From Ivory to Steel Towers intervenes into one of the most intense and controversial debates of our time: the complicity of Israeli universities in upholding Israel's military occupation of Palestinian Territory. Israeli universities collaborate with the Israeli military, security agencies, and military industries to enforce, refine, justify and defend Israel's military-security regime, explicitly reproducing Israeli state violence. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research, Maya Wind documents the comprehensive collaboration of Israeli universities in state violence and in grave violations of Palestinian rights and international law.

Wind reveals how the campuses of Israeli universities themselves serve as crucial pillars of Israeli territorial and demographic expansion. At the same time, she shows that academic disciplines produce research in the service of Israel's military occupation and system of racial discrimination. She documents how university administrations suppress dissent, critical scholarship and expression concerning Israeli occupation and apartheid on their campuses, in direct violation of the academic freedom they claim to uphold.