The Case for Academic Boycotts of Zionist Universities
A Review of Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel
November 6, 2024
Why, of all Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) demands, is there an academic boycott? This has been a central question in the wave of Palestine solidarity encampments across the globe. It has been cynically raised by university administrators and pro-Israel reactionaries inside and beyond the university; and it has also been raised among otherwise supportive faculty who, likely, have not examined how deep Israeli academia’s complicity with occupation goes. Meanwhile, no US university has officially condemned the genocide in Gaza as a genocide or even meaningfully acknowledged Israel’s systematic scholasticide, the destruction of all Palestinian institutions and archives of education.
The demand for academic boycotts forces Western academia to contend with its illusions of “neutrality” on Israel, looking away from Israel’s systematic destruction of Palestinian life. This “neutrality” maintains dual degree programs and joint research projects with Israeli institutions, which are often Western academia’s sole institutional connections with universities in the Middle East. Thus, the twenty-year-old international call for academic boycott by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) remains as crucial as ever—and more resonant today.
In her new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, Wind disproves any pretension of Israeli universities being liberal, egalitarian institutions dedicated to education. They are, rather, key pillars in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Wind methodically examines the historical development and contemporary practices of Israeli universities to show how Israeli academia pioneers and innovates the Zionist settler mission to establish a Jewish ethnostate.
Wind disproves any pretension of Israeli universities being liberal, egalitarian institutions dedicated to education. They are, rather, key pillars in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
This brings into relief the jarring degree of Israeli academia’s complicity in domination of Palestinians. As Wind says, “The decolonizing of universities is and should be unsettling.”1Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel (London and New York: Verso, 2024), 16. Wind’s account is approachable for academic and nonacademic audiences, comprehensively outlining various means by which Israeli universities are leading pillars of Zionist settler colonialism and explaining why academic boycotts are necessary and central to Palestine solidarity struggles today.
Drawing on decolonial and Indigenous criticism of settler universities, Wind argues that Israeli universities have enjoyed a lack of scrutiny internationally that has enabled their material and ideological role in Zionist settler colonialism. She argues that instead of being neutral institutions that serve all equally, Zionist universities were foundational as nodes of settlement even prior to the establishment of the settler state in the Nakba of 1948.
The university system was and is a fulcrum for innovations in occupation, Jewish supremacy, and the repression of any anti-Zionist social force. To address the (largely Western) international neoliberal stupor that looks past Israeli universities’ complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Wind marshals an impressive array of source materials—through bravely leveraging her access as a Jewish Israeli citizen—from colonial archives; academic and journalistic articles; academic publications in Hebrew, Arabic, and English; foundational theoretical accounts of settler colonialism to interviews Wind conducted with Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish faculty and students, and more.
While the book paints a resolutely tragic and damning account of Israeli universities, Wind’s message is clear: Israeli academia is so thoroughly integrated into the larger Zionist mission that its immediate boycott by all universities globally is the only means of ethically engaging it.
The Zionist Academic Mission: Settle, Legitimize, Innovate, Export, and Repress
Wind emphasizes this point by unpacking contemporary developments and drawing out their contiguity with past moments to provide a systematic understanding of universities’ relationship to the “scholarly security state.”2Wind, Towers, 89 She does so by organizing the book into two parts—complicity and repression—with three chapters apiece, each opening with direct quotations of admissions by Zionist politicians, academics, military leaders, and others.
Since the conquest of Palestine began, Zionist universities have molded their academic missions to support the settlement project, whether by producing fields of knowledge that erase the history of Palestinians from the land, performing the legal work to make permissible violations of international law, or innovating the technological machinery and weapons of occupation. However, Wind argues that academics as a group need to face the historical and present interlacing of Israeli academia and settler colonialism.
Her first chapter, “Expertise of Subjugation,” examines how various disciplines forego international standards of ethical research to produce knowledge crucial to facilitating, justifying, and legitimizing Zionist conquest. Hebrew University and the University of Haifa’s archeology departments have set up digs at the frontiers of Zionist settlement, facilitating these settlements’ growth. They have also led the plunder of artifacts from Palestinian homes, universities, libraries, and museums during military offenses—a tactic we have seen in the present genocide, prior to the destruction of all places of education in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Israeli legal scholars and so-called ethicists provide innovative legal and policy interpretations, what Noura Erakat calls “legal work,” to engineer permissibility for increasingly brutal domination of Palestinians in war and “just short” of it.3Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). These disciplines are coupled with Mizrahanut (Hebrew for Orientalist) Studies, which supplies an endless array of racist scholarship dedicated to Hasbara (Israeli propaganda) for fabricating Zionist legitimacy.
