In addition to routinely and illegally removing artifacts from the occupied Palestinian territory,

for research, for display in Israeli museums,

Israeli archaeologists have for decades participated in an unscientific and very explicitly political project

of removing and destroying evidence of not only Palestinian,

but Arab and Muslim history across historic Palestine.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Politics Theory Other.

My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Maya Wind.

Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy,

and they enjoy warm relationships with their counterparts in North America and Europe,

including the University of Columbia, the site of one of the many Palestine encampments

that have emerged across American university campuses,

and which offers a joint degree program with the University of Tel Aviv.

But as my guest Maya Wind explains in today's episode,

contrary to the depiction of Israeli universities as centers of pluralism and free inquiry,

these institutions are directly complicit in the project to dispossess

Palestinians of their land and rights. In her new book, which was the topic of our conversation,

Towers of Ivory and Steel, how Israeli universities deny Palestinian freedom, Maya demonstrates

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 repressed student descent.

Maya is a scholar of Israeli expertise and militarism and a postdoctoral fellow in the

Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

...