peoples, and committing genocide. 

There might be a temptation for those of us in the United States or Europe to read Maya Wind’s book as a harbinger of what may come for us, as university administrators and faculty increasingly collude with far-right forces within and outside our governments. Nowhere is this more apparent than in cases like NYU’s response to an anti-genocide rally in December 2024, in which administrators anticipatorily complied with draconian measures they presumably imagine Trump will demand against pro-Palestinian activists. But I think that reading Wind’s book in this way would be a mistake. First, it would flatten out the richness of Wind’s critique by allowing us to ignore the specificities of coloniality, occupation, and dispossession in our particular contexts. Further, it would ignore that in working on campuses “protected” by IDF-trained security forces and conducting research funded by entities enriched by technological advancements developed at Israeli universities, scholars based in the US and Europe are already embedded in the ongoing Israeli project of Palestinian occupation and genocide.