On Tuesday, Feb. 6, Maya Wind and Robin D.G. Kelley led a discussion titled “Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom.” The event, located at Pitzer College’s Benson Auditorium, centered around what speakers described as the complicity of higher education institutions in Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine.
According to event organizer Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and History Daniel Segal at Pitzer, Wind and Kelley were invited to speak at Tuesday’s talk because of their existence as “scholar-activists.”
Wind is the Killiam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and the author of the book “Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom.” Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of History at UCLA and the author of numerous books of his own.
For Segal, Wind and Kelley’s scholarly work, combined with their attention to social justice and activism, distinguishes them from many other faculty members.
“Maya Wind and Robin D.G. Kelley define what we mean by scholar-activists as distinct from many faculty who can be recognized as excellent scholars but do not extend their work into activism, during this moment of global-local peril and scare,” Segal said in an email to TSL.
Segal’s emphasis on Wind and Kelley’s existence as “scholar-activists” was highly reflective of the event’s focus on the intersection between scholarship and activism. At the talk, the speakers stressed the importance of holding universities accountable.
“What we’re witnessing today is not only a genocide, not only an attempt by Israel to erase the Palestinian people, but also [to erase] centuries of knowledge, culture [and] history central to who they are as a people,” Wind said. “Israel has always understood Palestinian education as a threat to its rule and it has targeted it at every turn.”
Wind explained her own discoveries about the relationship between Israeli and Palestinian education, which she made while visiting Israel and researching for her book.
“Israeli institutions of higher education are deeply implicated in Israeli colonialism and apartheid and must be understood as settler universities,” Wind said. “They are embedded in the infrastructure that sustains Israeli society as a settler society.”
She said that Israeli universities deny Palestinian freedom by suppressing critical research pedagogy, debate and student mobilization, especially following increased government restrictions in the ’80s and ’90s.
“Before the ’80s, in Israeli universities, Palestinian and some Jewish Israeli scholars really began to explore the histories and structures of Israeli state violence,” Wind said, reflecting particularly on events like the Nakba. “Following government control, researchers faced harassment and violence that drove many Palestinian scholars and some of the most critical Jewish Israelis out of these Israeli academies.”
Wind then went on to describe the current state of Palestinian universities, which she says are facing the full force of Israeli state violence. According to her, Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank have always been governed by the Israeli military and subjected to bureaucratic restrictions that isolate and obstruct them.
“Now, all 11 of the universities in Gaza have been targeted and either partially or entirely destroyed by Israeli bombardment,” Wind said. “Israel has killed over 240 Palestinian faculty members in Gaza — including deans and university presidents — killed over 4,800 students, injured over 8,400 and has left over 90,000 students with no university to attend.”
Kelley also commented on the silencing of Palestinians in academia, citing professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as an example. According to Kelley, Shalhoub-Kevorkian is currently receiving death threats and dismissal because she drafted and signed an open letter calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
“The letter described the mass killing, maiming and enforced starvation of children in Gaza as genocide and for this, she received death threats and threats of dismissal coming from the administration,” Kelley said. “They’re saying that she should be fired because she used the word genocide to talk about killing children; her research is on children — so much for free speech in enlightened Israeli universities.”
Kelley emphasized the responsibility of intellectuals in the face of genocide, which he explained is to speak truth to power and to unwaveringly advocate for principles of justice and critical thought.
“As long as we don’t stand up, we lose the possibility of thought, so we are complicit in the loss of academic freedom,” Kelley said. “We have to stand up for thought, stand up for thinking and stand up for justice. And that’s it.”
Facebook Comments