Towers of Ivory and Steel Quotes

“Michael Milshtein, who heads the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Dayan Center, also served as the Advisor on Palestinian Affairs in the Israeli Civil Administration governing the OPT and as the head of the Department for Palestinians Affairs in the Intelligence Corps as a retired colonel.”
― Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom

“Eyal Zisser, former chair of the department and leading Israeli Middle East studies scholar, has served as an advisor and course director of an elite military unit, the details of which remain mostly classified.”
― Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom

“Prominent examples include Meir Kister, Israel Prize laureate and founder of the Arabic language departments at Hebrew University and the University of Haifa, who also worked for the Haganah’s intelligence agency.”
― Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom

“With Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, Israeli military forces invaded the museum. Soldiers used the Palestinian staff as human shields and looted many of the antiquities.45 In violation of the Hague Convention, Israel transformed the Palestine Archaeological Museum into the current headquarters of the Israeli Department of Antiquities and renamed it the Rockefeller Museum.46”
― Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom

“But as Indigenous and other scholars of settler colonialism have shown, colonial education systems are structurally sustained by the scholars who work within them. Inhabiting the settler university, Suriamurthee Moonsamy Maistry argues, is a “state of complicity by default.”
― Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom

“Israeli universities violate the foundational academic freedoms of their Palestinian and critical Jewish-Israeli faculty and students, excluding knowledge production, pedagogies, and expression that challenge the systems of oppression unfolding daily just beyond and within their campuses. In”
― Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom

“The Settler University Settler-colonial states are founded through foreign invasion, with the objective of eliminating Native inhabitants and establishing a settler nation on Native land. Settlers seek to replace the Natives and claim the territory as their own.49 Settler colonialism is therefore understood as a distinct form of colonial governance, because it centers domination over land, which, in effect, becomes domination over life. To maintain their settler state and make the place their home, settlers must continually reassert their exclusive claim to the land, making the violent campaign to disappear the land’s Indigenous peoples into an ongoing process of invasion and dispossession rather than a single or historical event.50 As Audra Simpson illuminates, this settling of land and of consciousness continually builds “moral and political worlds,” as well as physical ones, “atop the worlds of others.”
― Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom

“There are eight major public Israeli universities. They are all directly governed by the Israeli Council for Higher Education and largely funded by its Planning and Budgeting Committee.48 As this book will show, all eight universities operate in direct service of the state and serve critical functions in sustaining its policies, and thereby constitute central pillars of Israeli settler colonialism.”
― Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom

“This book therefore begins with the question posed by Palestinian civil society, and which Israeli academia has endeavored to foreclose: Are Israeli universities complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights? The book seeks to answer this question by revealing how Israeli universities are entangled with Israeli systems of oppression. It does so by drawing on the extensive research conducted by Palestinian scholars and civil society organizations, as well as by making the evaluation of the data about the complicity of Israeli universities—which has been kept principally as an internal Jewish-Israeli conversation—subject to international debate.”
― Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom

“Upon launching a dual degree program with Tel Aviv University in 2020—the only such program it offers in the region—Columbia University advertised its Israeli counterpart as one that “shares Tel Aviv’s unshakable spirit of openness and innovation—and boasts a campus life as dynamic and pluralistic as the metropolis itself.”
― Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom