Indispensable to Efforts to Boycott and Divest from Israel—Maya Wind Documents How Israeli Universities Attack Palestinian Freedom and Maintain the Occupation
Sep 27, 2024
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Maya Wind, an author and researcher, discusses her book, detailing how Israeli universities contribute to the oppression of Palestinians. She reveals extensive findings on the complicity of academia in perpetuating violence and erasing Palestinian history. The conversation highlights the impact of education policies on demographic control and critiques the intertwined relationship between Western and Israeli educational institutions. Wind emphasizes the urgency of activism and the necessity to challenge institutional roles in the ongoing conflict.
Maya Wind's research exposes how Israeli universities play a crucial role in sustaining oppression and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.
The recent global student movements emphasize the urgent need for academic institutions to divest from complicity in Israeli military actions and support Palestinian freedom.
Deep dives
Israeli Universities as Actors in Oppression
Israeli universities play a critical role in the perpetuation of the state's policies against Palestinians, acting as integral components in the machinery of oppression. Through in-depth research, it has been demonstrated that these institutions are involved in suppressing Palestinian freedom by collaborating with state mechanisms that enforce military occupation and apartheid. The historical context reveals that, since their inception, Israeli universities have been designed to serve specific settler colonial goals, such as the demographic engineering of Palestinian lands. By ignoring the implications of academic collaboration with these institutions, one inadvertently contributes to the broader project of ethnic cleansing and erasure of Palestinian identity.
Student Activism and Global Response
Recent global student uprisings have crystalized two primary demands: the call for divesting from corporations that benefit from Israeli apartheid and severing ties between their universities and Israeli institutions. This alignment with the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) reflects a coordinated, grassroots approach to challenging complicity in state violence. Palestinian civil society has long requested international support for their struggle against oppression, emphasizing that educational institutions must also be held accountable for actions that sustain injustice. As a consequence, academic collaborations perceived as benign are being scrutinized, with activists advocating for greater solidarity with Palestinian scholars and students.
The Research Landscape: Access and Gatekeeping
The complexities surrounding access to research archives illustrate a significant barrier faced by scholars attempting to expose the ties between Israeli universities and state violence. While certain Israeli scholars benefit from relatively unrestricted access, many Palestinian academics find themselves systematically barred from opportunities to explore their own narratives. This disparate access creates linguistic and institutional gatekeeping, which favors narratives that align with the interests of the state. By translating and disseminating critical research conducted in Hebrew, scholars aim to democratize knowledge and make the implications of Israeli academic complicity globally understood.
Legal Studies and Academic Complicity
The field of legal studies in Israeli universities has become a key contributor to the state’s efforts to circumvent accountability for actions deemed as violations of international humanitarian law. Legal scholars within these institutions have crafted interpretations that legitimize state practices associated with the occupation and systemic violence against Palestinians. This legal framework has not only shielded Israel from international criticism but has also provided a blueprint for other nations engaged in similar military operations. The interlinking of legal innovation and military strategy serves to further entrench systemic inequities while undermining the claims of justice and legality upheld by human rights advocates.
Today on Speaking Out of Place, we talk with Maya Wind about her book, Towers of Ivory and Steel, How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, published by Verso. Through meticulous research into the archives of Israeli universities and hundreds of other documents, Wind furnishes proof of just how deeply and completely Israeli universities are essential actors in Israel’s efforts to suppress Palestinian freedom.
We originally taped this show in June 2023, as Maya came off a long book tour in Europe. We decided to wait into the beginning of this new academic year to release this episode. Since then, of course, we have seen that US universities have spent the summer creating new draconian measures to curtail and make illegal protests against Israel’s war on Palestine, which has now increased in violence and volume not only in the West Bank, but now also spread into Lebanon, killing civilians with impunity. Whereas the United Nations General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to censure Israel, the US remains committed to feeding the Israeli war machine no matter what. This makes today’s show even more urgent.
Shining a bright light on Israeli universities complicity in Israel's ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian population, the book is an indispensable resource in the fight to boycott Israeli universities and divest from firms doing business with Israel.
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