Maya Wind’s book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (2024), is having a big impact on the campus movement against the genocide in Gaza. It charges Israeli universities with complicity in Israel’s genocidal policies. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) professors and grad students discussed the book last month with thirty members of the reading group of the Radical Caucus of the MLA (Modern Language Association). Our comrades are working in this caucus to build the Party with our co-workers. Many of them are also involved on their campuses in the movement against genocide. Some are in faculty unions, with others involved in defending California farmworkers from Border Patrol raids. We are trying to get to know them better personally, in spite of being separated by distance and communicating on screen; and we discuss the Party’s ideas with them as we choose books for the group. The professor who told us about the farmworker raids around Fresno suggested for our next book No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, by Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis. One of our comrades had actually taken part in that kind of action in Tijuana with the Al Otro Lado organization. This would be a good book for us. We plan to step up getting CHALLENGE to them and talking more directly and personally with them about why it’s important to build up PLP among professors and students as we come under sharper attack.
The Israeli university: ideology and repression
We started with what the book is about. It treats Israeli universities as fully part of the war machine and the violent settling of historic Palestine by the Zionist state of Israel. It goes well beyond the idea that universities are partners in crime with the Israeli government. Maya Wind argues that the settler university is an integral part of the state structure itself.
First, she shows how the university perpetuates the Zionist ideology—the Jewish nationalist, Jewish supremacist ideas supporting the seizure of Palestinian land and the expulsion of Palestinians by a European Jewish capitalist class. This is its function as a “tower of ivory” (a traditional phrase for the university), in every discipline from legal studies to archaeology.
Second, she proves that the Israeli university is a major administrative and military section of the Israeli state: it functions as a “tower of steel.” A concrete symbol of this death-dealing institution is Hebrew University, “the first and leading university of the Zionist movement.” Sitting on stolen land, it dominates, from its Mount Scopus hilltop in East Jerusalem, the physical space of the occupied city like a military outpost in hostile territory, which in part it actually is (Chapter Two, “Outpost Campus”).
Settler-Colonialism and global capitalism
Wind’s theoretical frame is settler-colonialism rather than global capitalism. She does not point out that the Israeli state is run by a capitalist class, nor does she stress Israel’s function as an outpost of U.S. imperialism. PLP calls instead for seeing Israel not simply in its obvious appearance, as the occupier of Palestine by racist settlers who believe in the political ideology of Zionism (which it is), but also in its less-obvious essence, as a profit-seeking enterprise run by a capitalist class, backed by Western imperialism since its founding as a crucial outpost of empire in a strategic region.
Wind may well largely agree with this Marxist view of Israel. Her findings are certainly compatible with it. Moreover, what she proves empirically about universities in Israel also provides a model for universities under capitalism in the U.S. and globally—the academic-military-industrial complex. Embedding the university in the security state is the rule, not the exception, under capitalism. Wind’s detailed proof in the case of Israel can be extended to other countries.
Stop university complicity in genocide!
The book has helped fuel action at professional associations like the AHA (American Historical Association) and the January convention of the MLA. The AHA passed a resolution against the destruction of the Gazan education system, calling it “scholasticide,” or the killing of schooling (New York Times, 1/9. The MLA has arbitrarily ruled out even any discussion of a BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) resolution at its convention, and the Radical Caucus including PLP members is joining with the larger MLA for Palestine group to challenge that ban at the convention. At the AHA and MLA, we are answering the call from the bombed-out schools of Gaza, their students and teachers dead or shivering in tents: stop the genocide!
Towers of Ivory and Steel thus enters a turbulent political struggle against the conscription of scholars into the security state. Historians have made the same analysis of U.S. universities, as in Upton Sinclair’s scathing book The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education (1923). In 1969 SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), with leadership from PLP including our late comrade Ira Wechsler, occupied a “tower of steel” at Stony Brook University on Long Island, where military research was being carried on for the imperialist invasion of Vietnam. Twenty-one students went to jail for it as the capitalist state defended its academic/military branch.(https://stonybrookworker.com/issues/sbw-issue-2/1969-a-year-in-campus-activism-at-stony-brook-university).
Fight for a communist university, from every river to every sea!
What does “Free Palestine” mean, in relation to the university? Clearly, an end to the kind of university Wind describes in the Israeli case. But what then? PLP fights for a university serving workers in a state that is a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a dictatorship against capitalists (of all races) and an empowerment of workers (of all nations) to transform the whole of society. A communist university, a red tower of sciences and arts fully a part of the workers’ state power. Every dead school under the dictatorship of capital spurs us on to achieve that vision. Maya Wind’s book will stand as a record of what it was like in all the universities of a dying global imperialism. Fight for communism, from every river to every sea!
