A Conversation on Wind's "Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom" (Verso 2024)

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.

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.

Speakers:
Maya Wind is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. 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.

Lana Tatour is a Lecturer in Global Development at the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales. She works on settler colonialism, indigeneity, race, citizenship, and Palestine. She is currently completing her monograph provisionally titled Ambivalent Resistance: Palestinians in Israel and the Liberal Politics of Settler Colonialism and Human Rights. She is also co-editing, together with Ronit Lentin, a book titled Race and the Question of Palestine.