But legitimation is only one role; another is the close institutional ties that Israeli academia has forged with the Israeli state, military, and arms and security industry, all of which Wind analyzes in her book’s third chapter, “The Scholarly Security State.” She shows how numerous academic programs serve the technological, scientific, and labor requirements of Israel’s “Palestine laboratory,” which exports “battle proven” military and surveillance machinery globally.4Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World (London and New York: Verso, 2023). All Israeli universities run programs called Atuda, which train academic reserves to supply the Israeli military with a cadre of highly specialized and skilled soldiers to carry out genocide.
Moreover, such programs, data collection and processing, as well as internships at the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate, police services, Shin Bet (the Israel Security Agency), Mossad (Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations) channel graduates into leading units of the intelligence corps. This includes Unit 8200, which is responsible for the vast network of surveillance of Palestinians that uses intimate information about sexual orientation, medical treatments needed by a loved one, financial difficulties, and similar points of vulnerability to pressure Palestinians into becoming informants and otherwise complicit in their subjugation.5Wind, Towers, 104. Israeli universities, then, innovate the scientific and technological means of Israeli occupation while training its requisite labor pool.
Israeli universities innovate the scientific and technological means of Israeli occupation while training its requisite labor pool.
Shaping Zionist intellectual production and reproducing the occupation have always been complementary academic agendas for Israeli universities, which themselves operate as institutions of land expropriation. In the second chapter of her book, “Outpost Campus,” Wind provides detailed accounts of how every Israeli university continues to expropriate Palestinians from the land on which they’ve historically lived. Israeli universities have been geographic fronts for “Judaization,” a newly invented Zionist euphemism for what was openly referred to as the colonization of Palestine and the replacement of Palestinians by Jewish settlers.
Universities have played a substantial and essential role in “Judaization,” especially by providing the territorial and (in my words) social reproductive backbone for Jewish settlers. In addition, Wind outlines how each university successfully broke up Palestinian territorial contiguity, aiding policing, detention, and the constraining of Palestinian mobility and access to life-sustaining resources. These universities were planned intentionally to serve those geographic aspirations, with Hebrew University anchoring Zionist control of Jerusalem, the University of Haifa rooted in the Galilee with its Palestinian majority, Ben-Gurion University bringing Jewish settlers to the sparsely populated Naqab (Judaized: “Negev”) desert, and Ariel University today anchoring a settlement in the West Bank—now deemed illegal tout court by the International Court of Justice.
Though serving these roles of legitimizing, materially expanding, sustaining, and innovating Zionist occupation, Israeli universities encounter a host of resistant forces, which they use a huge academic infrastructure to repress. This repression, the focus of Towers of Ivory and Steel’s second part, is depressingly expansive, as Wind’s wide-ranging historical, sociological, and anthropological research sensitively demonstrates.
Wind first outlines the repression of knowledge production critical of the state. This includes attacks by colleagues, students, and the wider public on Palestinian scholars such as feminist legal scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian of Hebrew University, who was arrested after expressing commonplace Palestinian views of Zionism and condemning the present genocide in in an episode of the Makdisi Street podcast.6Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (“There Is so Much Love in Palestine”), interview with Saree Makdisi, Ussama Makdisi and Karim Makdisi, Makdisi Street, podcast audio, March 8, 2024. Other forms of this repression include barring the study of state and military archives, whose material is heavily redacted if shared, or legally contesting publication of critical scholarship, undermining academic standards of research in the process.
Decolonial scholarship produced by Arab Jews—scholars with historical connections to Arab lands, language, and history—is systematically effaced in Israel. This suppression of critical knowledge production extends to other forms of leftist thought and organizing as well.7Wind, Towers, 126–31. As Wind notes, “Israeli universities define research and discussion of historical and ongoing Israeli state violence as illegitimate. In doing so, they deny their faculty and students not just academic freedom but also the opportunity to debate and intervene in present and future injustices.”8Wind, Towers, 145.
This knowledge-policing is challenged in the classroom and campus by Palestinian students, but they are often met with repression from instructors, administrators, and fellow students (including staged confrontations with off-duty Israeli police and military personnel, later posted on social media). Palestinian students in Israeli universities are policed and disciplined simply for speaking or singing Arabic in dorms or on the campus lawn, as well as for joining wider Palestinian mobilizations, as so many did during the 2021 Unity Intifada.
Wind makes clear that Israeli universities could be otherwise. They could begin to acknowledge the expropriated land they colonize. Academic departments could end research programs that provide expertise to sustain Israel’s brutal occupation. They could close their military, police, and Shin Bet degree programs. Laboratories could sever research and monetary ties to the Israeli military–industrial complex. Universities could protect, rather than endanger and police, their Palestinian students and workers. Thus, Wind’s work and the call to boycott and divest from Israeli universities demands “fundamentally reimagin[ing] the university: the relationship to the land on which it stands, the knowledge it produces, and the pedagogy it practices.”9Wind, Towers, 196.
A Foundational Contribution to Scholarship and Struggle
All told, Wind’s book is a remarkable accomplishment, mapping the architecture of Israel’s ideological and material towering pillars of occupation. The book contributes to decolonial, Indigenous, and critical education studies, as well as political sociology and anthropology, breathing refreshingly concrete analysis into scholarly literature.
Its strength is Wind’s ability to marshal an incredible amount of material, much of which is translated from Hebrew and accessed from the closed state, academic, and military archives of Israel, while interfacing with critical anti-Zionist scholarship—much of which is published in Anglophone peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Palestine Studies and Jadiliyaa yet habitually ignored by complacent Western academia.
The analysis is not without its limitations, as with any book. Its principal limitation is that it does not provide much of a prescriptive, strategic account for Palestinians or the international community beyond arguing (forcefully) for heeding the Palestinian call for academic and cultural boycotts of Israeli institutions (though not of faculty, students, and workers). This lack of prescriptive insight contrasts with Wind’s extensive empirical work. This may stem from the lower profile of Palestinian struggles for conditions of education antagonistic to Zionist colonization.
Pursuing such insights would have required shifting the book’s methodology from centering the Israeli university towards a more expansive, holistic analysis deeply engaged with Palestinian knowledge production and relations of education. Nevertheless, Wind’s book will be an essential reference point for that future practical investigation.
Maya Wind has provided a cornerstone tool from which to learn, teach, and challenge academic complicity in the ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestinians.
The book could more explicitly thematize the connections between Israeli universities and those of other settler states and the imperial West, enabling a more rigorous prescriptive account of struggle along the axis of higher education globally. Readers will have to develop a greater understanding of how to intervene in their own institutions, which have ubiquitously adopted the neoliberal strategy of shrinking worker and student power, growing policing and surveillance expenditures, increasing costs of tuition, and stoking landlord hegemony over housing options in university cities, all while university finances and governance are privatized into stand-alone legal entities insulated from worker, feminist, queer and trans, environmental, decolonial, antipolicing, antiborder, and anticapitalist student and community campaigns. These lessons are present in the book as a subtopic, and readers will find great value in collective reading and education based on Wind’s incredible research.
That said, Wind accomplishes in spades her ambition to write what I would call the definitive book proving the need for institutional divestment and boycott from all Israeli universities immediately. It is a timely gift to a resurging international Palestinian liberation struggle. Wind’s account of university repression harbors many lessons for university students and workers of all ranks on the global neoliberalization of higher education. Her work reflects changing conditions in university governance—namely, the expansion of administrative, landlord, and capitalist power over students and workers—which recent Palestine solidarity encampments are revealing in their own institutions as they fight to end the US–Israeli-led genocide.
Towers of Ivory and Steel is a must-read for scholars and organizers interested in Palestinian liberation and settler colonialism more generally, as well as critical education studies and neoliberalism. Most importantly, Maya Wind has provided Palestinian solidarity organizing with a cornerstone tool from which to learn, teach, and challenge academic complicity in the ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestinians. No one is free, academically or otherwise, until we all are. ×
Notes & References
- Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel (London and New York: Verso, 2024), 16.
- Wind, Towers, 89.
- Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).
- Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World (London and New York: Verso, 2023).
- Wind, Towers, 104.
- Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (“There Is so Much Love in Palestine”), interview with Saree Makdisi, Ussama Makdisi and Karim Makdisi, Makdisi Street, podcast audio, March 8, 2024.
- Wind, Towers, 126–31.
- Wind, Towers, 145.
- Wind, Towers, 196.