The Role of Israeli Higher Education in Palestinian Oppression: In conversation with Maya Wind

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. Her new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel, is a powerful expose of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project.

In this talk, Maya Wind will draw on the book to demonstrate how 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. 

In conversation with staff and students from UCL, Maya Wind will reflect on the implications of these insights for universities internationally.

Speaker: 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. Her first book, published by Verso in 2024, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, investigates the complicity of Israeli universities in Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid.

Chair: 

Dr. Feryal Awan 
Lecturer in Media and Postcolonial Studies

Discussants:

Humma Andleeb  UCL  PhD student

Prof. Izzat Darwazeh 
Dept of Electronic & Electrical Engineering

Dr. Larne Abse Gogarty 
Head of History and Theory of Art, Slade School of Fine Art

Sponsored by:

Critical Childhood Studies Research Group

Refuge in a Moving World

UCL Action for Palestine

UCL Middle East Research Centre 

UCL Students for Justice in Palestine

UCL UCU

This seminar is part of a tour of Ireland and the UK organised by the  British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP).