When I was a child, my father, an administrator at Tel Aviv University, often took me with him to work. At the time, the young campus’s offices were housed across the road in old stone buildings whose architecture set them apart. My father explained to me that these were the remaining structures of the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muannis, which had stood there before the university was established. By the time I later became a student at the university, most of those buildings had been demolished and new ones erected in their place. One remaining structure was known as the Green House, which had been converted into a restaurant where my professors held celebratory dinners, one or two of which I attended. For me, those were tormenting occasions, since I was unable to ignore the history of annexation and the dislocation of the original Palestinian inhabitants.
Consequently, I did not need Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel to remind me that my academic trajectory, like that of my colleagues, has been shaped by the Nakba and the ongoing project of settler colonialism in Israel. Tel-Hai College, where I have worked for the past twenty-five years, was established as part of the Judaization of the Galilee, south of Metula – once a Druze village – and two kilometres from the former Palestinian village of Khalsa, now Kiryat Shmona. More recently, its merger with Ohalo College in the Golan Heights occurred despite opposition that I and others led, further advancing the Judaization of the region.
Wind’s extensive documentation enhanced my knowledge of the ways in which Israeli academic institutions have collaborated with the state and the military – the central arm of the occupation – by training soldiers and developing technologies that reinforce systems of control. She also provides a detailed account of the methods by which universities have suppressed the protests of students and faculty, like myself and others, against the occupation, thereby hindering dialogue between Jews and Palestinians and the development of young leadership that could change the political climate. In this review, I address Wind’s critical project, highlighting its contributions but also its puzzling and troubling omissions, which raise concerns about the book’s accuracy.
Strikingly, Wind, a white Jewish Israeli, presumes to speak on behalf of Palestinian civil society, positioning herself as its representative and attributing to its members the question: “Are Israeli universities complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights?” (p. 8). This self-appointed role raises significant concerns about authority, representation, and the appropriation of Palestinian voices. Drawing on research conducted by Palestinian scholars and civil society organizations, as well as on media sources and military and state archives, she divides her analysis into two central modes of academic involvement: complicity with the military and the state, and repression of students and faculty. By structuring her analysis in this way, she seems intent on offering a clear and simple answer while often overlooking important complexities.
Addressing mechanisms of complicity, she demonstrates how scholars in certain departments, such as Archaeology, Legal Studies, and Middle East Studies, have subordinated their intellectual inquiry and teaching to the requirements of the Israeli state, developing, among other things, legal justifications for stealing Palestinians’ property and confiscating their land. Focusing on Hebrew University, Haifa University, Ben-Gurion University, and Ariel University, Wind shows how these institutions have become part of the Judaization project by using land annexation to extend institutional spaces and by serving as settlement outposts. Moreover, universities have supported Israeli security forces by directing scientific research, technological development, and training programmes towards their operational needs, as well as by providing recommendations aimed at limiting Palestinian mobilization and global influence.
The second section addresses the ways in which universities have repressed Palestinians and left-wing academic voices. Wind’s research demonstrates that the alliance of academic administrations with right-wing groups and governments has gradually silenced public discussion on the Nakba, Palestinians’ citizenship rights, and military and settler atrocities in the Occupied Territories. Consequently, certain historical narratives have become off limits, and certain visions of the future that include Palestinians as equal citizens of Israel have been labelled unacceptable. In such an atmosphere, Palestinian students can be easily criminalized, policed, and targeted by academic administrations, particularly when they attempt to resist decisions or actions of the state that harm their communities.
The last chapter of this section provides a detailed account of Israel’s repeated attacks on Palestinians’ higher-education institutions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This chapter documents the continuing damage to Palestinians’ educational and research rights and opportunities. Wind stresses that even in the face of these injustices, Israeli universities not only continued to collaborate with military apparatuses but also actively repressed Palestinian students’ protests, particularly during the Unity Intifada in 2021. The chapter offers an account of the unprecedented aggression towards Palestinian students and faculty during that spring and summer, which sent students home for fear of their lives.
Wind’s analysis is persuasive and illuminating, demonstrating how an alcove of the liberal left can turn into a mechanism that confirms and strengthens the national power structure. However, I was also astonished by the omissions and manipulations of relevant information.
Around the world, universities have long collaborated with state institutions and have often played roles in research and practices that have harmed indigenous peoples. As a meticulous researcher, Wind acknowledges that Israel is not unique in this regard. Nevertheless, she avoids situating her case within a broader global framework at the outset of the book, instead deferring this contextualization to the epilogue, where she refers only to institutions that played critical roles in the expropriation of indigenous lands and the expansion of settler societies under the British Empire, while ignoring collaborations with military forces and the repression of students and faculty. As a result, Israel becomes implicitly elevated to the status of a singularly malign empire, while the absence of a sustained global context makes its academic institutions appear exceptionally harmful and oppressive.
Secondly, the book effaces the presence of scholars who continue to voice dissent from within the system, thereby producing an impression of total and unequivocal collaboration. Wind does not account for lecturers and students who have worked consistently within academic institutions to resist militarization, nationalization, and the state’s appropriation of knowledge. For example, the persistent efforts of organizations such as Academia for Equality – which has worked for more than a decade “to promote democratization, equality, inclusion, representation, and access to higher education for all communities living in Israel/Palestine” – to challenge academia’s complicity with the state and the military, and to oppose the repression and targeting of left-wing Jewish and Palestinian academics who object to the occupation, are entirely absent from the book. Also missing are the actions of individual scholars, including Anat Matar (Tel Aviv University), Amos Goldberg and Mordechai Lee (Hebrew University), and Sebastian Ben Daniel (Ben-Gurion University), to name just a few, who have faced threats from ultra-right actors following their public criticism of Israel’s war crimes. Wind not only overlooks the longstanding tradition of resistance by academic activists but also advances an unfounded and unjust accusation regarding their alleged unwillingness to recognize their universities’ accountability “for their complicity in Israel’s violations of international law” (p. 184). The disregard of the ongoing political opposition within higher-education institutions, which challenges Wind’s monolithic vision of institutional co-optation, is very troubling. Resistance from within provides glimpses of hope for possible change and a better future, so why ignore it?
Given the lack of complex institutional analysis and the broad, sometimes partially groundless claims, the book ultimately reads as a political manifesto in academic disguise. It seems that rather than documenting and representing the intricate reality within Israeli universities, Wind’s main objective is to implicate Israeli higher-education institutions and to present a compelling case for the academic boycott of Israel. This aim is explicitly revealed in the afterword by the historian Robin D.G. Kelley, who asserts that the book is “a weapon” for the struggle to free Palestine and rebuild democracy in Israel. Writing a manifesto is a legitimate means of pursuing political goals, provided it does not harm others who advance the same agenda by erasing their contributions or attacking them without justification, and as long as its author clearly acknowledges the manifesto’s political purpose. Wind unfortunately fails to do both.
Taking these omissions and manipulations of information into account, Wind’s book should be approached with caution. In presenting a solidified account, she ends up producing a reverse mirror of the very Zionist narrative she aims to dismantle. According to her analysis, the only voices that oppose the current situation are Palestinians and herself. At the end of her epilogue, she calls on Israeli academics to resist their institutions’ collaboration and acts of repression and to show solidarity with Palestinian academics in the Occupied Territories. Her call distorts an institutional reality in which opposition has never ceased, even under pressure and intimidation by administrations, the Israeli government, and the public.
